O'Reilly Thinks Mac OS X May Be the 'Next Big Thing'

Arkham writes "Tim O'Reilly gave a speech at WWDC called 'Watching the Alpha Geeks: Mac OS X and the next big thing', in which he suggested that Apple is doing the right things to be a big success. Specifically, Apple should continue to 1) adhere to standards, 2) keep things small and modular, and 3) document as you go -- man pages and RFCs. Anyone who has used Mac OS X can see that Apple is trying hard to be a good open-source citizen (for example, the new zero-config Rendezvous technology). The question is, at what point will these efforts pay off (more users, and thus more money)?" What is this "money" you speak of?

Comments

Re:Where Apple is going

[feldsteins]

Apple has become very successful over the last few years

Well if by "few" you mean "twenty" then yeah :)

Apple addressed this with the iMacs, iBooks and Mac OSX IMO, by providing a simple "dumbed down" UI

Um...Again it sounds like you are unaware that Apple has been all about ease-of-use for the last two decades.

(and this will go even further with the next release of OSX, which has a "simple finder" option)

Yet again...this feature has been available for years in previous versions of the Mac OS. Quite useful, I'm told, for very young children.

Re:Apple, a good open source citizen ?

[overunderunderdone]

What projects do they contribute open source code to ?

All ive heard is that they use *bsd code, do they improve and contribute the code upstream ?

From what I have heard YES, apple has contributed code back to the projects they have used: gcc, apache, perl, freebsd, mysql, emacs, openssh etc.

Then of course there are their own projects that have been released under the APSL. There is a lot of debate about whether this license is "open source" or not. Whatever your opinion on it they have used it to release the Darwin OS, the Darwin Streaming Server (for streaming Quicktime content) OpenPlay (a network abstraction layer based on Apple's old NetSprockets technology) and HeaderDoc (A tool for generating HTML reference documentation from comments in C, C++ and Objective-C header files..)

Re:Where Apple is going

[blakespot]

Inkwell is based on Newton HWR technology. The 'Rosetta' print recognizer on the Newton 2.x devices, written in-house by Apple, has yet to be surpassed in the world of HWR technology. The second best I've seen is Calligrapher, originally written by Paragraph, who wrote the cursive recognier on the Newton 2.x devices. Today's Calligrapher is still no match for the 5+ year old Rosetta HWR engine.

Apple need not "catch up" with MS on this one...

(Reminiscent of MS's ClearType sub-pixeling technology. It was seen first on the Apple II, yet MS claims it as their own technology.)

blakespot

Re:Apple, a good open source citizen ?

[stevenprentice]

Read the release notes for FreeBSD 4.5. It mentions a number of filesystems bugs that were found and fixed because of a file system test application that Apple contributed.

Re:Documentation

[Duck_Taffy]

There is a new version of the Apple Developer's Toolkit, currently in beta, which has complete Cocoa documentation, so just wait a bit, and quit yer whining. I know they're still working on carbon docs, but in case you didn't catch the WWDC 2002 keynote highlights, Apple doesn't want developers using CFM anymore.