Apple and Linux Beneficial to Each Other?

viewstyle writes "There is an interesting commentary on eWEEK discussing the 'synergies' between Apple and Linux after visiting LinuxWorld. It makes a good point that advancement of Linux is good for Mac OS X and vice versa, because of the ease of porting across the platforms (soon to get easier with the X11 on Mac OS X)." Next thing you know, most of the Slashdot editors and programmers will be using Macs ...

Comments

Uh, soon to get easier?

[Ryan Amos]

X has been available on OS X for about a year. With XDarwin and OroborOSX it's about as perfectly integrated as it can get. Most X programs will compile just fine (and the ones that don't more often than not the problem is with the configure scripts.. rewrite the makefile and it works) I use gvim as my text editor and other X programs with relative frequency. OS X really is the best of both worlds IMO.

Works for me

[djupedal]

I've been running both OS X & Linux boxes at home for the last 10 months. I can and do use both hardware and software as common elements, from drives & PCI cards to mail, music, browser and office apps, etc.

For me, these boxes are extensions of each other, not competitors, and I've come to think of them as one environment.

MySQL on one...MP3s and image db's on the other. Apache and PHP on both...DVD's play on both... TV on one...DVD authoring on the other. It continues to delight me that I can expand and build as they both mature. This effort started out as an experiment. Now, I wouldn't consider just running one box or one system.

The beat goes on.

Re:Expensive.

[Twirlip of the Mists]

I could build an x86 box with the same power for 1/4 of the price.

Dual processors? DDR RAM? ATI Radeon 9000 (or GeForce 4 Ti) graphics? Audio I/O? Gigabit Ethernet? FireWire 800 and FireWire 400? DVD-RW burner? Built-in 802.11g and Bluetooth?

Maybe you could build a machine like that for $500. But it wouldn't be easy, no sir.

Re:Gnome-on-Linux -- poor and/or free man's Mac OS

[borgheron]

Apparently you've not heard of GNUstep. GNUstep is an implementation of the OpenStep API and includes most of Mac OS X's extensions.

The GUI builder is almost done (I am the pricipal developer of it).

Take a look at http://www.gnustep.org. :)

GJC

Re:They gave the source back for KHTML???

[dadragon]

And I'm still waiting for Apple to release the source code to their GNU Chess port, dammit.

chess.tgz on Apple's site. It's right there for the taking.

Oasis working on Common Office standard

[SgtChaireBourne]

OASIS is working on a standard format for producivity packages. OpenOffice/StarOffice look to be the main beneficiaries, but since the standard will be open, you can write your own wordprocessors or spreadsheets to read/write/edit these files.

As mentioned in other posts, if the file format had been open and documented there would not really be an issue. However, since legacy formats are starting to punish businesses with real costs, the issue can no longer be ignored, even by those that don't/can't plan ahead.

DMCA and EUCD are two additional reasons for migrating from legacy formats. These two could legally prevent businesses (and agencies) from accessing their own documents if encoded in undocumented, proprietary formats and the tools to manage these formats are no longer licensed.

If they can work towards an open file format system to replace MS office, they could chip away @ the MS desktop market.

Chip, yes, but it MS-Office revenue will collapse like a sand castle when it goes -- but that's a separate thread. Since Microsoft has alrady taken a publicly stated position against the open file formats, the collapse will only reduce the overhead costs of businesses, agencies and citizens.

Re:Common Office platform

[shellbeach]

FWIW, MSOffice - or at least, MSWord - does have an open file format that is almost 100% compatible with native .doc - it's called RTF, is extensively documented on Microsoft's Web Site, is an open standard and has been around for years.

In fact you can (and I have done so) write a RTF document with nothing but a text editor (although it's not the most pleasant of things ... but that's not the point :). It supports just about everything .doc does - including footnotes, endnotes, margin spacing, layout, etc.

So the "open file format" issue can't be all that's behind the lack of good open-sourced office suites!

Re:OS X means more open source developers == good.

[Matthias Wiesmann]

Unfortunately, those open source developers will almost certainly end up writing Cocoa IRC clients or something - ie software that can only be used on a proprietary platform.

You are probably right, people will prefer coding in cocoa, because it is a very nice programming API, you are wrong in assuming that those programs will only work on OS X. Cocoa code can be recompiled for GNUStep, which is fully open-source.

This whole story is here because most free software is portable, it's based entirely on open standards and free APIs.

I think you are mixing up two different things, the fact that software is open source, and the fact that the coding is done for a given API. There are many open source project that are targeted for the Win32 API.

Technically, cocoa is an implementation of an open standard: open-step.

You're easily impressed then. Darwin was mostly already open source, and has such poor hardware support it's nearly useless outside of the Mac.

Darwin is heavily modified version of the Mach system, it includes elements that do not exist in Mach, like the driver system, IOKit.

The fact that darwin does not run on your hardware is irrelevant. The fact that can't or don't want to use the code that is open sourced does not change its value.

They were legally obligated to give back the KHTML improvements - yet Safari itself is not open source, despite it being a merely average web browser in terms of features and standards support.

If safari is such a poor browser, why would like the source code? Or do you mean that because the browser is of low quality it should be open sourced?

Their contributions to FreeBSD have been in the order of a few trivial patches and some test suites according to Jordan Hubbard who seems to consider the positive marketing as their biggest contribution.

You are right, and the reason is simple, the BSD component of darwin is not recent at all. Basically Apple is still catching up, so they hardly have any improvement to give back and can only find a few lingering bugs. If when apple will be using current BSD code and won't give back its improving, then complaining will be justified.

What, pray tell, have they returned that they developed themselves outside of Darwin, which as I've already pointed out, is a nice gesture but ultimately useless. Chess.app?

Ok, here we go again:

• Gcc (altivec and objective-c related code)
• Quicktime streaming server.
• CDSA.
• Open Play.
• Netsprockets.
• Rendez-vous.
• Header doc.

While they were required to give back the changes for gcc because of the license, for all the others projects, they did not have to. The element that will probably be used first by Linux systems is rendez-vous. Whenever the other technologies will be adopted is an open question.

Re:buggy as swamp in july

[tbmaddux]

Matlab for Mac OS X uses XDarwin and OroborOSX...

You can switch to the Apple X11 (after installing it, of course) by editing /Applications/MATLAB6p5/bin/LaunchMATLAB.app/Conte nts/launch_matlab.sh (watch out for spaces inserted by SlashCode in that path) to read as follows:

#!/bin/sh
# $Revision: 1.1 $
# Copyright 1997-2002 The MathWorks, Inc.

if [ "`ps xc | grep X11`" ]; then
# Bounce less if Apple X11 is already started
sleeptime=10
else
sleeptime=15
fi

# osascript -e 'tell application "OroborOSX" to activate'
# osascript Contents/launch_oroborosx

open -a /Applications/X11.app

cd ../..

bin/mac/setsid bin/matlab -desktop -display :0.0 &

# Bounce to let user know MATLAB is starting up.
/bin/sleep $sleeptime

The changes are a reduction of "sleeptime" since Apple X11 is faster, a change to what we "grep" for, and of course the "open" call to X11.app. Apple X11 is a lot faster and stabler for me than XDarwin/OroborOSX. If you prefer not to switch to Apple X11, at the very least you should update OroborOSX since the version distributed with MATLAB 6.5 is several releases old.