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Apple and the Open Source Community
Dozix007 writes "Sitepoint reports an interesting article on the increasing interconnection between Apple's recently released Tiger, and the open source community. Tiger includes improved releases of Apple's directory services (LDAP), secure authentication (Kerberos), mail server (Postfix), web server (Apache) and many more features, nearly all based on existing open source software. Most significant may be the release of Rendezvous for Java, Linux/Unix and Windows. This is a zero-configuration tool for networking that includes network protocols, identification and configuration of devices and services such as printers and local/remote servers, and was based on open source technology."
Why is Apple not included more as one of the major traditional computer and technology companies supporting open source? Apple has contributed a great deal to the open source community and hasn't really received its alotted amount of mind share as a result.
Apple has given a lot more to the open source movement that IBM or Sun.
Apple's decisions could be done for the same reasons that Netscape released it's srouce code. Netscape realised that MS would dominate the browser market then pervert the HTML and HTTP standards, in turn forcing them out of the server business. Apple probably knows that in order to servive it will need to release technologies for the Windows platform as well. At home I have Network with Macs and PCs running side by side, connecting to the PCs from the Macs is extremely easy, It gets harder when I need the PC to connect to one of my Macs. It appears apple is trying to appeal to those that run multiple OSs under the same roof, A wise decision.
Oh, Apple does get its mindshare. OS X is drooled over by many (including too many Windows junkies who complain about Apple hardware being expensive). A lot of OSS is being ported, or has already been ported, to Darwin and OS X. Many BSD hackers and developers who have coded for GNU or BSD are using OS X, as well as many LISP advocates.
Apple has been making the right moves, and people are switching. With OS X being the most widely used UNIX on the desktop, you can expect a lot of (hobbyist) development work to be done on, for, or taking into account OS X. I think it has a great future.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
If their hardware were inferior or more expensive you might have a point... but their hardware is typically better nad is cost competitive with all the other major PC oems that woould bundle the same hardware and software components.
Apple does however give you less opportunity to buy less and therefore pay less. That dopes not make them more expensive but it does make their system less configurable at the initial purchase time. If you can get over that detail, everything else with their solution is wonderful IMHO
Actually by my calculations Apple only charges 28.832093820394882% more.
If Apple made an x86 version of OS X, it would cost much more than the $129 Mac users pay because it wouldn't be subsidized by Apple hardware sales. That would drive all the Wintards to pirate it (actually they'd probably still pirate it if it was only $129), making Apple no money. Apple would also see a huge slowdown in sales of their hardware, which is their major source of revenue. No hardware revenue and piracy impacting software revenue would erode their R&D budget, the OS would stagnate, and Apple would eventually go under. In short, releasing a version of OS X that ran on x86 would kill the company. Were you paying attention in the mid 90's when Mac clones almost killed Apple in similar fashion? Apparently not.
OS X will never, never, never run on any hardware that Apple has not produced-- so surrender the fantasy of running OS X on some homebuilt x86 shitbox, or even a Dell. The major selling point of the Mac is the "it just works" factor-- the tight integration between Apple software and Apple hardware. They won't be able to deliver that if they suddenly have to support hundreds of varieties of commodity hardware flying out of factories in East Bumblefuck, Asia. Microsoft has blown through umpteen billion dollars over damn near twenty years in their attempt to do it, and they still haven't got it right. And if you think Dell would offer OS X as a preload option on their machines, think again. Microsoft would revoke their Windows license in a heartbeat and try to put them out of business.
Apple is a hardware company, period. Their software is just a selling point for their hardware. Look at iTunes and the iTunes Music Store as another example-- iTunes is a free download, and they barely make a profit on the sale of iTMS music. The whole thing is set up to sell iPods (highly profitable), and ideally induce some satisifed iPod buyers to switch to the Mac (also highly profitable).
They've donated Openoffice.org.
Apple has created a consumer UNIX satisfactory to both end and power users that is capable of running POSIX and most Linux-targeted software without modification, just compile and it runs. This is a major coup, and it surprises me people don't see this. If someone had come on slashdot 10 years ago and said that in 10 years there would be a consumer-targeted UNIX that could easily run whatever Linux/GNU software you threw at it in millions of homes, what would the reaction have been?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Why port an superior OS to an inferior platform? I am waiting for x86 to finally die - with IA64, x86-64, .NET, OS X, and Linux, backwards compatibility is losing ground to quality. The argument I hear most in support of x86 over PPC is the price - the cheapest PC is a few hundred bucks cheaper than the cheapest Mac. I am hoping that we will be able to build PPC (or any other good arch, AFAIC) just like we assemble PCs today.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
With web applications becoming more prevalent, this will give Apple a huge leg up on the competition which means other competitors like Microsoft or Macromedia will have to play catch-up. I think we're beginning to see that a lot more, recently. Microsoft and other proprietary vendors are falling back to vendors that are willing to embrace open source to move forward instead of just standing still and plugging more and more useless features into already overbloated software.
"The argument I hear most in support of x86 over PPC is the price - the cheapest PC is a few hundred bucks cheaper than the cheapest Mac." If you compare prices then compare value as well. And in this case this not only aplies to the hardware but to the OS as well, because in order to get the same amout of functionality you get with your latest OSX release you'd have to buy quite a bit of extra Software to your WindowsXP Home edition. And even if you were to just compare the hardware itself, you'd see that the g5 powermac is hardly any more expansive than a comparable PC (to the extend you can compare the two). Macs aren't really so expansive, it's just that they don't offer the same half-assed systems a lot of other companies *cough* Dell *cough* do. This was btw. written on a Dell Inspiron8200 with broken USB Ports and a rich history of fucking itself up.
But they give away free tools to further lock people in to their proprietary media formats and media players and the services for their proprietary OSes! They're really so kind for doing so! Thanks Apple! Thank you so much for being so kind!
Interesting?!? Even Sourceforge kicked these guys away. Open Source does not give you the freedom to break the law, liceneses and other people's business models.
To say that MS uses BSD's TCP/IP stack is like saying the Linux kernel uses SCO code because the letter "a" appears somewhere in the source code. The current TCP/IP stack which ships in XP on 2k3 is pretty far off from the code they based their software on many many years ago.
Re: apple hardware...well you get what you pay for. When you decide to "go apple" you just have to accept that fact that its Apple's way or the highway. Many apple users enjoy having their decisions made for them and they just put their faith into apple and hope for the best. Judging from what most apple users have to say that seems to be working out pretty well for them. Personally I kinda see what your saying to say that apple rules its users with an iron first is an understatement. But hey I'm not the one paying >$1,000 a pop for every machine I buy/build so its no skin off my back.
"[the topic of the hour] does not give you the freedom to break ... other peoples' business models."
This is a horrendously dangerous way to think.
A business model is not a right.
Again for emphasis, a business model is not a right.
Leaching as in taking code, improving it, and releasing your modifications back to the community. Which is how open source works.
Yeah, that optical in and out (as well as standard analog audio in and out) really suck. Forget that crap.
And "shitty speakers"? What PC even has decent speakers built into it? Run some good speakers to the crappy onboard sound listed above. Problem solved.
I'll give you the one about the graphics cards. Mac graphics cards are so overpriced compared to the PC counterparts.
No matter what code Apple releases with OS X 10.4, there will forever be the stain of the Konfabulator.
You forgot to add, "IMHO." Not all developers feel as you do.
Better yet, read John Gruber's take on this non-issue, and see if you still feel the same way.
Surely you mean "the source to the Darwin that is contained in the Tiger WWDC preview is available now". Mac OS X 10.4 hasn't, as the original poster noted, been released yet, and source to it isn't available for the simple reason that it doesn't yet exist.
But they give away free tools to further lock people in to their proprietary media formats and media players and the services for their proprietary OSes!
Proprietary media formats? Like UFS, Samba, AAC, MPEG-4, PDF, and XML?
Media players? The only thing proprietary about the formats that iPod plays is the FairPlay DRM, and that's only there to make the record companies comfortable enough to buy into iTMS. But you can play AAC, MP3, AIFF, WAV, etc... And you can load it from a Mac, Windows, or anything that will talk to a FireWire device.
I'm not sure what services for the OS you're talking about, but a significant portion of the OS itself is open source.
There's nothing about any of this that 'locks you in to their proprietary' anything. Use what you want, don't use what you don't want.
Really? Where can I Buy Dell OS? And what OSS has Dell released back to the community?
Did AMD, Intel or Linus Torvalds give you a PC to develop on? If they didn't give you one, did they loan you one to use? Yeah, I thought not.
Did you see this? Checking eBay superficially, I found this with a price of US$105: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&cate gory=14911&item=5106132682&rd=1
Now add $130 for a new legal copy of Panther, and you have the Mac you claim you need for $235. And it also has all the USB ports you seem to need.
And if you didn't actually already have a physical Mac, why would you be in need of VirtualPC? VirtualPC simulates an Intel clone with Windows on a Mac. Sheesh.
Let's play Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I'll be Pestilence.
If one wants a cheap solution, there are plenty of OSS solutions availble for the cheap x86. If one wants the Apple solution, buy the Apple hardware.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Mac bashing has all been done before. I'm used to it by now. It's tired, old, and unoriginal. Although I do think it's really funny that I'm still singled out for discussing my mac pride and opinions in a forum about MACS. Go figure. I guess macophobes just seek out people to bash out of jealousy.
The thing is, in the days when Mac bashing was slightly more fashionable it was (often) done by people who had a relatively good grasp on technology.
Nowadays it's the other way around. The people quickest to bash Macs are the ones who read a couple issues of PC Magazine, watch TechTV, and like the image of being a 'geek' though they are technically inept. In other words, it's the people who know the least about technology.
I dunno, when I see a Mac-basher I think of a white kid in Nebraska who 'hates' niggers, but wears baggy pants and listens to Eminem and 50 Cent all day; half of his 'world' is a black one. Windows users are the same, except half of their world is a Mac one, and a half-assed imitation of it at that. They're experiencing an identity crisis.
There are also products like VMWare and VirtualPC which help significantly.
I don't know if you're aware of PearPC, but it might help. Sadly my system's too slow to make any use of it, so I can't offer much in the way of a review. Also sadly, I'm in the same situation as yourself - well, minus project popularity. I'd be happy if there were just a way to easily crosscompile for osx/ppc from an x86 linux setup.
Everything will be taken away from you.
I think it's important to point out that Apple was under no obligation to contribute back to the community. The fact that they did simply points out that they have an ethical corporate culture that values open source.
Other companies may not be so nice.
evil is as evil does
You seem to be under the impression that I am ragging on Apple. They are a business and are free to do whatever they want. I am merely pointing out one problem that I as an open source developer (getting zero dollars) have in better supporting the Apple platform, and am looking for constructive solutions. If you want to do fan boy ranting or play in a religous war, please pick a different thread.
You are correct that they didn't. I already have x86 based equipment because I have far more options for applications and operating systems. And if I didn't, the costs to acquire them are very low. Additionally I can easily get parts and do partial upgrades (motherboards, CPU, memory, hard disks, graphics cards etc). The Mac world was really bad at that in the past which is why people like me didn't even consider them and now have an x86 based setup. Apple is now doing a lot better with all those, but that doesn't change the past nor what I already have and the reasons I have it.
There are still 4 days left on that item. The vast majority of bidding and hence the actual price happens in the last few hours of listing (which you knew if you did eBay more than superficially). For other items in a similar price range, the costs of upgrading to 10.3, plus putting in a new hard drive and memory puts it back in the several hundred dollar range. Not to mention that I don't think 266MHz processors would be too useful for developing and testing my app.
Sorry to burst your fan boy bubble, but I was referencing VMWare and VirtualPC for x86. Those products let you use one host x86 machine, and run almost any x86 operating system as a guest. That makes it easy for an open source developer to support multiple families (and versions) of x86 based operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, *BSD etc (and without dual boot, plus undoable disks etc).
So talking about open source development, the cost of entry and the tools available are quite a bit lower in the x86 world. As an open source developer I want to support the Apple environment better, and my constructive suggestion is Apple loaning hardware providing certain constraints are met (such as number of downloads). Do you have any better constructive suggestions?
As I recall, Apple has given some stuff back, in terms of the rendering engine used in Safari which is based on the one in Konquerer, amongst many other cases.
But in terms of why we should care, well, remember back in the late 1990's, when everyone was trying to get people to get their bosses to use open source? The rationale was simple: open code makes better software which makes for better IT which makes for better business.
What this means is that an Apple computer, by virtue of being based on OSS, should run faster/better/with greater stability than one that isn't based on open source software.
While I do see your point about community involvement, you've got to realize that that isn't the whole deal to a lot of people.
And, if you're wondering, yes, I'm writing this on a PowerBook, and yes, I like Apple, no, I don't think they're from God, and yes, I like the fact that my laptop just works without any trouble.
Tim
Theres nothing wrong with a monopoly.
Its only when a company abuses their monopoly to leverage their way into new markets and stifle competition where monopoly status becomes a problem... and is also illegal.
Wow.You must really know your stuff.
That was pretty harsh. I was only going by what was posted. Now I'm an "assface." Golly, I'm so hurt by that comment.
You should pass your information on to the original poster, since apparently neither he/she nor I am aware of deals like this. Thanks for the info, though, I will check into it before my next purchase.
Judging by your response, AMD, Intel or Linus Torvalds gave you a PC as well. ;-)
As for the final selling price of a Mac, it could be sniped easily. As I said, my search was superficial. I note that the link I gave has now been increased by $0.16 since I first posted.
Lighten up, Francis.
Let's play Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I'll be Pestilence.
because they lock you in on the hardware. Apple's business in on the hardware, not software.
And that may have something to do with their willingness to release many aspects of their OS as open source. What distinguishes the Apple "brand" and sells the hardware, after all, is not their tweaks to postfix, but their user interface. So they can treat their unix implementation as non-proprietary.
Apple really is a monopoly when it comes to hardware... want a new G5 with a single processor?
So if Chrysler won't sell you a battery powered PT Cruiser, does that make them a monopoly?
Is there some DRM or something on Mac hardware that prevents people from illegally copying OSX on the mac platform?
Nope, none at all. It would annoy customers, and, frankly, Apple doesn't care that you're pirating their $129 OS, because you can only run it on a computer for which you already paid Apple at least ten times that much.
Apple Loans start at like $30 a month... although you'd be paying for like 5 years... but then if you are a capable developer you should be able to make some money so develop some software and use the proceeds to pay for the Mac... it's called investing in your business and it's a tax write off, so in the end you shouldn't be paying anything for the Mac... a free Mac imagine that.
The barrier to entry got a little bit lower all of a sudden.
If you just want to develop free software... free as in beer, stick with Linux. Us Mac people would rather pay you for free as in speech software... which would let you develop more software for us.
It's hard to feel sorry for you in any case. You've got skills apparently so use them.
Again free as in beer is nice but put the extra effort into the details and give us a good binary dist as well, with a custom icon a thoughtful GUI and some documentation, for $20 - $30... if you get one person a month to buy it.. there's your Mac. Was that so hard?
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
You're wrong on only one point - It was Psion who gave the world the PDA in 1984. Sold as an 'Organiser', it didn't come with PDA functions, but within a year, software was available for managing contacts, calendars and to do lists.
I find Apple's take on 'non-conformist' quite interesting, as they have moved towards many industry standards over the last few years that a decade ago they would have shunned. Gone is their ADB, bus structure, and in comes PCI, AGP, USB.This brings it all down to what a Apple machine actually is nowadays; essentially, the only bits that make an Apple machine special are the CPU, OS and case. Apart from that, the guts of it are all industry standard and not worth writing home about, yet the machine itself is more than the sum of its parts - simply because Apple focus on what makes it different; it's G5, case pics and 'lickable' OS all the way with their ads, whereas PC stuff is hooked up on GHz, GB, MB and other mundane specs.
Another irony from the Open Source perspective is that somebody we all love to hate was a non-conformist - Bill Gates. His mantra from the mid-70's regarding selling software has shaped the computer industry as we know it today. Interesting stuff...
to sleek, quick computers with the most technologically advanced OS available (for the desktop, at least).
True!
The Apple succes on unix desktops always reminds me how right was Steve Jobs with his NeXT computers, ahead of time by 19 years!.
And some people still thinks we are in the fast lane!
What's in a sig?
I hate to post a "me too" but this exactly describes me as well.
I really don't understand this talk of "Apple zealots." I'm sure they must exist but I'm certainly not one. I didn't use Macs at all until I bought a Powerbook a few months ago. I'm a long-time Unix user and used Windows grudgingly from time to time, and to me Mac OS was just another limited OS like Windows only more expensive and with fewer apps. OS X changed all that.
Now I have a Mac and I love it, but if Apple got stupid and started producing crap again I'd switch in a heartbeat. As opposed to the Microsoft zealots who complain about their buggy systems but inevitably line up for the next Windows release.
As for Apple's contribution to open source, well, they strike an interesting balance between free and proprietary software and however you feel about the OSS "purity" issues you have to admit (if you're honest with yourself) that the end product is damned effective. The fact that they give back when they don't have to impresses me even if it doesn't impress anyone else, but the reason I like their stuff is that it's good. I'm willing to pay a premium for quality.
I have a Unix laptop with a slick UI and I do not have to fuck with it all the time to make it work. Even most of the pre-installed Linux laptops I've seen do not fully support all of the onboard hardware, and none of them are as nice as a Powerbook (though some of them are about as good as a P-P-P-Powerbook!) Apparently, my willingness to pay a little more for this makes me a zealot. Um, yeah, whatever. I say I'm a person who likes nice stuff and is getting too old to spend hours fucking around with hardware just to save a few bucks.
What did MS do as soon as Safari was release? That's right, they claimed that OSX now has a browser and EOL'd IE for Mac. There is also the argument you hear time and time again from the GNU community (as opposed to the OSS community as a whole) if you don't like the terms of the licence, don't use the code. The KDE team was free to reject the Apple code wholesale if they didn't want the hastle of integrating the code bases.
Apple have so far been a fine player in the OSS community, they have worked hard and we cant forget that they are a commercial company, in the world of commerce first to market actually means something. Apple don't want to spend millions investing in making a browser for their platform for the whole project to be torpedoed by buggy early releases, code handed back to KDE that isn't ready for the primetime and an early exit from the market by MS.
To be frank, Apple have given more back to the community than you give them credit for with comments like "the corporate version dumped on your lap by an organization merely following the letter of the law". You are completely neglecting the contribution that is Darwin. That was BSD, that had a BSD licence, they could have just taken and not given anything back. They chose to keep it OSS.
I've been in the corporate world - it's not much fun, and I'll bet it would leave a very bitter taste in one's mouth if a competitor used your code to beat you to the punch, released a browser and dumped a large "patch" of your own code to a project before you'd finished; while at the same time your platform languished because said 'followers' didn't have a decent browser. Obviously this is a worst case everything went wrong scenario, but they aren't doing it for the love, no Mac 'follower' is really fooled into thinking they're doing it for anything except to line the pockets of the shareholders, it's just that at the same time we think they're doing it right.
YMMV.
Who the hell cares? Is it Apple's problem that their contribution is not being utilized by many people? Apple gave back improvement. Period. You can use it if you want, or not. Nobody forces you to do anything. Nobody forces FOSS projects to merge Apple's patches into the tree. isn't that why people keep arguing that free in FOSS is like in 'freedom'? It makes me wonder if you actually understand the spirit of FOSS philosophy.
Well, I've heard that the typical Mac user is more likely to keep their software up-to-date than a Windows user, which makes sense for a couple of reasons: First, Mac users are willing to spend more money (since if they wanted the absolute cheapest bottom-line, they wouldn't have gotten a mac*), so they can afford to pay for upgrades. Second, OS X has been around for what, 4 years now? That's a pretty long time. Third, Apple really, really pushed OS X, and tried pretty hard to force people to upgrade - for example, refusing to sell new computers with OS 9, and having people load "Classic environment" instead. Finally, OS X was a huge improvement over 9, so almost everyone wanted to upgrade.
It pretty much boils down to this: people who care about how well their computers work care about keeping it up-to-date. People who don't care, and just want The Internet to work (i.e., want an appliance) end up with Windows, PCs, because they're the default choice these days (they don't care to investigate all the choices available to them, and instead just buy whatever the loser at Best Buy tells them to - and Best Buy doesn't sell Macs). Therefore, Mac users care about their computer being up-to date.
So, I would say that the vast majority of those Macs on the Zeitgeist are running OS X.
*note that I'm not saying Macs are overpriced, or even necessarily expensive - but they have only high-end and midrange machines, no eMachines or Dell style low end
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Ever consider that they picked KHTML because they prefer LGPL over MPL or GPL?
You post begs much explanation, because it makes no sense as is.