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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."
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
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).
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
Leaching as in taking code, improving it, and releasing your modifications back to the community. Which is how open source works.
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.
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.
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?
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.