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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."
In my opinion, Apple's Mac OS X has the best of both worlds. It allows you the ability to run traditional and widely used desktop applications, such as Microsoft Office, while at the same time giving you the power and strength of BSD Unix to run GNU tools under (or on top of) OS X.
Apple has gained a great deal by levereging OSS in Mac OS X. They not only got a rock solid (especially in comparison to OS 9) base to build their proprietary GUI on top of, but they also have gotten a lot of traction in the serious computer geek user category (just look at all the Apple press on /.)
Their use of a solid, tested (open) base for OS X has allowed them to spend most of their developer time refining the user experience. They seem to be moving a lot faster with OS developement than Microsoft (or any other vendor), currently.
Apple seems to grok the spirt of the open source community, and has generally been a good citizen about giving back to the community technologies from OS X (from bug fixes to packages used in OS X, to Apple paid developer time on OSS projects, to release of Apple software under a open license (Darwin, Rendezvous, etc.)
This isn't really surprising because it just makes sense -- if an open source program is useful and does everything you want there's no reason not to include it. The real interesting thing about this is that Microsoft is not including these programs. I mean, it's not surprising that they don't given their antagonistic view towards F/OSS (and from the other side as well), but I really think this is one area where Apple's really got a leg up on Microsoft. Apple's willing to include useful open source unix tools, and so they've immediately got a huge pool of pre-written code to draw from.
What about X11--where they're not legally required to give the code back, they typically don't. They're doing what they have to in using other people's work, but I'd hardly call them altruistic.
Since apple is using open source programs, I wonder how can I obtain the settings, so I can duplicate the services on my servers. Is it possible to offer the kereberos, windows integration, ldap schemas, LDAP server on my gnu/linux or *BSD servers?
It would be great if I could use LDAP schemas from apple and use with postfix, samba, user loggin because open source is giving me to many choices and I would like to standarize with open source and with a company begind it, such as apple or IBM.
Intergration is key nowadays. Anyway, does anyone have a hint on were to look for?
Thanks slashdot community!
According to Emerson, the nonconformists in the world are the ones that change the world (i.e. Galileo, Jesus, etc). Nonconformist players like Apple and the Open Source Community have contributed a lot to the computer industry. _ Apple gave us: -The first mass-marketed GUI operating system -The PDA -The iMac (which changed the way computers are made today i.e. NOT BEIGE) -The first personal supercomputer (it was inevitable, but they got it out first) _ Open source gave us: -The GPL -Operating systems for the rest of us -Countless open standards -Tux! _ Apple and Open Source belong together, and will probably continue to be major players in the computer industry as leaders, not followers.
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
Apple and Open Source software have cross-pollinated and produced benefits for both paying Apple users and OSS users. Examples that have already been enumerated are Safari/KHTML and PPC BSD. This can only be a good thing for all involved. Perhaps at some point, Apple will open up even more, and release the source to its X11 server and Konfabulator clone.
"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.
My point of view may be skewed because I finally bought a Mac a year ago and have been impressed ever since, but I think Apple has the potential to lead the mainstream charge for open source advocacy than Linux does.
To be honest, most people I know that use computers aren't really aware what Linux is. Then, when a penguin-head tries to tell them about it, they don't really understand it or even care. I've faced that problem multiple times when trying to explain linux to folks.
The thing is that the average user only cares about internet, email, instant messenging, pirated mp3s, and porn. While it's all fine and dandy that linux is more efficient, it still takes a lot more set-up to get it all working. To the average person, one major system crash a week is more tolerable than dealing with a whole new system from scratch.
On top of that, there's the nervous insecurity that comes with knowing they're mostly on their own. Nobody likes tech support, but it's still nice to know that they're there. Apple has handled open source wonderfully. Users feel secure with a Mac in their hands - at least moreso than Linux. On top of that, if they actually know what open source is, they feel like they're elite for using it.
The developers get more open access, the users get a sense of pride and security that comes from open source well handled, and Apple makes money.
I think they have the formula that will drive open source to the home user. Linux will be the better for it, too - while Windows will eventually fall further behind as "too restrictive."
But these are just my predictions being typed on a very efficient and dependable PowerBook. Writer bias, anyone?
Note the and in my statement. Breaking someone's business model by breaking the law/license is a bad thing. Especially in the United States, business are well represented in the law since we are based on capitalism. While, I agree a business model is not a right, but protection from illegal actions is.
Ironically, I thought to my self and to my friends 10 years ago that apple should just use unix as a core and port most of the traditional GUI layer/apis ontop of the unix layer. (yes 10 years ago when amiga was about to die). This was when Taligent was flying about the OS world, and when the new MacOS was in development that was dumped. But given that 90% of the OS was in pascal and some assembly with some programmers gone for good and with left over bad source codes, I could see why it was hard to do, but hey, the OS of 1994 was a lot smaller than today. The thing is, apple could have done this OSX stuff in 1984, all it needed to do was dedicate 5-8 programmers, give em some working unix on a high-end sun, and port the whole System 6 to it. Give em 5 years time frame and they could have been done by 1989. Sure their OS probly wouldnt run on any mac hardware, but by 93/94 it could have and been well ahead or at least ready for the big OSX, well before 1999.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Well, from my experience, Apple's service has been exemplary, The last time I sent my PowerBook in for repair (blown hinges on a TiBook), Apple also replaced everything except the hard drive, memory, bottom case and airport card cause they were a little out of spec. I also got the machine back in two days.
//e) is that its quality is well above the average, both in terms of quality and engineering.
The only time Apple took more than three days to get my machine back to me was when a part was out of stock. They gave me a $200.00 credit on the Apple Store as an apology.
As for the single processor, why would you want a single processor 1.6, when the new low end is a dual 1.8 for a couple of hundred bucks more? There is some evidence that the new 1.8 might not be quite as good as the old one, but it's still better than a single 1.6 and is cheaper than it was before.
My experience with Apple hardware (all the way back to the Apple
http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/products/
They were good enough for the US Navy subs.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Neither of which are truly open or free. In fact Konfabulator may be using one of the open source JavaScript parsers without attribution! It's certainly not using Apple's JS Core.
No. Zeroconf came from Apple, developed by an Apple employee (Stuart Cheshire, whose job title is "Wizard without Portfolio") and was submitted to the IETF for standardization (not that much of the much of that work has succeeded yet. There are a bunch of drafts, but no official RFCs yet.) That is not leeching by any sense of the word. (or leaching either. Slightly different meanings, but I guess both would work.)
As others have said, using, improving, and returning your improvements back to the open source projects is hard to be considered leeching either. And this is what they are doing for gcc, FreeBSD, KHTML, and other projects.
This open source developer has a project that works on Windows, Linux and Mac, but sadly doesn't possess a Mac himself - someone else does the Mac builds for me.
I'd love to get a Mac so that I could improve the project on Mac myself, but sadly they are too expensive to acquire. The cheapest Mac I can find new is $800. There are second hand ones around $650, but you usually need to add $130 to upgrade the OS to 10.3 putting you back at the $800 price tag anyway. (Sadly I can't do development remotely as I need to play with USB based devices).
By comparison, you can get x86 based machines for $200-$300, which makes the barrier of entry to Linux/Windows very low. There are also products like VMWare and VirtualPC which help significantly.
It would be nice if Apple had some way for developers like me to get loaned or cheap equipment. They could even set minimum download thresholds from SourceForge or other similar minimum requirements. (My project spent most of last week within the top 100 projects on SF).
I think it's mainly the users. Most of the ones I've met are total jerks. I won't go through any of the names they're called, but suffice it to say there are people who agree with me.
And I am a BSD and Linux user. So I am all about alternatives. I just wish it was Be and not Apple.
Maybe if you mean *.advocacy
The OS advocacy newsgroups used to be pretty similar to the kind of fights over OS software seen in these parts in the present day.
The personal attacks and publicly conducted private flamewars on the advocacy groups have somewhat overwhelmed anything else these days, though.
resigned
Apple knows the risks it takes with such a closed system but after seeing the Tiger demo I'm kinda impressed and I think it's a direction worth pursuing. In other words, it's a compromise I'm willing to take.
Or a summary:
- Windows : proprietary software running on any Intel-compatible (cheap) hardware
- OSS Unixes : free OS running on most types of hardware.
- Apple : proprietary software and hardware with some software OSS to reduce the burden of doing everything themselves. But with guaranteed integration of hardware/software type gee-wiz things.
To me this looks like nice healthy competition and asking Apple to join one of the other bandwagons seems to be anti-choice. Dontyathink?
Ciao
You know of course that the creator of Be's most beloved feature, the BeFS, Dominic Giampaolo, now works for Apple. That new Spotlight feature in Tiger, looks to leverage a lot of his competence in that area.
"I tend to think of OS X as Linux with QA and Taste", James Gosling, creator of Java
By what measurement?
By lines of code? How many lines of code are in OpenOffice anyway?
By the number of kernel improvements to Linux? I don't recall seeing Apple's name on RCU.
How about marketing dollars? I'm pretty sure IBM is just beating HP for that title.
By legitimizing OSS in the corporate world? Pretty sure IBM wins that one. Heck, OSX users probably don't even know they're using OSS.
Or how about units of OSS software shipped? I am pretty sure Sun wins again; OSS and GNU has been bundled with Solaris for years and Sun ships a lot of boxes.
By their contributions to the BSDs? Apple uses FreeBSD a lot but it's only a trickle back. Sure, they give some gnawed bones to the FreeBSD kernel guys, but what about the rest of BSD?
Are you measuring all the boring stuff like documentation and testing and selling? Because I think Sun and IBM both beat Apple there too.
Hell, what metric are you using to convince yourself that Apple has "given a lot more" than IBM or Sun? I'm really interested to know. I realise that Apple uses a lot of open source software and they are responsible for a lot of FreeBSD-based desktops and servers, but using software isn't the same thing as giving.
My own personal list of companies who have given the most to OSS (in no particular order):
I'd rank Apple somewhere in the top 10 but they're playing well behind those 3. I reckon Apple probably ranks below Novell, SGI, HP and fricking Intel in terms of contributions to the open source movement. I certainly would not place them in first place. They're a good contributor, and they have given a lot, but have they given the most? No way!
1) Use Gecko
2) Use KHTML and bring it up to speed
3) Write their own
4) License one
3 was entirely out of the question - the investment and time it takes to build a modern web rendering engine is enormous and they don't have the resources nor desire to do that. 4 would have been difficult - the only other rendering engines on the market would have been from Opera or OmniWeb. Both these companies make their living by selling unit copies of their browsers so the idea of having them bundled with the OS and potentially reused in competitors browsers to compete against them can't have been pretty.
So they had to use a pre-existing open source rendering engine. They went for KHTML, for various well documented reasons, and started work on bringing up to scratch. But did they work with the KDE community to do that? No. Of course not. Steve Jobs wanted to go "tada!" and surprise his followers. So instead they released an enormous patch dump once Safari was out.
I can tell you from working with similar patch dumps from TransGaming that this is very nearly as bad as not getting the changes back at all. They are ridiculously hard to make use of - not only are all the changes mixed together, but often they contain duplicated work. How do you pick between the component written as a labour of love by a volunteer, or the corporate version dumped on your lap by an organization merely following the letter of the law? What if the corporate version is better? What kind of message does that send? How do you split the patch up into discrete commits so you can track regressions when each part depends on the others?
To be frank, if Apple were truly working with the open source community in the KHTML case, they'd have entered the spirit of "no secrets" and released their work as it was done, with discussion on the mailing list. They did not. I've been there - it's not much fun.
Keep in mind that Apple is a business first and foremost; if it is convenient and *profitable* (less development time, bugs are not in their hands as much) for them to use open source then they will.
If they were totally altruistic then the open source community would have access to sourcecode for the Finder, Spotlight and other Apple technologies which would benefit those who wish to improve their OS systems. But no, it's a business, and what works for them doesn't necessarily mean they should fully reverse the process.
And, when they introduce bugs in system updates that cripple (fully compliant) applications, one gets to wonder what their goal is.
(fyi, I am an Apple Mac user)
By their contributions to the BSDs? Apple uses FreeBSD a lot but it's only a trickle back. Sure, they give some gnawed bones to the FreeBSD kernel guys, but what about the rest of BSD?
Seeing this, it implies to me that you are just ranting with no idea what you talking about. The part of FreeBSD that Apple is not using is the kernel. They are using the BSD w/ Mach thing that they inherited from NeXT. It is the user space utilities that are mostly from FreeBSD. Instead of the ones that shipped with NextSTEP (the ones they licensed from Berkeley before BSD became free software) which were getting a bit long in the tooth, they grabbed most of /bin and /usr/bin/ from FreeBSD.
The comment about Open Source shipped by Sun seems misguided as well. First of all, Sun shipping open source software packages is a very recent phenomena. Solaris Freeware. shows the packages that ship with Solaris 9. A small portion of those titles were distributed with Solaris 8 (I'm thinking less than a half dozen. That was the release they added ssh and Apache.) In Solaris 7 and earlier, the only thing close to free software were the hacked up binary only versions of Sendmail and and Bind.
I don't quite understand why you keep harping on OpenOffice too. They bought a failing company producing an office productivity suite because they wanted some sort of word processing and spreadsheet option to sell with the workstation systems. It was sort of like SGI buying the MIPS CPU maker. It wasn't good for them to do, but it would be disastrous for them no to do.
And Sun doesn't ship a lot of boxes. They ship a lot of boxes for a server manufacturer, which isn't quite the same thing.
did not find any flaw in Linux itself, just that the interface for management was not quite there
This, for me, really illustrates the culture clash between Apple and the open source/Linux community; I've always had the impression that for the Linux crowd, the back-and is all important and adding the UI is just a finishing touch. The above comment would seem to confirm that view.
But for Apple, it's the UI that is all-important. I think a lot of people underestimate the time it takes not just to implement a UI, but to get it right.
You couldn't imagine Apple ever dismissing an issue as "That's just UI stuff..". "Just back end stuff" maybe!
Apple has had to overcome the bad reputation that they got back when tried to prevent anyone else from using the intellectual property they stole from Xerox (aka look&feel). Googling on "stallmann boycott apple" turned up the following:
Boycott Apple - Some time before 1989, Apple Computer, Inc. started a lawsuit against Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, claiming they had breached Apple's copyright on the look and feel of the Macintosh user interface. In December 1989, Xerox failed to sue Apple Computer, claiming that the software for Apple's Lisa computer and Macintosh Finder, both copyrighted in 1987, were derived from two Xerox programs: Smalltalk, developed in the mid-1970s and Star, copyrighted in 1981.
Apple wanted to stop people from writing any program that worked even vaguely like a Macintosh. If such look and feel lawsuits succeed they could put an end to free software that could substitute for commercial software.
In the weeks after the suit was filed, Usenet reverberated with condemnation for Apple. GNU supporters Richard Stallman, John Gilmore, and Paul Rubin decided to take action against Apple. Apple's reputation as a force for progress came from having made better computers; but The League for Programming Freedom believed that Apple wanted to make all non-Apple computers worse. They therefore campaigned to discourage people from using Apple products or working for Apple or any other company threatening similar obstructionist tactics (e.g. Lotus and Xerox).
Because of this boycott the Free Software Foundation for a long time didn't support Macintosh Unix in their software. In 1995, the LPF and the FSF decided to end the boycott.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue