Slashdot Mirror
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.
Of course, Tiger was recently revealed (or introduced), not released. It won't be released until 2005.
There ain't no rules here; we're trying to accomplish something.
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.
Microsoft has also loved open source. As long as it's under the BSD license...
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
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.)
Rendezvous, code existing in Safari, QuickTime streaming server just to name a few
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
OpenOffice?
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.
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.
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.
RendezVous wasn't "based on open source". The ZeroConf standard (to which Apple contributed as well) is open, of course, as any standard necessarily is.
The implementation, however, is Apple's. Apple wrote it, incorporated it in Mac OS X, and made the parts of it that make sense when lifted from the Mac OS X context public. They wrote stuff and opened it consequently; original work, not "based on" open source.
one of the reasons the architechture is 'superior' is apples control over it's own hardware and thus having good support.
which you kind of lose if you'll start assembling them together like x86 pc's from parts from dozens of vendors..
I'm sure someone will educate(flame/troll) you on the finer points why x86 backwards compatibility isn't really such a big deal in real world(as in, it doesn't really hinder the performance due to the way the processors are built internally).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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
Of course, if you want to have Cocoa on your PC, you can. It's called GNUStep. It's not 100% complete, and currently very ugly (theming is about to take off, though!), but it has a number of advantages over OS X:
- GNUStep runs on a variety of platforms, including GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows.
- GNUStep is far less resource hungry than OS X.
- Applications developed for GNUStep are trivial to port to OS X - mainly the menu layout needs to be changed.
The developer tools for GNUStep are really nice, and strikingly similar to Apple's. GNUStep still needs a lot of work, but it's come a long way.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Read the FIRST PARAGRAPH here and try not to spread FUD.
I'm very grateful it's not true copyleft, since I've had to integrate this code into existing commercial modules. Truly "free as in freedom" licenses allow that, and Apple is to be commended for picking a license that allows this (since they could have released under a different license and bypassed any such restriction themselves as the copyright owners).
But it is getting harder to argue against them every day.
I was not really referring to how well the machines work - indeed, that is largely due to Apple writing software for their own hardware only.
...) that sucks power, causes instabilities and incompatibilities, etc, etc. Also, the limited number of registers, many of which have special uses, makes things unelegant. Context switches are expensive, which leads people to write elephantine programs, because they run faster.
What I meant is that the x86 architecture...is very subobtimal. There is a lot of legacy cruft (Real Mode, Virtual86 Mode, BIOS, CHS,
Compared to other CPU architectures, an x86 gives you little speed for the frequency, and uses a lot of power (and generates heat) for the speed it gives you.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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.
"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.
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.
Heh, and the Konfabulator people, Watson folks, et al., might've something to contribute to that discussion as well.
"[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.
Actually, that's no longer the case: "Memory: 256MB of PC2100 (266MHz) DDR SDRAM (256MB built-in and one available SO-DIMM slot) with support for up to 1.25GB"
Source
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.
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.
You've apparently confused capitalism and plutocracy. I like the potential segue into calling someone who disagrees with those laws a Communist, though. Thinking a couple of moves ahead like that is essential to good trolling.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
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.
How is Konfabulator a new idea? Deskspace applets are an old thing man.
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.
The parent has already been modded up, but I was at WWDC and was very impressed with the amount of things that are being given back to the OS community. Not just in app-like things such as Safari/Konqueror, but in some of the nuts and bolts like OpenLDAP, Samba, and Kerberos. They were very pround of their accomplishments (and rightly so), but seemed equally proud of the fact that they were giving back to the community.
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).
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.
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.
Further, they've involved in several smaller projects. Check out http://www.sunsource.net/ for more information. Oh, and they're a member of the Open Source Development Lab.
Is that good enough for you?
Further, Sun has developed several technologies which have been widely adopted by other Unix vendors, such as NFS and PAM.
While Sun doesn't get a lot of media attention for their open-source work, they do contribute a lot.
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
omg F 9-11 are teh expose keys on a mac!~~!~~! it is teh SUPAR COINCEDANCE!!!!ONETILDE
Because Apple doesn't own all of Quicktime.
There isn't a single Quicktime codec, but a host of standard codecs that work under the Quicktime umbrella. Codecs like Sorenson and MPEG. These are licensed out by the various owners, but not owned by Apple. This means that Apple can't open source Quicktime unless the owners of these codecs open source their codecs.
And if that happens, well, it's when I win the lotto.
AnamanFan - Trying to find the Truth, one post at a time.
Remind me what their marketshare is worldwide? I bet it's less than 1%.
Here are two editorials that respond to that flaimbait. I suggest you (and others that adopt this way of thinking) read them.
The New FUD: Apple Market Share
Gartner Research - Server Install-base vs. market share
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.
Wake us up when they're ready to give something back.
This is your wake up call. Click the links on the left under the title Open Source Projects. All of Apple's modifications to KHTML, etc. are in there, along with the kernel, compilers, and everything else. Next time, expending your energy on a rant based on incorrect assumptions, try a Google search; it only takes 10 seconds, 8.3 if you merge Apple's changes into your KHTML.
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.
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 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.
You, there's this little thing called R&D... Apple has to spend a lot of money developing new products. Where should that money come from? Apple's not like Dell, who just slaps some components in a box and calls it a system. Purchasing a Mac subsidizing the whole system, the OS, the apps, everything.
I have a shitty sig!
As for your ridiculous assertion, Apple themselves produce more than one application in some product categories, because needs differ. But don't let the facts get in the way of your predjudice.
Open Directory Administration
This very precisely details the schema used by Apple for its Open Directory (LDAP) service, to the point you will be bored to tears.
Stuart Cheshire is the architect of Zeroconf/Rendezvous. He was working for Apple when he drummed up interest for easier to use IP networking at IETF.
a rt icleview/30/1/3/
proof #1
"In 1998, between finishing my PhD and starting work full-time at Apple..."
http://www.stuartcheshire.org/#Personal
--
proof #2
"Peter Ford from Microsoft helped me co-chair those meetings, and we gathered enough interest to warrant the formation of an official IETF Working Group, under the new name "Zero Configuration Networking", in September 1999."
http://www.theideabasket.com/index.php/article/
Now stop spreading FUD!
He claimed that OS X was the most widely-used UNIX-type OS on the desktop, and he was right. I just looked at the Zeitgeist, and although Mac is 3%, Linux is only 1% and BSD doesn't even register - I guess it's part of "other."
And people are switching. I used to hate Macs before OS X, but they've gone from crappy, slow computers with an outdated OS to sleek, quick computers with the most technologically advanced OS available (for the desktop, at least). Now I own one, and have several friends who want to switch.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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
Google it, you'll find quite a bit of info out there. I actually have (or had) a CD image of it somewhere, but not anything that will run it (it has pretty specific hardware requirements which makes all of the Macs I have available unusable - Basilisk won't work either).
My English teacher once told me that two positives don't make a negative. Two words for her: Yeah, right.
...I mean, one is a religion, the other is some bloke who lived 2000 years ago.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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)
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?
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.
Donate free food here
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.
You forgot to mention that we're also all gay filmmakers and musicians who only buy Apples because they match our decor.
*hides wife, Unix books, old Linux box, and lack of artistic ability behind shiney Mac* Nothing to see here, move along...
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
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.
From what I could quickly find, look on page 16 of this PDF file under the sections "MPEG-2 Notice" and "Use of MPEG-4"
AnamanFan - Trying to find the Truth, one post at a time.
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
So unless you think the Apple website is wrong and they don't really use FreeBSD in their kernel, despite their own developer's website saying that they do, I think you might be mistaken.
Yes, I think that quote that you grabbed somewhat misleading. Or at least a large simplification. Lets look at how many lines in the kernel have either copyright or RCS variables that reference FreeBSD
Now as a comparison, lets grab src/sys from FreeBSD for comparison
and just to round things out, lets look for how many references there is to Apple anywhere in the FreeBSD source.
I discounted the references to appletalk, which aren't apple code and skew the results. If you look closely at the rest of those 53 files, they are hardware related files that aren't common between the two. (most of the PCI and low level disk drivers are handled by Mach, not BSD on the Darwin side)
Based on this, I'll repeat my assertion. The Darwin kernel is an evolutionary outgrowth of the work that was done at NeXT. NeXT's BSD is based off of the BSD source before it became free software and before the FreeBSD project began. There is very little, if any FreeBSD code in Apple's kernel. The rest of the BSD subsystem, the parts above the kernel, (mostly the stuff in /usr/lib and /{,usr}/{,s}bin) are a different story and have a lot of connection to FreeBSD.
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.