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Google Gets Serious About Open Source Mac Projects
mjasay sends us a link to a CNet story, which begins:
"In the '20 percent time' that Google employees have to work on projects of personal interest, it turns out that an increasing number are spending time writing open-source projects for their Macs. Google has long had a fondness for the Mac, with upwards of 6,000 of its 20,000 current employees opting to use the Mac over Windows. It is in the 20 percent employee development time, however, where this statistic becomes interesting. At Google, development time translates into products. The more Mac-friendly employees, the more Mac-related development. The more Mac-related development, the more Google-sponsored Mac-based open-source code. As Google's Mac Developer Playground demonstrates, some of this code is quite interesting."
To me open source on a non opensource OS (apple has a patchey history with opening bits of OS) has always seemed a little contridictory and defeating the purpose of running a free or opensource system.
The appeal is the quality of the user interface and developer community as opposed to both of those on Linux.
Superior interface, mature developers vs Whatever bad interface you want to use, we got 10 of them and childish political programmers who think what software license one uses is the civil rights battle of our time.
Oh and users. As in Macs have more non-programmer users than Linux does.
When you look at it that way its not much of a contest.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I do. Though it's karma suicide, as my last post got modded "redundant", although nobody else mentioned it, within 30 seconds of clicking submit. You can't bring up facts about /.'s golden children without some neck-beard in his mother's basement trying to shut you down.
You can, pretty much, take Google and insert $SEXY_COMPANY_HERE and expect Google to be best buddies with them when it comes to what's relayed to the public. This helps form advertising partnerships, makes investors balls swell, etc.
The more I've been reading about what Google employees do, the more it becomes apparent that most must be driving new Beetles, wearing "Can you hear me now?"-guy glasses, latte sipping, looking serious while browsing myspace at the coffee shop, goatee donning weeners.
#include
main()
{
printf("Hello World");
}
-
Hrm. Seems to work just fine on my Mac and my Debian Box. I guess I foiled apple again.
Or if you mean Apple has their own language, Cocoa, which isn't ported to XP or Linux. Funny thing is, you're not forced to use it.
Since we're on the topic of cross plat form stuff, it's not OSS, but it was one of the best selling games ever: Myst.
Because it's a damn good and user-friendly operating system, with a large user base and a vibrant developer community and thousands of professional and home user applications. That's why.
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
It has nothing to do with appeal to Google...
At Google, people get paid to work on whatever they want (some of the time), and those developers (not Google as an entity) choose to create open source Mac software.
I think you misunderstand how it works. The original author rarely ports it to a platform he doesn't use. He makes the source available, and someone who is willing and able to make it work on another platform can do that. You even said it yourself - "They've ported." If few Mac open source projects have been ported to a particular platform, blame the users of that platform, not the people who don't use it.
Because a lot of Google people love Unix, and the Mac is the best desktop Unix environment. That's why.
And do you think Google are so penny-pinchingly cheap that the massive boost in developer productivity they get from using Macs isn't worth the small extra cost over a system running Windows or Linux? Give me a break. What are they spending, maybe $50 000 extra total for the Macs? Google earns that in probably around 5 seconds.
.sigs are for losers
by that definition mac didnt start on mac.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Oh wait. They have a terminal, emacs, gcc, perl, shell, python, ruby, and a bunch of command line development tools. So that can't be the reason why linux is your thing, can it?
or does not have any RAW conversion software for any major digital SLR camera manufacturers?
Thanks but no thanks. With Mac OS X I get the best of both worlds (terminal, UNIX tools, VIM, gcc) but also Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, and Nikon Capture, and all my Epson printers work with no driver installations in Leopard.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Just like KDE works hard to ensure that applications written for KDE aren't easily ported to other APIs? And GNOME works hard to ensure that applications written for GTK aren't easily ported to other APIs? And X.org works hard to ensure that applications written for xlib aren't easily ported to other APIs? And Be works hard to ensure that applications written for belib aren't easily ported to other APIs? And Microsoft works hard to ensure that applications written for Win32 aren't easily ported to other APIs? And Sun works hard to ensure that applications written for Swing aren't easily ported to other APIs? And Open Group works hard to ensure that applications written for Motif aren't easily ported to other APIs? And QNX works hard to ensure that applications written for Photon aren't easily ported to other APIs? And Donald Knuth works hard to ensure that documents written for TeX aren't easily ported to other markup languages? And Intel works hard to ensure that x86 assembly code isn't easily ported to other architectures? And Toyota works hard to ensure that gasoline-powered internal combustion engines can't easily run on hydrogen?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
That's why you guys have to keep on working on Linux, get your shit in order (one standard GUI, one standard installation method, one way to code apps). Choice isn't always good.
Exactly. Objective-C is the language, and, oh yeah, it has excellent support in gcc thanks to Apple giving back its improvements in that area.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.