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."

Comments

Open source on non open OS?

[kipman725]

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.

Re:Open source on non open OS?

[FinchWorld]

Why? Surely if its open source anyone can take it, compile it, and use it on whatever they want. How much propriety software lets you do that? By limiting open source software to only play nice with other open source software (OS, whatever), you become a little bit like Microsoft.

Re:Open source on non open OS?

[ColdWetDog]

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.

That's just plain silly. You don't have to have the source code for every tiny little bit on the computer for source code to be useful. Really, how many people need to dink with the kernel, be it Windows, OS X or Linux?

Sharing code is useful at the application level. You should re examine your zealotry, son. It's gonna cause you some grief. Mark my words ... You'll grow a beard, be shunned at parties. You will want to put posters of RMS on your wall. Your mother will disown you.

Re:Open source on non open OS?

[MMC Monster]

I don't know. Is Firefox on MSWindows useless? At some point they'll have to call a proprietary library.

The nice thing is that they can put wrappers around the proprietary function call bits and potentially make the software run on multiple OSs. (As Firefox does.)

Re:Open source on non open OS?

[Znork]

Really, how many people need to dink with the kernel, be it Windows, OS X or Linux?

Well, it's a fair number, but it's not necessarily the number of people, but the _right_ people we need to be dinking around with the kernel. Unfortunately, with proprietary operating systems, it seems the right people are not necessarily doing that.

I don't personally dink around that much in the kernel (altho I've bypassed a bug or two in drivers), but I certainly want the genius with too much free time and the same hardware that I have who can fix the bugs to have access to the source. I dont want to hack my own paravirtualising hypervisor, but I'm very pleased to use xen technology, which would have been very difficult to implement without open source.

As a user of programs and operating systems I usually dont need the source. But I do need many improvements made by people with similar interests to me; interests that may overlap very much less with the strategic thinking of a single monolithic corporation.

Sharing code is useful at the application level.

Free software is useful at any level you want to have improved. Which is pretty much all of them. Personally I dont have the patience for proprietary products anymore; I find most tend to have issues that would never survive a few iterations in an opensource product. With free software products I know that if it annoys me enough it'll annoy someone else enough to fix it.

Now go away. I have a beard to tend to.

Re:Open source on non open OS?

[Eighty7]

That's just plain silly. You don't have to have the source code for every tiny little bit on the computer for source code to be useful. Really, how many people need to dink with the kernel, be it Windows, OS X or Linux?

You really think it's just the kernel? Jobs (goes for ballmer too) has complete control over his platform. Are you going to make all your users pay for 10.5? If he stops supporting Carbon, what can you do?

My biggest gripe is with repositories. It would be absolutely trivial for MS to set up a repository & kill off 90% of the malware. Apple supposedly cares for its users - an add-remove button like ubuntu's would go a long way towards providing quality applications. I'm sure it's possible to add a repository afterwards, but it's nowhere as easy (popular) as ubuntu's default. When you find yourself having to explain to yet another person that legal, free, world class software actually exists -- remember that you're doing it because you're on someone else's platform & they want to make it difficult because they're in the business of selling proprietary software.

Re:Mac developers don't do cross platform.

[0100010001010011]

#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.

Re:Why Mac, though ?

[Cannelloni]

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.

Re:Mac developers don't do cross platform.

[Paradise Pete]

This is why I consider the Mac OSS community to be a bunch of leeches. They've ported most open source unix applications to OS X but to date have given nothing useful back.

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.

Re:Mac developers don't do cross platform.

[RiotingPacifist]

by that definition mac didnt start on mac.

Re:Mac developers don't do cross platform.

[larry bagina]

Apple works hard to ensure that applications written to OS X will not easily be ported to other platforms.

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?

Re:Mac developers don't do cross platform.

[onefriedrice]

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.