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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."
When you write a story about open source and Google on Mac, you don't miss QuickSilver.app which is a record breaking download which turned to open source and Alcor, the developer is a Google employee.
See the numbers just at its versiontracker page
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/22549
Also here is its source along with various Alcor programs:
http://code.google.com/p/blacktree-alchemy/
There is no chance you miss a 200.000 downloaded (just a single site!), used by newbie to advanced developer profile utility. Unless you have never used Mac regularly and sit there and write a story about Google and Mac code of course. Another thing to include in that story is the fiasco of Google Desktop search which seriously made everyone paranoid with its method of install, method of running and the idea of shipping that Windows wonder to an OS which invented dynamic/extended search in its core.
Not true for "open source" OS X software. Developers on this platform are generally opposed to cross platform application development and Apple works hard to ensure that applications written to OS X will not easily be ported to other platforms.
If you disagree, can you name a single significant open source desktop application that originated on the Mac and is now cross platform (supporting Windows, Mac and Linux at least)?
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. The attitude seems to be that its fine for them to use stuff from BSD or Linux, but if you want to run their software, you should just buy a Mac. And that makes them a lot more like Microsoft than the person who asked the original question.
The appeal, I think, is that Mac provides a pretty unique development environment. Not *my* favorite, mind you (I do prefer using a terminal to XCode, so emacs and Linux are my thing), but I definitely see the appeal of the Objective C thing.
Only, I wish those same people putting all that work into OS X applications would instead redirect their efforts to improving GNUStep, making Linux a place that can have the same set of appeals. Right now it's pretty ugly, but it has so much potential.. it seems to only lack developers. I'd love to see it go somewhere.
If Google is so big on the Mac, where is the Mac version of Picasa? It's been rumored for months. iPhoto's interface is poor by comparison.
It sounds like a reasonable policy to me. It's the same one we had at my last employer. Users choose what works best for them. Since several of those people now work at Google, I imagine they feel right at home.
It's a pity, because the thinkpads are better built and more easily serviced.Actually, according to Consumer Reports Thinkpads have a higher failure rate than MacBooks or MacBook pros, by a decent margin. At that last employer those were our two pre-approved vendors and our data showed the same thing. As for ease of service, who services their own machines? We put in RAM and the like, which is plenty easy on Apple systems. Anything else, we copied the data to a spare machine (if possible) and shipped the broken one back to the vendor. On site repairs may make sense for servers, but not for laptops. It just isn't worth the employee down time. A couple of spare laptops are a cheap way to keep people working.
Despite the relatively good support for linux laptops at Google, using them remains cumbersome...I find using them anywhere as a primary desktop is cumbersome. It's come a long way, but there is still a lot of tinkering and hands on work that needs to be done to get them running with whatever infrastructure and keep them that way. I use one daily, but I don't find it to be as painless and enjoyable as OS X for most tasks (although for some tasks it is quite superior).
I'd note most all of the problems you list are probably the result of having a distro not tailored to your hardware. That will hopefully be less of a problem in future as laptop makers customize Linux for their machine and keep it supported.
I probably would use Mac too if it weren't for the absence of the nipple-trackpoint and the user interface that drives me crazy.Yeah, we all become accustomed to interfaces and the like. I've used ThinPads and they are fairly reliable (number 3 or 4 right now?) but I've never been fond of the nipple-pointer thingy. Over the last couple of years I've noticed that OS X has incorporated pretty much all the old UNIX style interface features I missed, but the big Linux distros are still lacking in reciprocation. Ubuntu still does not ship with an expose clone by default or with two-finger trackpad clicking and scrolling. From what I've seen this has facilitated a large exodus of laptop users away from Linux and to OS X for their primary OS. Where I worked last they went from about 5% to about 70% in the last 4 years, mostly converting Linux people (and a few BSD users). It worries me because a lot of those people are now developing applications and the like to solve problems on OS X and there are even fewer people doing so for Linux on the desktop.
I think what you're talking about is centralized package management. I agree Apple should add it into OS X, as they are doing with the iPhone. There is even some indication they might be planning to do so in the future.
I'm not sure, however, that this is a one sided argument. Package managers are great and useful, in some cases, but all the current ones fail miserably for other workflows, sometimes in ways Apple has already solved. Package managers on Linux suck for commercial software developers and as a result are pretty much ignored by commercial developers. They also suck for installing software on remote drives for access by multiple systems, installing on removable media, easily moving installed applications to other systems, and installing from a Web page.
Right now I'd say Apple has about 50% of the solution we all want, while Ubuntu has the other 50% and neither has gone and integrated the half the other vendor got right. Apple has their half right because they have one, centralized authority willing to make hard decisions and break compatibility with others when needed to make a real advancement. Ubuntu has the other half right because they have diverse contributors and a somewhat democratic, mob like way of making decisions that work for most people. That said, want to bet that Ubuntu gets drag and drop installs and all the other benefits they could get from GNUStep before Apple adds a centralized package manager and repository to OS X?
You limit to significant open source programs that have to originate on Mac OS X.
That's right, let's compare vs. Linux (1991) vs. OS X (2001).
And, since you said, 'significant', this makes it a bit harder, as to be significant, something generally has to be around for awhile, reducing OS X's ability to produce something.
And guys like you crack me up, as, a bunch of significant open source programs did not originate on Linux - the Gnu tools, gcc, perl, Apache, X11, python, samba, java, and I'm sure the list goes on.
I couldn't find out where mysql started. But that's three letters out of LAMP that didn't originate on Linux. Linux could not have originated ON Linux by definition, and I'd have a hard time counting it anyway, since it owes heavily to Unix in design and implementation. (Note: this is not a knock on Linus, or Linux, just if you're getting picky, w/o Minux or UNIX linux would not exist.)
Apple has made contributions back to open source, the easy example here is KHTML which even ended up changing it's name to WebKit.
Apple has originated open source projects as well. Take a look at iCal Server, which is an open source, cross platform Calendar server written in python.
launchd is open source, and I vaugley recall that it inspired some changes in Linux booting.
Others have noted several user supplied open source projects.
It's hardly a one way street Open Source -> Apple.