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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.
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.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Share the code that will hurt your worst opponent most! Pull the rug under him! :D
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.
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.
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.
Give me a damn google calendar sync. The free one (gcaldaemon) broke under Leopard and hasn't been updated. There are a few but the one I looked at sent the data to their servers and then used that to sync.
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.
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.
If google are going to start using Macs throughout their company I might start using Live.com
Only joking!
.sigs are for losers
Don't forget all the productivity saved on not playing games on the Mac.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Excel and Photoshop come to mind first... but there are numerous others as well....
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
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.
>with upwards of 6,000 of its 20,000 current
>employees opting to use the Mac over Windows.
Actually, Google developers have *Linux* boxes by default, so many of these people are opting for Mac over *Linux*.
Currently, there are way more development tools available for the mac than Linux. Things like textmate, araxis merge, DTrace, etc. Thus a lot of people, inside google and out, use mac workstations to develop software that gets deployed to linux servers.
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.
Most people work to solve a problem, either their own, personal itch, or what their employer needs done. Those that care about the benefits of GNUStep have mostly moved to the Mac for the desktop. The rest don't know or care about those benefits. Many angrily defend Linux claiming it is better the way it is now than being more "like OS X" which they believe is obviously inferior (although many have no real experience to make this determination). Others understand the benefits of GNUStep for the desktop, but already use OS X for the desktop and really want Linux to be the perfect Server OS for them, and actively oppose any compromise that might add "bloat" without benefitting Linux as a Server. Finally, there are those that would like Linux to be an ideal desktop OS and understand how GNUStep can help, but pragmatically believe compatibility with other Linux distros is more important than the benefits of GNUStep and at the same time believe it is too hard to get all the major distros to buy in to a better way all at once.
I'd love to see GNUStep match and exceed OS X's implementation through integration with package managers and extending packages for that purpose. Sadly I don't think it will happen. Really Linux needs a hardware OEM to champion it on their hardware and work towards making it an ideal desktop, including feature parity with OS X (and interoperability where possible). Basically what would be needed is an Apple like company that had one executive who could make hard decisions and break compatibility with other Linux distros. They could undercut Apple on price by leveraging all the shared work from other Linux developers. Alas, it is just a pipe dream for now.
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.
A post can be both flamebait and true as mine was.
YOU may prefer to use Linux+Xfce over OS X and thats your right. You aren't alone either. There are whole hundreds of thousands of people who use Linux everyday as a desktop operating system, and as their main operating system too. Not just as a rarely used dual boot option when they get bored of Windows.
The issue here is that Google is a company and a company makes money by catering to LARGE groups of people. This is why they're willing to develop for Windows and Mac OS X and not so much for Linux. Emphasis on the LARGE in large groups of people there.
The problem with some Linux users is that they cannot see that time has a price value too. If you severely undervalue your time at $5 an hour, then you have about 40 hours to tinker with Linux and get it running properly before it would have made more sense to just shell out the money for a copy of Windows. Lets say you go for a Mac instead, with a MacBook at $1000 that gives you 400 hours to get your Linux install working properly. Thats 16 days worth of time. I can assure you that there are folks who have spent 16 MONTHS trying to get Linux to do what a Windows running PC or Mac can do pretty much out of the box.
Of course if you were smart enough to realize any of this you wouldn't be using Linux in the first place, now would you?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Shut the fuck up you worthless cum guzzling sack of fuck. I hope you bleed to death while getting fucked with a spiked dildo.
Asshole.
Also, you're doing it wrong.
>Actually, Google developers have *Linux* boxes by default,
True, on the desktop.
>so many of these people are opting for Mac over *Linux*.
Not true, mostly. Most developers have Linux desktops, since most of us work on server-side applications. (Many of us have more than one, actually. I have an extra one that runs my group's continuous builds and tests.) But engineers who are working on Windows or Mac apps have a desktop box running one of those. Or maybe more than one if they work on multiple platforms. All of us also get a laptop if we want one. We can choose between a Mac or PC laptop. Most of the folks with PCs run XP on them, but some run various flavors of Linux. (I have an XP laptop because that's what I still use at home, mostly due to Photoshop and Lightroom. I dumped the Mach for NT 4.0 back in the days when Macs had no protected memory or hardware multitasking and crashed all the time. Next time I upgrade my home machine I may switch both back to the Mac.)
The reason I said "mostly" is that some people I know run their main monitors off of their Mac laptops and do remote X sessions on their Linux boxes so that they get the best of both worlds: the Mac UI and all the development tools on Linux.
One thing I love about working at Google is that they give us all the tools we need to do our jobs. You get all the computers you need, and primary workstations come with a 30" monitor or two 24" ones (your choice) and a ton of RAM. If you need another software package (say, an IDE) or more RAM, you just file a "ticket" asking for it, and it shows up on your desk a few days later. Most items don't need approval. I just asked for an 8 Gb RAM upgrade for one of my workstations recently (for analyzing insanely large heap dumps) and got it with no questions asked.
-- Laura