OSI APSL Response

Rubinstien writes "Eric Raymond has issued a brief response in which he claims that Bruce Perens and others are mistaken in criticizing the Apple Public Source License and OSI's endorsement of it. " I knew this was going to be hairy.

Comments

Apple's attitude toward OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite relevant to the whole ESR/Perens issue, but here's Don Yacktman's take on how to view the whole Apple open source issue. Don is a long-time NEXTSTEP developer, and has a reputation for being informed and sensible, with good contacts within Apple. The above link hasn't yet shown up in DejaNews so I'll just quote it below.

The basic opinion is: Apple's testing the waters here; its further actions will be governed by the response of the open-source community. If people treat Apple as slime and "just as bad as Microsoft", as some people on Slashdot have been doing, then it's assured that Apple's open-source efforts will never go beyond what they are now. But if they see positive results coming out of their experiment -- like good outside enhancements or bugfixes, or market-viable porting opportunities -- then they may very well more fully embrace the idea of open source.

Please, people. Be rational about this. Good can come from it if we avoid extremism and ideological jihads.

From: don@misckit.com (Donald A. Yacktman)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy,gnu.misc.discuss,comp.sys.n ext.advocacy
Subject: Re: The brewing QuickTime/Linux issue
Date: 18 Mar 1999 19:33:01 GMT
Organization: XMission http://www.xmission.com/
Message-ID:

"Michael J. Peck" wrote:
>taiQ wrote:
>> Yep, but it's still welcome news. Wasn't it Randy Rencsok who
>> advocated this route in an essay on his web site? I'd be interested in
>> reading about his opinions on this turn of events.
>
>I think it was Don Yacktman, if you mean the "OpenMach" proposal. And
>come to think of it, if that's what you mean, you're right; that's
>approximately what it is, but I never really thought of it.

Both Randy and I wrote some things on this. Randy suggested opening up higher level stuff than what I proposed, such as the Yellow Box. He and I also consulted with each other somewhat, and both chose to take slightly different approaches to the same thing.

I'll make a few rambling comments now; I do intend to put up an open letter thanking Apple on the Rhaptel site (http://www.of.org/rhaptel/) either today or tomorrow.

I didn't go as far as Randy in my proposal for strategic reasons. I'd certainly like to see Apple eventually open up everything, but I just don't think that is practical to do up front.

I'm looking more at the idea of driving in a wedge. Ask for something smaller, something that is easy to do. They do it. If it is successful, then you can ask for something a little bit bigger. Taking two steps--A to B and then B to C--is much easier than one big step A to C. Another analogy is to realize that to turn a large ship, you do it in smaller increments, taking its inertia into account.

Apple's taken step #1--Open Mach. In fact, they've released two things beyond Open Mach, consider them surprise bonuses: SoundKit and Netinfo. So, kudos for Apple to have the courage to take that first baby step. Now they've passed the baton to us. We have to make it a success.

And this "wedge" process is something that Apple is fully aware of. They are actually trying to turn the ship and this is just the first increment. I have very good reason to believe that if we take the baton and run with it--if Apple sees some real successes with Darwin--then we shouldn't be surprised if Apple opens up more things.

I'm not making a promise here, just an "educated guess". But I do think that Apple is serious about Open Source and is looking *very* closely at how Darwin, ahem, "evolves" and that such evolution will shape the future directions Apple takes. I've got several good (NDA) reasons for believing this to be the case.

>I think the issue here is that the lower levels were already pretty well
>known. In any case, if one were to port the lower levels, one would have
>Mach + BSD. It's not exactly the sort of thing one shouts "Hallelujah"
>about, seeing as how the hue and cry these days, in the Open Source
>community, is for more sophisticated *upper* levels (hence the KDE/GNOME
>happenings, the XFree86 griping, the Berlin project, and the hardware
>OpenGL push). It could be that someone will port Mach + BSD to other
>platforms, but once you have the port, what are you going to do with it?

I can see a few things happening. One obvious scenario is that Apple can *always* "port" their upper layers to any Darwin implementation that seems to be popular with the community. The beauty of letting the open source community take the wheel is that the marketing people can just watch how things unfold to determine which products are worth producing.

There are other scenarios, but I won't elaborate them here or now. As I understand it, Darwin is the _beginning_, not the _end_, so assuming that the community does kick in, there could be a lot more to come.

By the way, most of the data I've collected reinforces the point that Apple is fully behind this "newfound" open source direction. For example, in reference to Perens' arguments, if the APL needs to be modified slightly to make it work better, I get the impression that Apple is willing to make some tweaks. They've even said that, in effect, they are new to this whole thing and expect it to adapt to the community as needed. They're admitting that they are the students, and they're willing to learn. Apple _wants_ this to succeed, so they'll be flexible. Of course, there will also _always_ be people who are upset about some niggly detail--you can't please everybody--but I think Apple will be able to provide decent value to the majority of people.

One thing that I find interesting that nobody else has mentioned. By open sourcing this stuff, they now have over 100 people working exclusively on code that is open source. Are there any other commercial entities which have thay many developers paid to work solely on open source? It is fascinating to think about how different the Apple of today is from the Apple of even just two years ago; like any large body there is a lot of inertia, but there are also some striking changes. I hope the community is willing to allow Apple to change and willing to give them a chance.

While Apple is certainly going through a learning process, you have to give them credit for having the guts to actually start the process. They certaionly didn't _have_ to do Darwin. Now I dearly hope that the community follows through...if we all work with Apple and ease them through the learning process, we will probably succeed in not only changing Apple, but also in transforming the entire industry. That's a cool thought...

--
Later,
Don Yacktman
don@misckit.com

On Slashdot Flaming

[Bruce Perens]

Geez, guys. I wrote a very polite and non-confrontational letter asking Apple for a few small changes and clarifications. The folks at Apple did not find that unreasonable.

I really wish you'd all stuck with the tone I established. Fortunately, the people who count in this matter seem to understand how to ignore the flames.

Thanks

Bruce

Great!

[Bruce Perens]

One license with a special notification clause isn't that much of a problem. 100 licenses are. Right now, the volunteer hacking on free software knows a few rules of thumb like "distribute the source code" that keep them in compliance with all of our licenses. If they have to get a read from their lawyer on 100 different licenses, each with their special things to do: send a postcard, post to a web site, etc., it's going to become very difficult for that volunteer hacker.

So, I guess you could say I'm fighting creeping complex-ification of licenses.

Thanks

Bruce

I spoke with people at Apple today

[Bruce Perens]

I spoke with Apple's director of operating systems development, and with the specific person responsible for Open Source development at Apple.

They acknowledge that they have not defined Affected Original Code well, and they should do so. That would help with the termination issue. We also discussed the notification issue, and they seemed receptive about that.

One point I try to make with every company is that these licenses are executed by hackers, not lawyers, not even people who have easy access to lawyers. Those hackers have to be able to read the license, and it should be unambiguous to them. The folks at Apple accept that point.

So, at least Apple isn't telling me that I'm blowing smoke. It wouldn't hurt Eric to help ask for these simple changes.

Thanks

Bruce