Cringley: Apple using Open Source to get Microsoft

alfredo writes " In the latest I Cringley, Robert Cringley demonstrates how Apple is using open source to undermine Microsoft. " Cringley, as always, makes an interested and impassioned argument, essentially arguing that Apple is doing the politically correct thing of Open Source-ing portions of their code, but doing it to become de facto standards (a la Quicktime), or else to push Microsoft down. Worth a read.

Comments

A generally strong strategy--take it further

[ajdavis]

I posted to /. a while ago that Apple is and will continue to be a hardware company--they make great hardware, and the OS has been nothing but a liability to them for a long time. Even Quicktime can't be making serious revenue for Apple. OS upgrades may have been a significant source of revenue for Apple, but with the new wave of great hardware from Apple, aren't virtually all copies of MacOS "bought" preinstalled? Apple should give up any attempt at making revenue from software, and use OSS to gain hardware market share, in desktops and servers.

Apple now has a decent OS which will actually be an asset, but it's based on publicly available code and knowledge. I imagine Darwin is a major improvement on the state of the art, but I also imagine that any good team of OS programmers could approach its quality, since BSD and Mach are public (correct me?).

They should just release the whole damn MacOS X. Sure, some people would port it to cheaper Intel hardware, costing Apple revenue, but most people would run MOSX on G3/G4 hardware, and MOSX would kick butt even more if it were open-source. Its OSS development would be particularly fast since a) most OSS developers are already familiar with Mach & BSD, and b) this is so political.

The various forks of MOSX would certainly be less Euro and slick-looking than Jobs would prefer--hackers like to see the guts of a system; Jobs thinks the wave of the future has its guts sealed up tight--but Apple can take the improvements it likes and preinstall it (with source) on the servers and desktops it sells, maintaining the MacOS facade.

IBM (a hardware company with a few impressive forays into software) has begun to realize that it needs to become a hardware & services company, and use software as a tool, not a source of revenue. This realization led them to undercut their own costly, revenue-generating Unices by selling Linux pre-installed as an option on their servers. IBM has done extremely well recently with these strategies, and they've turned themselves around from the most hated monopoly of the early 80s into a hacker-friendly open-systems company. Apple could learn a lesson.