Scaled Composites has been a wholly-owned entity of larger companies in the past: it was Beechcraft around the time Scaled was working on the Starship prototype, and Wyman-Gordon soon thereafter. The prototype output from the shop has been pretty consistent throughout the history of the company, so I highly doubt there'll be much change there. Both NG and Scaled have supposedly said as much in their announcements of the deal.
Northrop Grumman has been heavily involved in the Proteus program for several years now, and was looking at using an unmanned Proteus in production as their response for some DoD RFQ a short while back . And as previously noted, they did have 40% ownership prior to this announcement, and that would buy a fair amount of influence if that's what they were going for.
My guess is that NG wanted Scaled so they could wrap up Proteus whole cloth, and who knows, maybe even resurrect some older programs like ARES or ATTT, that Scaled had trouble getting DoD attention for back in the day. And with the cash infusion, Scaled will get the capital it probably needs to keep the SS2 program moving along and into low volume production, something you don't typicallly have to worry about with one-off prototypes that are their bread and butter.
Your research into the recent article on Apple's open source efforts overlooked many facets to the story that may have changed your mind. I'll briefly explain what I mean by that, and then provide you with links and/or quotes to back up my points.
Apple has contributed many man-hours of their employee's paid work time in support of Open Source efforts. Among the Apple Developers working on Open Source projects was Wilfredo Sanchez, who had (has) commit rights to the CVS trees of both FreeBSD and Apache. This is a privledge and honor amongst Open Source Coders, and only the most trusted (and worthwhile) are granted such rights.
The BSD license is designed to allow anyone, including profit-making companies, to use the code licensed under it as they see fit. Apple is working above and beyond the requirements placed by the BSD license in their development efforts. They are not opening all of their software at this time (their current business model would not easily allow for this option at this time), though the option to do so remains open.
Software players for Quicktime movies have been successfully created in the past (NeXTTIME for the NEXTSTEP OS) without any assistance from Apple. The Sorenson codec is property of the Sorenson company, and is not Apple's to give away. Of course, it too could be reverse-engineered were there an enterprising fellow or two who were interested in doing so.
The FSF boycott of Apple that you mention was lifted in 1995. Somewhat disingenious, especially considering the overhaul that the company has received since the return of Jobs in 1997.
Darwin has been ported to x86. And while it is probably true that Apple itself won't be porting KDE/GNOME apps to the darwin platform, they're certainly not trying to stop others from doing so. The XonX project is well on its way to achieving this goal (http://sourceforge.net/projects/xonx/), and Apple's own "Wishlist" for Darwin states that the goal of a rootless XFree86 port is "highly desirable". (http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/darwin/t odo.html)
I hope that you will print a retraction of some of your claims in light of this evidence. Thanks for listening/reading.
Sean Willis
Windows sysadmin and NeXT/Apple fan
-----
http://www.advogato.org/person/wsanchez/
http://www.apache.org/contributors/index.html
-----
From www.opensource.apple.com/projects:
Darwin (including the OO driver development framework, IO Kit)
Darwin Streaming Server (an alternative to the costly RealServer product, that will run on Mac, Windows, and Linux)
Open Play and NetSprocket
HeaderDoc
------
From www.perens.com/Bio.html:
I publicly criticized Apple's first not-quite-Open-Source license. They addressed every one of my criticisms in the next version of their license, which is applied to part of MacOS X and other products.
-----
From a comp.sys.next.advocacy post by Mike Paquette, current Apple employee and developer of NeXTTIME, a Quicktime clone for the NeXT computer:
Mike Paquette states:
"Well, typing as someone who was a member of a 4 man team that did build a QuickTime clone, complete with plug-in architecture, editing, and a tiny bit of video capture and recording, running on a Unix derivative, I'd like to chime in.
...
"The information is all out there. You don't need squat from Apple. If you really want a QuickTime clone either copylefted or open sourced, knock off the whining, get off your butt, and do it. Show us what a totally kewl coder you are."
Slashdot Mirror
Northrop Grumman has been heavily involved in the Proteus program for several years now, and was looking at using an unmanned Proteus in production as their response for some DoD RFQ a short while back . And as previously noted, they did have 40% ownership prior to this announcement, and that would buy a fair amount of influence if that's what they were going for.
My guess is that NG wanted Scaled so they could wrap up Proteus whole cloth, and who knows, maybe even resurrect some older programs like ARES or ATTT, that Scaled had trouble getting DoD attention for back in the day. And with the cash infusion, Scaled will get the capital it probably needs to keep the SS2 program moving along and into low volume production, something you don't typicallly have to worry about with one-off prototypes that are their bread and butter.
Do you happen to like wearing pants? Idly curious, that's all.
Here's what I had to say:
t odo.html)
o ff &th=8bd7f1594db13278,72&ic=1
Evan,
Your research into the recent article on Apple's open source efforts overlooked many facets to the story that may have changed your mind. I'll briefly explain what I mean by that, and then provide you with links and/or quotes to back up my points.
Apple has contributed many man-hours of their employee's paid work time in support of Open Source efforts. Among the Apple Developers working on Open Source projects was Wilfredo Sanchez, who had (has) commit rights to the CVS trees of both FreeBSD and Apache. This is a privledge and honor amongst Open Source Coders, and only the most trusted (and worthwhile) are granted such rights.
The BSD license is designed to allow anyone, including profit-making companies, to use the code licensed under it as they see fit. Apple is working above and beyond the requirements placed by the BSD license in their development efforts. They are not opening all of their software at this time (their current business model would not easily allow for this option at this time), though the option to do so remains open.
Software players for Quicktime movies have been successfully created in the past (NeXTTIME for the NEXTSTEP OS) without any assistance from Apple. The Sorenson codec is property of the Sorenson company, and is not Apple's to give away. Of course, it too could be reverse-engineered were there an enterprising fellow or two who were interested in doing so.
The FSF boycott of Apple that you mention was lifted in 1995. Somewhat disingenious, especially considering the overhaul that the company has received since the return of Jobs in 1997.
Darwin has been ported to x86. And while it is probably true that Apple itself won't be porting KDE/GNOME apps to the darwin platform, they're certainly not trying to stop others from doing so. The XonX project is well on its way to achieving this goal (http://sourceforge.net/projects/xonx/), and Apple's own "Wishlist" for Darwin states that the goal of a rootless XFree86 port is "highly desirable". (http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/darwin/
I hope that you will print a retraction of some of your claims in light of this evidence. Thanks for listening/reading.
Sean Willis
Windows sysadmin and NeXT/Apple fan
-----
http://www.advogato.org/person/wsanchez/
http://www.apache.org/contributors/index.html
-----
From www.opensource.apple.com/projects:
Darwin (including the OO driver development framework, IO Kit)
Darwin Streaming Server (an alternative to the costly RealServer product, that will run on Mac, Windows, and Linux)
Open Play and NetSprocket
HeaderDoc
------
From www.perens.com/Bio.html:
I publicly criticized Apple's first not-quite-Open-Source license. They addressed every one of my criticisms in the next version of their license, which is applied to part of MacOS X and other products.
-----
From a comp.sys.next.advocacy post by Mike Paquette, current Apple employee and developer of NeXTTIME, a Quicktime clone for the NeXT computer:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&safe=
Mike Paquette states:
"Well, typing as someone who was a member of a 4 man team that did build a QuickTime clone, complete with plug-in architecture, editing, and a tiny bit of video capture and recording, running on a Unix derivative, I'd like to chime in.
...
"The information is all out there. You don't need squat from Apple. If you really want a QuickTime clone either copylefted or open sourced, knock off the whining, get off your butt, and do it. Show us what a totally kewl coder you are."