Apple Losing Touch With the OS Community? 410
InfoWorldMike writes to tell us that InfoWorld's Tom Yager recently had the chance to sit down and chat with Apple about their closing the OS X Kernel. From the article: "The Mac platform is an overflowing basket of raw materials for innovators and creators of all stripes. It's what Steve Jobs would fantasize about if he still worked out of his garage, and you can bet that he'd be livid to find that the vendor locked some portion of his chosen platform behind a gate without a word of notice or explanation."
Personally (Score:3, Insightful)
I will stick with OSS thanks.
So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
OS-X is a closed OS (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps I Was Off-Planet And Missed It... (Score:4, Insightful)
At one point it was cool to have a PowerBook to do unix dev on, but the quality of Mac hardware has plummeted now that they have been forced to turn to Intel for chips and I don't see many people rushing to trade in their existing non-Mac hardware.
With how fast Ubuntu with the new accelerated desktop is coming up to speed, I don't think I even care about OS X anymore outside of the more ascetically pleasing UI elements.
If I may add... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's also about money. Yager states that he believes Apple will open the OS back up again (eventually), and I'd have to agree. A running theme in economics is that investment (in technology) leads to increased capital. I believe the main reason that the Linux community enjoys so much capital right now is because of the years of investment. That investment was at the cost of human labor and hard work by the OSS community!
When Apple realizes that free (as in beer) investment into their business (by the OSS community) actually has a bottom dollar impact on capital, the lock on the kernel will fly open pretty quickly.
OS X (Score:2, Insightful)
Fork? (Score:2, Insightful)
No quotes (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:OS X (Score:1, Insightful)
Rule #1 For Understanding Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple is a hardware company.
Apple happens to have an incredibly great OS and great consumer and pro apps, but when it comes to what butters Apple's bread it's all about the hardware. Apple is not, nor will it ever likely be, a software company.
Does opening the source for OS X sell more Apple hardware? Obviously not, since it allows people to use OS X on non-Apple machines. That's not in Apple's interest, and that's why they're making that more difficult to do. Apple is first and foremost a business, and no smart business would cannibalize itself to pick up a market that they don't need.
People who are dogmatic about OSS have plenty of choices in the market. Apple just isn't one of them. Somehow, I doubt Steve Jobs really loses sleep over such a small part of the market.
Consistent with the BSD license too (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally, I don't quite get it, but this move of Apples clearly should NOT offend BSD license advocates since that is exactly what they stand for.
I think this is a perfect example of some of the tensions within the open source community too, and a key differtiator between the positions of the FSF (Stallman's group who advocates GPL-like philosophies) and the OSI (who has people like ESR who often advocate BSD over GPL tend to like it when companies like Apple do this).
To summarize, I'd say that Free Software advocates will criticize Apple's move, but Open Software Initiative advocates will hold it up as a prime example of business and open source playing nicel togehter.
Why? (Score:1, Insightful)
Excuse me, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
BSDs asked for this (Score:5, Insightful)
In my opinion, this is why the BSD license is bad. However in many other people's opinion this is why the BSD license is good - because it gives you the freedom to fork and close source it.
Whether it's better to have the 'freedom for the code' (GPL, LGPL somewhat, etc) or the 'freedom for the person' (BSD) is of course a personal opinion.
Re:Part Deux (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, Tom Yager, you claim Apple promised to make future kernels' source open? Care to point us to any supporting evidence for your spurious claim?
Re:Perhaps I Was Off-Planet And Missed It... (Score:2, Insightful)
When they shipped the Apple ][+ with a commented assembly-language listing of its firmware.
Not so much since then.
Jobs *UNDERSTANDS* (was:Jobs upset?) (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
The most common reasons for trying Linux are going to be:
(1) It's something different.
(2) It's free (as in beer).
(3) It's not Microsoft.
(4) It's generally very stable & secure.
(5) There's a lot of stuff to customize (not talking about programming).
Yes OSS is nice (I actually advocate it whenever I can at work as we have onsite programmers so we can customize OSS apps however we want), but if you think that most Linux users care about it being OSS, you'd be mistaken. If you think they switched over to Linux just b/c it was OSS, you're crazy. And no, a quick response typed back stating "But I did switch b/c it was OSS." does not negate this point.
Re:Part Deux (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Rule #1 For Understanding Apple (Score:2, Insightful)
I disagree. I think Apple is a computer company. Apple is interested in selling you the complete package, software and hardware. Having seen the company from the inside, I don't believe that the infrastructure and effort that's behind their applications is merely some kind of slick adjunct or value-add to sell hardware. The strategy is synergy.
Apple is about selling (and having as much control as possible over) the whole enchilada.
Re:Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
One question: Are you going to PAY (as in money) for Apple's O.S. or are you just going to copy it from a friend?
The bottom line, it's about profit. Apple has no incentive to open up their O.S. for free. If Apple can't make a profit off it, what's the point? Nothing stops you from purchasing a new Mac. That's Apple's bread and butter, computer sales. You want to switch, buy a Mac. You could probably buy a new Mac cheaper than switching to Windows Vista.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not hard to switch. Apple is a hardware company first and foremost. Buy a MacBook or a Mac Mini and get the best of both worlds.
If you want to stay with your Dell or Gateway box, load SuSe or Ubuntu. Much of the advantages to OS X is the tight integration between hardware and software. You just won't get the same benefit by loading it on to some crappy WallMart box. Contrary to some people's beliefs, you don't have a right to load OS X on any computer you like. It is a proprietary piece of software and buying Apple's hardware is part of the deal. If you don't like it, use OSS on your beige-box.
BTW, this was written on a Dell running SuSe 10.1 -- sitting next to my MacBook Pro dual-booting WinXP and Tiger.
BSD license encourages opportunism (Score:3, Insightful)
Proprietary OSX should be expected now that Apple has gotten all it can out of the BSD code base. Let it be a lesson to the Free Software Community about the dangers of BSD style licenses. It encourages opportunism. Theo's rant earlier today is a further example.
Re:Consistent with the BSD license too (Score:3, Insightful)
Not exactly. BSD license advocates just don't stand against it. They stand against the additional restrictions of the GPL license.
You're right that it should not offend. It shouldn't offend anyone and it should have been expected.
The real mistake is thinking that Apple is a friend of open source to begin with. They sometimes contribute voluntarily, sometimes through license requirements, but always because it benefits their business. Nothing wrong with that. Apple's in business to make money, not friends.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow. This post seems so on-topic, yet strangley makes no specific statement about Apple's actions. Almost as if Mr kronnek had this in a clipboard buffer and pastes it into every "Apple did something bad" story.
Look, I've been a window user for years... I just don't understand AppleThe second, hence the first. Many people do not understand Apple, particularly her fans.
They have vision, ideas and a damn good OS. Why do they keep shooting themselves in the foot? Mac users must be frusterated because of the one step forward and then five steps back Apple keeps taking.s/Apple/Microsoft .. Or even s/Apple/Linux sometimes.
Why not keep it open, what are they afraid of, people actually using their desktop?Yes, the WAVES OF USERS just waiting for Apple to open their source code so they can use their OS would surely end any financial or marketing problem Apple has never had.
I just wish Apple would realize that there is a secondary OS niche that needs to be filled and if they just jump into it they might come up as winners...They're right there, in the secondary OS niche you speak of. They make a bit of money with it, its users are very happy and loyal. No one switches back.
When there's an opportunity to be taken they back off. They avoid conflict.... WHY?!?!?This opportunity you speak of is a chimera.
Damn you Apple! I want to use your OS! STOP MAKING IT HARD TO SWITCH!!!!!When you have to upgrade your laptop next year, buy a MacBook. They'll have all there technical issues worked out by then and should be pretty slick, as well as competitive with any laptop you might want to buy from Dell or Sony (excluding those bizzare coupon deals). Oh and it'll run the Windows you seem to be invested in, despite your exaspiration with the closed-source OS X.
Re:Get things straight... (Score:3, Insightful)
What? 5 seconds of research would have kept you from looking ignorant. You can download all the needed SDK's from MS without cost. You can even get the free (as in cost, not Freedom) versions of Visual Studio 2005 along with the free (cost) version of Sql Express.
The Visual Studio Express [microsoft.com] editions allow you to do development with C#, J#, C++ and unfortunately VB.Net.
I am not an MS fanboy, however if you are going to take a jab at MS, at least do it for a valid reason.Re:BSDs asked for this (Score:3, Insightful)
Who was his source (at Apple)? (Score:3, Insightful)
These seem like questions marketing would ask. People that are actually in charge of OS X's development wouldn't need to ask these questions because they would understand the reasons why people would want the kernel's source code.
At any rate, we still don't know why Apple hasn't released the source yet (or if they will at some point). There are some hints that there might be Intellectual Property issues involved. This post [apple.com] on one of Apple's Darwin mailing lists indicates that there are IP issues that precluded the release of one of their Intel ethernet drivers. If the Intel Kernel contains licensed code from Intel (for TPM or EFI or something else) or licensed code for Rosetta then they might have problems releasing the code.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm arguably a programmer. (I say that because if you're not using some sort of compiler there are a lot of people around here who won't even call you a programmer.) I do not hack anything but scripts (and the occasional C CGI). I don't look at or mod any source code for major applications and idea didn't even strike me until after I began using Linux on the desktop and I considered all the little features I wanted to see in X app.
Eventually though, I became a Mac user because I had tasted the fruit of Unix and the command line, loved many of the tools there but didn't have a lot of the commercial apps I liked. (Games obviously aren't a factor.) And motivations were #1 and #3. Apple fits the bill. This is why a lot of geeks are going over to Apple.
When you're 16ish - 20ish (and perhaps a little older) it's cool to upgrade your computer every single paycheck, tweak this and that and spend hours fiddling with your computer. My computer used to triple boot: Win2k, Slackware Linux and BeOS 4.5. It was all fun. But when I actually started making money doing web dev and server related stuff, that kind of lost its luster. I wanted a computer that "just worked."
Macs fit the bill. I will say this though, if you use a little but of forethought when picking out hardware, Ubuntu installs and "just works" easier than WinXP or Win2k. I still keep an OSS desktop around and run FreeBSD on my servers, but I don't want to fiddle with my work machine and generally prefer Mac GUI apps to anything I had in Linux. (Safari, TextMate, Pages, iTunes, Photoshop, etc.) My computers are my tools and I go with preference.
OSS is not why most people/geeks play with Linux. The fact that they're geeks and routinely do technological crap like install NetBSD on their DreamCast is why. We like to play with stuff just because.
Re:Rule #1 For Understanding Apple (Score:2, Insightful)
This is a simpler issue than Tom admits. (Score:5, Insightful)
Darwin is still open source, except for the x86 kernel (XNU).
This is meant to slow down / stop wholesale use of OSX on generic x86 hardware.
Everything else, including the PPC source for XNU is right there, open and available to developers. I browsed it mere minutes ago.
Apple still hasn't said that this is the final disposition of the x86 kernel, but it's what they have for now.
The Part Tom's Making Complicated
Tom's invoking everything short of motherhood and apple pie (sorry) over this.
He imagines and carries the standard for legions of people who want to compile custom x86 Darwin kernels.
(Isn't this the very definition of astroturfing - "a few people discreetly posing as mass numbers of activists advocating a specific cause"?)
He seems to claim customizing the kernel is Very Important, Real Soon, for those who simply want to, and for those who want to optimize some custom servers and thin clients / workstations that he imagines Apple will be releasing in the future.
Maybe they will. If so, they'll figure it out.
But so far, no pitchforks or torches have been spotted on Mariani Ave.
Take his argument to the logical extreme and Apple lets everyone run OSX on anything they want.
That would be Bad for the future of Apple.
He does seem to say there's some magical way for Apple to have it both ways, but doesn't say how.
Re:Personally (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Rant on arm-chair-biz-o-nomics (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe because as a former Apple supporter (a short-lived state of being as it turned out) I am frustrated to see them cavalierly drop the principles that got me to switch. It might be a different matter if they had already captured a 50 percent market share, or for that matter even a 20 percent market share, but their number are right where they always have been. I see all their recent moves as desperation, and quite possibly the results is that they will cease to matter at all. I just got done answering a request for advice on a non-technical forum and I couldn't honestly advise them to buy an Apple "laptop" even though my last two laptops were Apple machines. Their switch to Intel, coupled with more and more DRM orientation, legal action against well meaning users, and the dissing of the Open Source roots of their OS makes me wonder if the company hasn't suffered a stroke or something. The personality of the company has changed, and with no good reasons (roadmaps be damned), their quality control sucks and they spend more time on propagandizing than they do on actually supporting their users. I have little use for them any more. Unlike the author of the original article, I don't expect them to get better any time soon. Recent departures at the top ought to give some people a clue that something is wrong in Cupertino.
If the iPod market fails the company is history. That should give the fans nightmares.
MOD PARENT UP (Score:3, Insightful)
A fair number of people choose to work for Apple rather than some other Silly Valley company because they're a "cool company" who did things like open source the guts of their OS. What should someone in their position think after this kind of stunt?
More alarming to me than the kernel being closed is that they didn't release any of the core source until people started complaining. Even the parts of the OS that are most useful for tinkering were an afterthought for Apple.
Re:Why are they experimenting with Intel then? (Score:3, Insightful)
PowerPC wasn't cutting the mustard, otherwise Apple would still be using them. We were still stuck with bloody G4s in the laptops. Thanks to heat, they were one generation behind. With x86 Apple doesn't have to focus on hardware development and they don't have to play magic numbers to try and convince people a crappy G4 is somehow more powerful than what Intel is offering. With Intel, there is no concern as to whether they'll be around tomorrow and with the hard competition from AMD, it's a no brainer that they have to improve. On top of that, if Intel starts to go sour, there's nothing stopping them from going with AMD since there are multiple contenders in the x86 world.
Moving to Intel has allowed dual booting Windows and much improved VMs to work with Windows since the hardware no longer has to be emulated. This gets rid of a major road block for a lot of people and why I was able to sell a major client of mine on the idea of using a Mac instead of a new PC.
A Mac can run pretty much everything under the sun now, plus OS X is awesome. Seriously, PowerPC was a dead zone, just like Motorola before it. Apple no longer has to concern itself with a company that's too busy working on "other things" to update their processor line. Intel gives Macs more power, less power consumption, more versatility and more value than IBM ever could.
Re:Rant on arm-chair-biz-o-nomics (Score:5, Insightful)
Rome circa 100AD
Roman Slave: This sucks
Roman Centurian: *whips slave* Quit your bitchin! If it is that bad, why don't you go start your own empire.
Roman Centurian: Ow! Well... I would but you see... You've got this thing called a Roman Legion and I've got these chains on me... Oh and I did revolt you'd kill my family and then crucify me and feed me to the lions.
Roman Centurian: Good point! Get back to work anyways! *whips slave again*
Roman Slave: Ow!
Corporate Environment 2006AD
Cubicle slave: This sucks!
Supervisor: *delegates another deadline* Quit your bitching! If it is that bad, why don't you go start your own company.
Cubicle slave: Well... I would but you see... You've got this thing called millions of dollars of investment into entry barriers of the market and I've got this NDA and contract that owns all my ideas... Oh and I did revolt you'd sue family and then crucify my VC capital and then feed me to the Patent Lawyers.
Supervisor: Good point! Get back to work! *assigns another deadline*
Target market? (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple and Jobs don't care that they're losing touch with 'the OS community'. I doubt they ever cared much in the first place. Just enough to get Slashdot to make an Apple section.
Re:Part Deux (Score:5, Insightful)
Look closer at the passage you quoted. Here it is again:
"Has anybody ever written to you about this? How many people actually recompile their OS X kernels?" I do, for one. I rattled off some of those groups that value open source in its fullest sense. I included academia, high-performance and high-throughput computing experts, and shops that want to roll in system-level enhancements before Apple gets around to packaging them. He never says that these groups contacted him, which I sincerely doubt they did. Instead, he says that these groups value open source in its fullest sense. This may be true, but whether they are complaining about this is another matter entirely.
Taft
Re:Why people love Apple so much ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, am I the only one to perceive Apple as just a facade?
Probably not, there are lots of people without a clue.
I feel it's just a brand name for a target market, absolutely nothing more.
And all of the innovative technology they have created and or popularized was an illusion of some sort?
I still remember the KHTML fiasco (and the lengthy posts about it in Slashdot) when the white knight turned black.
Why don't you bother to go read some informed post about said, issue, you know like what the KHTML people had to say about it? Apple followed their license, used the code, made it better and gave it back. They diverged in purpose quite a bit from what Konquerer wanted, so many of the changes were hard to pull back in or were not wanted. Further, some of the developers did not like the way the code was posted (as a lump) and asked for more granularity and documentation, which the Safari team worked hard to give them. If you had any sort of a clue, you would not pick this example to complain about Apple's behavior.
In every action, every decision I see Jobs as a Gates-wanna-be. It's the same kind of company. I'm not trolling, I'm just trying to understand why Apple is loved so much. Can anyone give reasons, real reasons, for this...
I can give a lot of reasons. They listen to their customers and make products many of us geeks want and make a profit at the same time. They save a lot of us from having to use the abysmal Windows or functionality lacking Linux. They make our lives easier. The most devout Apple fanatic is usually someone who bought their first Apple machine a month ago and is still amazed by how much easier everything is. They can't understand why everyone isn't using it and just want to let everyone know. I've seen it many times.
The enthusiasm of a newbie aside, Apple consistently delivers innovations. I would be very sad to use a primary workstation without system services after Apple supplied them to me. I use them every day and when I use a Linux or Windows machine I feel like I took a step back to a more primitive era. They supply a top notch GUI with real innovations, like expose. They supply a fully functional command line environment that integrates with the graphical UI. They integrate application with one another and they run mainstream software. I can actually invoke photoshop from a usable command line. I can use one program's functionality in another. For example, I can highlight a URL in Safari and use a third party program's ability to automatically generate a bibliography citation from that HTML page and insert it into a book I'm laying out in InDesign. No other OS lets me do that without a bunch of copying and pasting. I have one dictionary. When I teach it that "SNMP" is not misspelled, all my applications know from then on. I could continue, but there is no real point.
If you use OS X for a few months as your primary workstation you will understand why so few people switch back. Naturally, a lot of people like Apple, because Apple gives them this. Now they don't do everything better than others. They are behind MS and Linux in certain areas. They do a lot of things I'm not to fond of and they do a lot of things to try to get a little more money out of people. What they don't do except in one or two very necessary areas is lock customers in and they do a good job of interoperating using standards. For this, a lot of us are appreciative.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Part Deux (Score:5, Insightful)
The one thing that Yager does fail to address is the reason WHY Apple closed the kernel. I think everyone knows that answer, but for the sake of discussion I'll inject the prominent theory. The kernel was closed so Apple could protect the code used to lock the Mac OS to Apple Intel-based hardware. Until Apple can find, or invent, a better way to secure that Mac OS X will not get into the wild, i.e., installed on non-Apple hardware, or just gives up trying and declares that they will not support it running anywhere else, the kernel source will remain closed. I do believe that Apple will re-open the entire Mac OS X source in the future, but they are presently protecting their fragile sliver of market share in the mean time. Is it an affront to the OSS community? Yeah, but it's also business. They have a product to sell and shareholders to protect. Was it uncool? Yeah. Will the recent actions be nullified and a fully open Mc OS X re-released? I believe so.
Re:article down (Score:3, Insightful)
As you say, the real HPC guys on the nitty-gritty end (people optimizing TCP stacks for high-performance network interfaces, for instance), will sign the NDAs, then those of us in the field will decide whether or not we can use their solution. Whether or not we can get the kernel source code is not going to matter to 98% of us. We ran Irix (closed), UNICOS (closed), AIX (closed), VMS (closed), and Linux (open), and will run OSX whether it's open or closed, as long as we get reliable simulations done in an acceptable amount of time on equipment we can stand to work with.
Re:Part Deux (Score:3, Insightful)
He didn't give examples of people contacting him, he gave random examples (no specific names) of people he thought were recompiling the OS X kernel.
Re:Personally (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Jobs upset? (Score:4, Insightful)
When Jobs returned, it was a conscious decision to position the line as a premium product. Even so, the pricing has almost always been near-equivalent, considering what you're buying.
The reason PCs got cheap had nothing to do with Gates. It was a side effect of the brutal race-to-the-bottom that happened in the late-'80s clone market.
m-
Re:Personally (Score:2, Insightful)
oooh, let me try it!
. . . iPod.
Re:So what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, before I get into this let me say that the, "If you make serious judgments about other people based on their platform, you're an idiot," was using "you" in general and it wasn't meant to be personal. I screwed up in the way I phrased that and I apologize. The whole last paragraph was more of a general rant than anything else. That being said...
Oh sure, those things say a lot. For instance, if someone has a Harley, it says, "That guy has a Harley." If someone has a tattoo I know, "Woah, that person has a tattoo." If someone is dirty, it tells me, "This person is currently dirty." I don't know why one guy owns a Harley. Could be because he's a Hell's Angel or because he's having a mid-life crisis. If someone is dirty, it could be that they're a bum or that they simply have poor hygiene. Motivations are what make actions and circumstances have meaning. A person's choice in music tells me nothing unless I know whether they like it because it's "cool and popular" or because they love the beat or because the lyrics touch them. Jumping to conclusions about circumstances with no understanding of their foundation is " a big componenent of how we judge people." It doesn't make it a good thing.
So, when I know that someone uses Linux, I know one thing: They use Linux. I don't even know that they prefer it anymore than I known whether the average Windows user "prefers" Windows. Could simply be that they're honest and its all they could afford or that their job requires it. They could be a tinkering geek with no consideration for the ideals or a pragmatist who likes it better. They could be my mother, who ran a Linux box I set up for her for a couple years. So, using Linux doesn't even tell me that the person is computer savvy.
I'm not trying to sell you on a Mac or imply that it's better for you. I'm glad you like Linux. I was simply explaining why Macs currently fit the bill better for me. (And I'm sure that over time I'll switch again. I'm in no way loyal to any platform.)
Photoshop "works fine" under Wine is what I usually hear from people who pirate Photoshop when they're at a level that requires nothing more than The Gimp in the first place. When you have oodles of custom filters and do advanced printing, things get a lot stickier. This doesn't include InDesign or Illustrator either. Wine is an extremely cool program and I actually paid for a copy of CrossOver Office so my dad could continue to use MS Office while running Linux and so that I could test pages in IE 6 without dual booting or a second computer. (Although, Javascript didn't work for me but it was rarely a problem.)
The Finder is pretty weak as far as file managers go, but Linux is the OS that really taught me not to care. When I just wanna open up my Documents folder and browse for something, it's fine. I rather like column view. However, if I want to do complicated file management, I use the terminal just as I did and do in pretty much anything with Bash. I used to care about file managers, when before programs began becoming smarter about their own file associations. I used to open up my file manager to find my mp3s and make a playlist or drop videos into a media player or whatever. Most programs have libraries (media programs) or projects (text editors and IDEs) or simply have their own internal structure (mail apps).
Path Finder is an awesome file manager and I do love it. However, I've downloaded the trial twice and while you can customize nicely and it has some very cool features (the drop s