Submitted by “We all cheered when Apple began experimenting with community-driven, open source development for its flagship operating system. But if those experiments are now drawing to a close, should anyone really be surprised? In his columns earlier this year, InfoWorld’s resident Mac aficionado Tom Yager noted how Apple seemed to be backpedaling away from open source. Seen through that lens, last week’s news that the OpenDarwin Project would be closing its doors looks like just another sign of the times.”
Why is OpenDarwin’s closure such a surprise? The Darwin kernel is interesting, but it isn’t a huge engineering feet. Mac Unix-junkies don’t have much interest in the project since they can just run Unix programs along with standard Mac apps. (Thanks to Fink.) BSD or Linux users already have their own distributions, why would they switch to another system, especially one that’s nascent and not well supported? OpenDarwin just didn’t have the appeal as opposed to. say, QNX or Plan 9.
Apple shut down their x86 branch for a good reason-to prevent OS X installations on non-Apple hardware. Sure this upsets die-hard free software advocates, but Apple has an obligation to their shareholders first.
Sure this upsets die-hard free software advocates, but Apple has an obligation to their shareholders first.
Upset? Not me. It just reminds me that Apple is an opponent of FLOSS. Luckilly Apple is still small enough to be able to ignore them. If they were the size of MS, the situation would be worse than the Wintel hegemony.
I hope all would be Apple switchers realize that. Apple is only palatable, because they are a blip on the radar. As soon as they command 95% of the desktop market, they will try to control you as they try to control everything Apple style.
Apple will never be 95% of the market.
Steve Jobs said it right in 1997.
“We have to get this notion out of our minds, that for Apple to win, Microsoft have to lose.”
Apple are profitable, regardless of how much marketshare MS has.
An opponent ? Really ? I don’t remember when they opposed to FLOSS, or fought against it. Lack of interest undoubtedly, but opponent ?
It just reminds me that Apple is an opponent of FLOSS.
Here is a reality check for you – pretty much every for-profit company out there is an enemy of FLOSS. Ok, perhaps there are a few that live and die by open source (and that does not include any of the big-name commercial Linux distro makers), but the majority of them are like a hot chick who you see on the arm of an ugly, rich guy – they’re in it for the money, and as soon as the money dries up, the romance is over.
pretty much every for-profit company out there is an enemy of FLOSS. (…) the majority of them are like a hot chick who you see on the arm of an ugly, rich guy – they’re in it for the money, and as soon as the money dries up, the romance is over.
Still, every time that happens, the code that was freed in the process will remain free. If the code is useless, well, nothing is lost. If it’s useful, the world has benefited.
Eventually, OSS might reach the `critical mass’ in more and more places, where it is actually cheaper to pay for a contribution to an existing OSS product compared to buying a commercial offering.
Uh, I’d like to see Novell survive if it makes a mess of Suse, they’ve put all thier eggs into the FOSS basket, it’s really their last chance, as MS have pretty much beat the tar out of netware
“Apple has an obligation to their shareholders first.”
No, this is the tail wagging the dog.
Apple has an obligation first to its customers, and if it satisfies their needs, and in so doing increases the customer base, the shareholders will profit. Focusing on shareholders leads to a very short-term vision.
Excuse me, but Apple is a corporation. As a corporate institution, the bottom line is profit. It doesn’t matter which customers are happy, as long people are buying their products.
What I don’t understand is how the customer who is not happy will buy any more Apple products…so shouldnt the customer be satisfied first?
Which FOSS die hard will buy Apple products in the first place? How will the lack of open source support at Apple affect their sales? The closure of OpenDarwin will not have an effect on the sales of Macs at all.
True, most OSS geeks seemed to buy them for a Desktop *nix style OS rather than for the OpenSource factor. I can’t imagine any FLOSS geek would want OSX, darwin has never been Free as such.
Because these are apple products and in the eyes of the right Apple addict they can do no wrong, will shoddy build quality and overheating discourage you from buying future apple products? “Hell no! i’m a hip Mac user i wont touch one of those pee-cees and my iPod rocks!”
Apple have this die-hard core customer base who worship the ground Jobs walks on and who will always buy Apple because it’s become an unbreakable habbit.
Too bad real life doesn’t work that way. Apple is more beholden to it’s shareholders than it’s customers, most big public companies are, it’s the way of the world, and it’s kinda sad
This combination (subject/header) somehow strikes me:
http://img133.imageshack.us/my.php?image=msnewssx3.png
Without borders? Yeah, right…
I know that OSAlert is not necessarily the “OpenSourceNews” portal, but… are you planning to do some more advertising for MS? If so, i’ll have to enable adblock here again.
Isn’t it the OperatingSystemNews portal? I really dislike the advert myself, encouraging charities to tie themselves up in MS technologies and licensing is evil, encouraging new developers to help them, doubly so, but that’s probably not a valid reason why OSAlert shouldn’t run it the ad.
Got to pay for the bandwidth somehow, good to see you’re willing to support osnews
A big counterexample is WebKit.
Yep, but it’s not like they strived to keep it compatible with the original version and if they hadn’t been required by the license to release sources you can be fairly sure they wouldn’t have done it. KHTML gave them a good base from which to produce a rendering engine, they put a fair bit of work into it but it’s not as though they’d lose out from wider adoption of the engine, it’s actually in their interests to see it spread.
Apple have never had any interest in FOSS, darwin sourcess were openned under a thoroughly unhelpful license as a marketing exercise and possibly an attempt to get free coding help, nothing more. They’ve finally remembered that their best friends all produce proprietary software for the apple platform and are actually threatened by Free Software.
“They’ve finally remembered that their best friends all produce proprietary software…”
I don’t think they FINALLY remembered this, I think they’ve KNOWN this all the time.
They also had bad PR when they made difficult for KHTML developers to integrate Apple changes. Open source community has more weight.
Wow, god forbid they should lose 3 or 4 computer sales over that “fiasco”.
News-flash: 99% of Apple’s customers, and 100% of their target market, couldn’t have cared less.
“Wow, god forbid they should lose 3 or 4 computer sales over that “fiasco”.
News-flash: 99% of Apple’s customers, and 100% of their target market, couldn’t have cared less.”
Hehe, they don’t lose users, but also they don’t get more. Apple is doomed. It always was, and probably always will.
Hehe, they don’t lose users, but also they don’t get more. Apple is doomed. It always was, and probably always will.
Hmm… people have been saying that for years. Unfortuneately, there are still people who fail to see that Apple is doing better than ever and continue to think they’re doomed. And – they are losing some customers, while they’ve also gained a considerable amount. I for one have switched around 5 people – not much, but its still a gain.
Apple is doing better than ever, so they must be doomed like they have been the past 10 years…
Edited 2006-08-07 05:55
Apple is doing better than ever, so they must be doomed like they have been the past 10 years…
Apple is doing better than ever because of iPod+iTunes, not because of its computer sales (which have become increasingly marginalized by its “other” business).
Apple is doing better than ever because of iPod+iTunes, not because of its computer sales (which have become increasingly marginalized by its “other” business).
iPod+iTunes have helped them considerably, but just this last quarter, Apple saw sales of its laptops grow 61% compared to the previous quarter of the last year. Apple saw a year-over-year unit sales increase of 12 percent for Macs and 32 percent for iPod sales. Not bad considering the average for other PCs is generally near 6%.
Granted, they have enjoyed a increase in laptop sales. They are incredibly sexy machines, and I’m thinking my next laptop could be a triple-booting Win/OSX/Linux MacBook…
Well I won’t argue that if they didn’t have to they would not have released their sources, but for the Mac community it has been good that they have done so. I know quite a few people, including myself, who update our source trees everyday, rebuild, and look for bugs/memory leaks/etc and fix them when we can. Sure, we don’t have to, and its not the most exciting hobby, but later on after we’ve done enough (and after we get our bachelors – 1 more year to go!) we can send in a resume to Apple saying look at what all we’ve already done for you – should improve our chances of getting a job there. And, not being completely self centered – we’ve helped out fix a few things that someone down the line now won’t have to.
The LGPL only forces them to release the sources, and for a while, that was, indeed, all they did. They just released big tarballs of the source, with no indication of what changed, and why. This made it very difficult to merge across changes with KHTML, and caused much gnashing of teeth among the KHTML developers.
Then, it appears, Apple changed its mind, and gradually opened things up. They now have a public bug tracker, publicly available CVS (or maybe SVN by now?), and even contributors from outside of Apple have accounts.
I think Apple is just being pragmatic, and judging by results. OpenDarwin wasn’t producing many, so it slowly fell by the wayside. WebKit, on the other hand, was, and so they’re pursuing it further.
it’s because KHTML is LGPL’d and WebKit is a KHTML fork so they *have to* release the sources.
“it’s because KHTML is LGPL’d and WebKit is a KHTML fork so they *have to* release the sources.”
If they had no desire to release the sources, they wouldn’t have chosen an LGPL project in the first place.
“it’s because KHTML is LGPL’d and WebKit is a KHTML fork so they *have to* release the sources.”
If they had no desire to release the sources, they wouldn’t have chosen an LGPL project in the first place.
They didn’t do it because they wanted to. They did it because they had no choice. It was either this (choose between KHTML or Gecko) or write their own HTML rendering engine from scratch. This is not a small feat, even for a company as big as Apple. They went the easy route and took something that was in a state that they could leverage for their own products.
Don’t think even for a second that Apple wanted to share source code with anybody. They did it because they had to comply with the licence. That’s all.
Or purchase one from someone else? You forget there are companies like Opera and Omniweb who make their own browsers, who have their own rendering engine. There was no *need* to choose either Gecko or KHTML. If Apple felt that the LGPL was truly an issue, they would have chosen to go with something else.
Apple used OSS as hype. They’re good with that PR stuff, you know. Now it’s not really helping them so much, and may be a slight drain, so, “g’bye y’all, we’ll talk when we desperately need to revive our computer business again.”
Apple does not embody open source, they use open source. It’s cool, don’t get me wrong, and adds/added significant value to OS X, by way of making it easily work with many FOSS apps; but they never championed FOSS, nor did they adjust their business to attempt to profit from a thriving OSS community (several grew up around OS X, bot not really about OS X itself).
While apple needs FOSS, the FOSS concerned is licensed in ways to freely allow them to use it, and they have little incentive to give back.
Oh my, not that lame discussion again..
I thought this site is called OS News? Where’s the news?
Let’s face it, Apple is piggy-backing on OSS. The only thing is that they are using a license that allows them to close the source.
In the beginning I knew that the PR machine of Apple was putting too good of a spin on the fact they’re using OSS and that the community is X big and the party is going to last forever! Yeah, right! Who are we kidding?
The thugs at Apple simply used the community until their product was mature enough and is now kicking the community to the curve. Sound familiar? Why is the community surprised? This was something that was bound to happen, remember, Apple is a for profit organization with responsibilities to their shareholders.
This should have been the first hint that this was coming: http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=544490
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=237019
‘Nuff said. . .
I wouldn’t say Apple is “piggy-backing” on OSS. I would say they are certainly taking advantage of it where they can, but that is not piggy-backing as their success is not owed to OSS.
are you quite sure? remember the days of OS9? that’s about what apple is able to produce “on their own”.
it took a strong dose of OSS components, combined with apple’s technology and sense of aesthetics that has resulted in OSX. also consider, a large part of apple’s rise to technological respectibility (I think) is that a large portion of the *nix and geek communities started buying into the whole thing. sure, total sales from said communities won’t be all that big on their own, but think of the trickle down effect of a large number of tech savy geeks starting to evangelize this great new platform to their friends, online forums, tech mags, etc. I don’t think people factor that component in enough in looking at the post OSX success of apple, after a time the company was near it’s own extinction.
NEXTSTEP was it’s own conglomeration of many open project components, yes. I am not disagreeing with you. But that alone is not the sole reason for their success. It’s how they patched the bits together and how they sold it. It’s also a matter of how they have controlled it to match up to their hardware (and to be able to eliminate some of the extra drivers since they knew exactly what they had to support) and stuff like that.
Actually, it took a strong dose of Next’s technology, not Apple’s, Apple bought Next, then used Next as a base to develop OS X. Apple couldn’t produce a modern OS on thier own, so they bought the majority of it, and used OSS tech to round out the foundation, and then they did what they do best, designed a amazing GUI and multimedia frameworks to sit on top of it.
The brief foray into opensource was a desperation play that pulled their fat out of the fire, everything is cool now. What of any real value has apple ever given away?
The fracas that resulted from Apple not properly releasing their open source contributions, the complaints that the KHTML team received for their perceived failure to integrate WebKit changes (most notably the Acid test stuff) kinda answers your question about the value of what Apple gave away. If it was worthless, nobody would give a rats .. err.. behind, right?
To hear some carry on, you’d think that Open Source was the be-all end-all savior of the tech world.
Surprise
It’s not
Life goes on with or without it just as it had for years and years of computing advances before. With it or without out it, Apple will continue to do their thing just as any other company.
At this point Apple owns the media with it’s ITunes and IPod. With that they have created one of the largest DRM lockin schemes inhibiting free media growth on the Internet
Remember PCs weren’t that popular in the 90s. Now they are huge but not on the desktop. Money sucks. Love and freedom is better for humanity. Why do so many people want IPods when they have had so many problems and their limitations. One MP3 player looks like any other. It’s because of lockin.
I liked Wozniak allot but Jobs is just as obtuse as Gates. Everyone should try to be more open or just try something else.
It just seems like Jobs has this vision thing where he wants stuff a certain way instead of following more logical technology. I thougt the Apple 2 and 2GS were nice because they just worked. We already have had the vision with Woody Allan’s Bananas in the 70s and the sex machine and futuristic round white cars , etc we don’t need more vision.
I dont agree with Neil
I have heard nothing but irratation with Apple from people.
How can Neil state that Apple’s been a success on the desktop with such a minor market share well below open source Linux.
I’m not irritated with Apple. So there goes your statement. Also, success is measured by $$$ and growth, both of which Apple is managing quite nicely.
I guess well have to see after the stock options probe and lawsuit are done.
From problems that occurred over 4 years ago? Eh. The world won’t care.
Such a silly thread. Look at this from another perspective.
-Apple gained NO mindshare/sales by having the boring part of the OS open source. None, zip, nada. Understand that. Their core install base is just not going to be sold on that.
-While a good deal of nerdy types bought (and are still buying) Apple gear, the OpenDarwin project never thrived. Not because Apple killed it but because there was LITTLE INTEREST. What fun is OS-X without all the stuff that makes it OS-X? If you want FreeBSD on x86, install FreeBSD. If you want NetBSD on PPC, install NetBSD. OpenDarwin was utterly useless to just about everyone.
-Due to the above the whole “open source it, reap the benefits” never really happened for Apple.
-No one ever took the OpenDarwin sources and did cool stuff. I remember the “outrage” here the last time this came up. There were exactly zero people in all the whiners that had ever built their own kernel or found some whizbang feature in something someone else has built. The only example I ever found was a hack to let you cook your laptop by not forcing sleep when closing the lid. Whooo!
I won’t even bother with the sheer ignorance of people claiming Apple is “working against” open source. That’s just retarded. There will always be programmers that want to be paid and companies that want to SELL software. This is not evil. You are free to use a free alternative if you don’t want to buy software. There will never, ever be the GNUtopia where all software everywhere is free and open source. Sorry!
I think one of the biggest barriers to doing interesting things with Darwin, besides the fact that no-one could get the thing to compile without some gargantuan effort to understand its peculiar build system, was the license terms, even if someone found a good use for darwin they wouldn’t have much freedom to use the code which i’m sure discouraged certain devs.
Suggesting that either of the BSDs mentioned gives you the same system as darwin would is a little inaccurate, darwin doesn’t use that much of FreeBSD.
There will never, ever be the GNUtopia where all software everywhere is free and open source. Sorry!
All software? Probably not.
All software in the major categories that Apple makes software in? Yes.
Its not GNUtopia, its plain financial sense. Why as customers pay <company> for proprietry software when a useful free version already exists?
Conversely, from a shareholders point of view it will become irresponsible for a software company to duplicate software available and widely used under a Free license.
No one ever took the OpenDarwin sources and did cool stuff. I remember the “outrage” here the last time this came up. There were exactly zero people in all the whiners that had ever built their own kernel or found some whizbang feature in something someone else has built. The only example I ever found was a hack to let you cook your laptop by not forcing sleep when closing the lid. Whooo!
You know why? Cause Apple didn’t use the changes. Everytime there was a release, all changes that people did would be lost because Apple didn’t work with the open source projects. Everytime there was a release, it either required a ton of man hours to merge it back into the open source version, or they have to take Apple’s version and start over with their own changes. They just did it to comply with the licenses and if there was software licensed under terms where they didn’t have to give shit back, you get bet everything you have Apple would not have returned anything, hell, even credit would be a lot to expect from Apple.
Did they do anything to comply with licenses? I’ve a feeling that they only ever used code from projects with a BSD or more liberal style license which didn’t require them to release anything back at all.
They used GCC, which is most certainly GPL.
GCC is not the primary component of Darwin, most of their stuff didn’t need to be released at all, though obviously what GPL’d software they used has had to be released under the same license, with most of the Darwin core they were free to release under their own license if they felt like releasing sources at all.
They could have licensed some proprietary rendering engine for money but they probably liked the idea of community contribution, something they could not expect with their sources a closely guarded secret. The other thing is that this way they can go on about their AppleTM WebKit rendering engine and all the advantages, Open Source included, it has over the competition, Opera and Omniweb spring to mind…
Well, it’s on topic and i didn’t make any personal remarks, i don’t think i was even damning about Apple, so why mod the parent -1?
Again, not sure why this moderation occured.
Some personal advice: if you want to sleep soundly at night, just ignore negative moderations. You may or may not agree with it, and it may or may not be justified, but in the end complaining about it won’t do much good (and may be modded down as well, as comments about moderation are definitely off-topic).
Just let it go.
Don’t worry, i’m not genuinely concerned I was just curious to see if my next comments would be met with the same moderation, and they were
KHTML is a C++ solution and WebKit is a amalgam of Objective-C/ObjC++/C++. Apple is an ObjC/Cocoa company, not a Qt/KDE/C++ company. The refactoring to make the new KHTML/WebKit unified for Qt4 is happening and one that required some efforts on both sides of the equation.
The Open Darwin project was is in no way officially related to Apple Computer Corporation and whether or not that project exists or doesn’t has no bearing on Apple or Apple’s open source initiatives.
The project was never more thank a page linking to other projects anyways. While it’s sad to see that the idea didn’t take off the history of IT is littered with failed concepts.
The “brute force” improvement of a niche market is a flakey idea at best anyways. The project didn’t ever really have much of a chance. Saying that the death of Open Darwin equates to the death of Apple’s open source efforts, even at a time when Apple employees are making efforts to reach out to the open source community, just demonstrates a lack of knowledge by writers.
The problem was that Apple didn’t want people hacking the kernel to make Mac OS run on normal PCs. While I personally believe that it is wrong for them to do this, it’s understandable when viewed from that perspective.
Had so many people not tried to do this, Apple probably wouldn’t have closed down the darwin for intel project.
Apple still has many many open source projects: Rendevous, WebKit, etc. which should count for something.
Proprietary+Open Source just don’t seem to mix too well. You’re either one or the other and you can very seldom successfully be both.
GJC
When OpenDarwin was announced – as the author said: “not wanting to share its toys is classic Apple behavior”
Seriously, given their history and business practices, Apple supporting Open source is a bit like Thomas Edison giving credit for his inventions to Nikolai Tesla, Louis Lumiere and Thomas Young. (what, you though Edison actually INVENTED things?)… or J.D. Rockerfeller and Andrew Carnegie donating money to help keep business rivals and workers unions afloat.
It’s funny, the ‘young hipster’ (or as Eric would call it, “dirty ****** hippy”) ideal portrayed in their advertising and by the ‘zealots’ (ooh, that word!) runs so contrary to their UBER CLOSED business model and practices, it’s hard to understand how they’ve even gotten what little success they have. (There’s something in the water…)
Let’s face it, ‘Open Source’ is built on the same type of naive idealism that Apple has been preying on since the introduction of the original Mac. That they’d take the open source community for a ride and leech it dry is hardly shocking… In a way, I almost applaud their audacity. What’s that I always say about some business major taking some programmers work, slapping their name on it and not paying the original creator dollar one?
Again, programmers, STOP DEVALUATING YOUR WORK.
Why OpenDarwin closed:
http://macosforge.org/
Edited 2006-08-08 04:34