How Can I Promote Open Source On The Macintosh?

Chris Buskirk asks: "I have been working with Macs most of my life. I have since expanded my view to Unix, and Linix. I also do NT for Pain and Profit. I have been a part of the Slashdot community for the past year now, and I have become convinced that open source is the best way to produce software. This week open-source software advocate Eric S. Raymond kicked off the 15th annual MacHack conference. Mac Week is covering the keynote address , and almost all of the responce to the article is negative. Surprisingly this is a departure from the recent mood among the Mac community which has been changing with the advent of OSX. So the question becomes, How do I convince a Mac geek to become an Open Source Mac geek?" I hope that OSX is the spark to ignite the fires of Open Source on the Mac. Or at least bring it the visibility it deserves.

" Most people view Mac users as idiots. There has always been a constant myth that there are no programs for the Mac. However I dispute that claim as I have always been able to get any type of program I have wanted for the Mac, and usually for free. The Mac has always had a large and talented freeware/shareware communtiy, and I would think that this community would be very prone to embrace the open source movement. Once this base of programmers is secured, I would think larger companies would start to follow suit to one degree or another."

Do it yourself...

I've always thought the best way of promoting open-source software was to create it and release it.

If you do this successfully, it demonstrates the viability of open-source software on your platform. It also gives weight to your advocacy of the open-source model, since you are willing to put forth considerable effort towards that end.

Doug

Development Costs?

Are there any free development environments for MacOS? If someone is going to develop a program to give away, I can see why they wouldn't want to shell out $500 for VC++ or CodeWarrior. If there was a port of gcc to MacOS (there may be, I'm not sure), there still would be the lack of a good IDE to develop with. A project like Kdevelop for macintosh would provide the ease of use and incentives that the Mac programmer would need to start writing open source.

Am I trolling, or am I serious?

I thought popped into my head. It seems flamish, but I still consider the question to be valid.

Since the financial reward of Mac programming is generally (yes, a generality) less than that of Windows programming, wouldn't the barrier to adopting open source for the Mac be far less than the IBM world? (But maybe more than the UNIX/Linux world?)

Free Software

There used to be a lot of freeware around. People also used to swap various hypercard stacks around and hacks that added features to hypercard (think excel, but much much cooler, a sort of graphical scripting language, but actually cool for the time, especially if you weren't a programmer, but there was fun stuff for programmers in it too).

I used to see a bit of source swapping and such going on as far as actual programs were concerned. There was always a bit of, "this is mine, I wrote it, I'm not going to enforce the fee, but it's there" penis-size contest going on there too, which a lot of people would be reluctant to give up, but all and all, I would think that there will eventually be a strong vein of mack open source hackers. Of course, the issue of the closed platform has always been what sort of drove hackers away from the platform. I like my PC because there is a lot more freedom for me to tinker with it. Even now, yeah, there's more slots, more hardware is supported, it's not quite like being able to say, "this board, this processor, this drive, and I'll put it all together over-night." Even the trouble that people have gotten into for extending the macintosh has driven many away. I must say, I love the SMP performance in the newer processors, but the Mac developers have never been a real, "Open up our box and screw with it," kind of team.

Re:Development Costs?

Are there any free development environments for MacOS?

Apple's MPW (Macintosh Programmers Workshop) is a command-line based development environment that can be downloaded for free from Apple here [apple.com]. MPW is a very UNIX-like environment and includes C and C++ compilers, as well as linkers, assemblers and editors etc.

If someone is going to develop a program to give away, I can see why they wouldn't want to shell out $500 for VC++ or CodeWarrior.

VC++ no longer supports Macintosh development, I believe, so its not a viable option anyway. There is a low-cost version of CodeWarrior available, which can be used for non-commercial (i.e. Open Source freeware) development. Check out the Metrowerks [metrowerks.com] site for details (its currently down, though).

If there was a port of gcc to MacOS (there may be, I'm not sure),

Mac OS X comes with a complete gcc-based development environment, but you currently need to have a (paid) membership in the Apple Developer Program to get it. However, a public beta is due later this summer, and it should be very cheap or free to get the OS with development tools then.

there still would be the lack of a good IDE to develop with. A project like Kdevelop for macintosh would provide the ease of use and incentives that the Mac programmer would need to start writing open source.

Defintely check out MPW, particularly if you are coming from a UNIX background.

Re:Am I trolling, or am I serious?

This question is based on an invalid assumption: namely, that the financial rewards for writing Mac software are lower than for Windows. Perhaps suprisingly, this is not true. Most Mac software makes more money than Windows versions of the same software. Why, when the market is much smaller? Because developing Mac software is much easier and therefore cheaper for one thing. For another, you can safely charge much more for a MacOS release than for the Windows version. And lastly, often the proportions are not the same: that is, a higher percentage of Mac users will buy a given piece of software than PC users.

Supreme Lord High Commander of the Interstellar Task Force for the Eradication of Stupidity

Re:Lamenting the demise of Hypercard

Yeah, the demise of Hypercard has been a real low point in the history of Macintosh. HC used to be the best amateur-hacker environment around, and it also attracted a lot of people to the Mac. The Mac is not the same without it. It seems like HC fell out of favor just when the Web came around-- maybe because HC failed to very integrate with the Web, or maybe because html offered another easy outlet for part-time geeks

Now here's a topic I have a great deal of firsthand knowledge of. HyperCard was ultimately cancelled by Apple because Steve Jobs didn't see the potential of this product - he believed it competed with InterfaceBuilder that Apple inherited (along with Steve) from NeXT.

At the time the project was cancelled, the HyperCard team were working on a ground-up re-write of the software using QuickTime as its runtime. It had all the modern features that HyperCard developers wanted (full color, full multimedia, no built-in limits etc.) and it would produces stacks that ran everywhere that QuickTime ran. Steve just didn't see the potential for an end-user programming environment, and cancelled it. He thought it was nothing more than a rolodex app.

Its one of the few occasions where I've seen Steve really fail to "get it".

NewsWatcher - Macintosh Open Source success story

If you're interested in evangelizing open source to Mac developers, perhaps you should start with the one major open source success story on the Mac platform - John Norstad's NewsWatcher.

Since John Norstad released the code to NewsWatcher under a very permissive (BSD-like) license, it spawned a long list of feature-enhanced derivatives: YA-NewsWatcher, MT-NewsWatcher, WS-NewsWatcher, Value-Added NewsWatcher.

(And NewsWatcher and its derivatives are still the best news readers on any platform. Nothing compares on Unix or Win32.)
--

Mac open soure software catalog

Jason McIntosh has created a catalog [jmac.org] of Mac open source software boasting 149 titles, which I consider pretty impressive for a platform usually considered barren of open source.

--ian

Mac OS X GCC sources are available

Check out http://www.publicsource.apple.com to get all the sources to Darwin, which is the open-source kernel for Mac OS X, including Apple's hacked-up versions of GCC and GDB etc.

(If you're thinking of whining about those changes are not integrated with mainline GCC, complain to me personally instead; fully 1/2 of my hours for Apple are now allocated to preparing GCC patches to send to the FSF...)

So why *is* open source not more popular on Macs? I think it's the same reason there's not so much on Windows either; it's more work to develop programs than for a Unix variant, there is a large end-user base that just wants binaries and is often willing to pay for them, and there is a relatively stable ABI, so there are fewer reasons to need sources for the purposes of recompiling.

I expect to see some change when OS X comes out, because there is now more awareness of the other benefits of open source, and porting Unix apps is pretty easy (I've done some myself), but I expect it will be a gradual transition as OS X expands its installed base.

Stan Shebs
[e-mail]

Paying for tiny tools -- Macintosh culture?

For some reason, many (maybe even most) of the people writing code for the Macintosh have the idea that they deserve to be paid -- that being rewarded by enthusiastic users thanking them and saying nice things about them is not enough. Although there are some wonderful shareware programs for the Mac that are worth every cent their authors charge and more, there are also many tiny programs whose authors demand US$5-$15 that would be given away for free without a second thought by Unix hackers.

In discussions I've had about why this might be, my friends and I have generally come to the conclusion that because the Macintosh has always been sold as a ``premium'' platform (Macs cost more than roughly comparable PCs, and have traditionally been marketed to appeal to people who want to believe they're ``better'' than the average person), combined with the fact that the Macintosh user community has tended to be less hands-on technically adept, may have created a user community that equates money with quality, and so expects to pay for a quality tool, no matter how trivial. (The Macintosh user community tends to be stereotyped as incompetent and technically ignorant -- in fact, most Mac users just want to concentrate on their work and not on the tools they use to do their work. If they have to pay attention to their tools, they're being distracted from their goals.)

It's also possible that programming the Macintosh is such a chore that Mac programmers do much less of the kind of ``scratch-my-own-itch hacking'' (``I have a problem I need to solve for myself. Hack, hack, hack. Done! Gee, now that I've solved it, I bet other people might interested in this code, too!'') that we see in the open source community. Because the Macintosh presents a polished, closed interface, Mac users don't have the ``gateway drug'' experience Unix users have with the shell: learning how to use shell commands, then learning to assemble those commands into pipelines, writing simple scripts, and then, perhaps, learning to write more complicated programs in languages such as Perl, Python, and C. (Apple provides AppleScript, and people can and have built fairly complicated workflow solutions using AppleScript, but most Mac users never find a need to justify purchasing or printing out the thick manual and learning the language. Even if they did, many Mac applications support only the most basic set of (required) AppleScript commands, making them essentially unscriptable.)

It may be (and we can hope) that MacOS X, with its Unix underpinnings, will allow the world of free (as in both beer and speech) software to penetrate the Macintosh world in a way it never could before. If people can download the vast library of free and open source tools and put them to use (either as compilable source code or as MacOS X installer packages), then shareware that handles the same tasks but can't be modified for a user's specific needs might take a beating, provided that the quality is there.

Re:Let's say you're right... what does it mean?

Let's say that you're correct, and that in general, there is far more money to be made in Mac software. Does this even more so raise the barier of entry to open source software on the Mac?

This has always been my theory on why there is so little Mac open source. Specifically, if you've invested the time and effort to learn to program a Mac, the ease with which you can obtain a commanding marketshare makes it quite tempting to take any and every piece of Mac software commercial.

I wrote the MacHTTP web server in my spare time in early 1993. It was originally given away for free and most of the source code was easily obtained as well. But as time went on, the increasing demands on my time, the addition of significant features, and the market demand for the software made it a certainty that the product would become commercial.

After a year of free distribution, it became a shareware product (the first "commercial" web server on the Internet). After a year, the product was making over $250,000 a quarter as shareware and turning it into a commercial product (WebSTAR) was a no-brainer. StarNine turned that into a $15M run rate and 98% market share in 6 months.

From the perspective of even the most altruistic of developers, passing up that kind of cash is hard. In the context of the Mac marketplace, where good software is rewarded with high margins, high purchase rates, and loyal users, it's impossible to pass up. I think all the really good Mac programmers are just too busy making money at it to do open source justice on the Mac platform.

Open Source Development is a misnomer

The term "open source" needs clarification. In practice, this means that the developer of software makes the source code available under a license similar to GPL or the BSD artistic license. This is a good thing, because it means you can make fixes or changes if you become desperate, and there's always the possibility of someone else picking up the project should the original developer(s) lose interest. Or someone could use the source as a basis for another project. And so on.

But let's stop fooling ourselves into thinking that open source means better and faster development. The best software is still developed by focused groups of people who are following their original vision. Add too many people and you get design by committee. There aren't good examples of non-system software that has benefited from OS. Perl, the Linux kernel, apache, and sendmail are the usual examples that get trotted out, just like fraternities trot out the "We do charity work!" line each time they get nailed for hazing or drunkeness. The bottom line is that just having the source code freely available (as in speech) does not make for open source development. That's something different altogether.

"Open Source" means that the source code is freely available. "Open Source Development" means "development by people who are making the source code publicly available." ESR would have you believe that all the work is being done by people who happen across the source and add major features, which is far from the truth.