Bringing UNIX to the desktop is a new approach and a novel idea. It may well work. If it does, then maybe MS will have a competitor.

It is certainly worth a try. Considering pending legislation in America and the way things are going there, this may be what saves open source.

Essentially, I spent the last ten years of my life shackled to Microsoft products with the all-too-infrequent practical use of Linux. As Microsoft's business practices continue to get ever more predatory, and the Microsoft operating systems become increasingly marketing tools rather than productivity tools, I decided that it was about time to try something new.

I found an inexpensive, new iBook, and bought it. An "icebook" with a 500Mhz G3 processor, I've been quite happy with it so far. The construction of the iBook is quite decent, with a few common blemishes in the casing and a few mechanical defects reported. However, the real shining star of Apple's lineup has got to be OS X. This BSD alteration (Or enhancement, or bastardization, or annexation, call it what you will.) is positioned in the perfect place to bring intelligence back into the use of personal computers. Functionally, OS X is a wonderfully complex yet artistically presented program interface which does an admirable job of concealing the true nature of things from the average Macintosh transitional user, while providing an extremely high amount of flexibility for the more technically oriented. With the Macintosh userbase, there's actually a very devoted core that could use the help and assitance of open source efforts despite the problems with Apple in regards to certain areas of the system. (The interface, primarily)

Projects suck as Fink, an excellent tool for porting unix applications to the OS X environment are a great start, but what will really help Apple prove a real challenge to Microsoft is the conscious effort by Open Source developers to port applications to Apple hardware so seamlessly, that the average user won't even have to know that The Gimp was actually a unix application.

This is where Apple has succeeded as a core business, making computing simpler for the artistically, rather than the technically minded. The best thing Open Source can do is aid the Apple userbase in proving that the Mac is a viable alternative. Yes, Linux and BSD themselves as well as all the other systems out there, deserve to continue to be the primary focus of most efforts. But it just may be that the most effective way to open up the operating systems market will be to back the entrenched underdog.

Further, you need to do more research about your arguments. Open source zealots may never bother to check copyright law, but companys really -have- to defend their copyrighted stuff every single time. If they don't they risk losing the rights to it. In addition, Apple -doesn't- own the Sorensen codec: they license it. They can't control whether or not it is open sourced. Finally, your arguments about aqua and other core technologies are ludicrous. People should be very clear: Apple is a commercial company, which means they need to make real -money-. If everything is free, why would anyone pay for the OS? What would cover development costs. The OS is comparatively cheap, because of hardware, but it is still the corner stone of Apple's business. People can get the base Darwin for free, just like linux. If you want the extra stuff Apple worked so hard on, you're just going to have to pay for it.

This is a great start, and I hope that it is very sucessful and prompts other commercial companies too start to champion open source. Value added solutions can be viable business models.

It's important to remember that the core OS behind OS X is still open sourced. You can download Darwin/x86 and run it just fine, using X11 instead of Aqua.

I hope more open source people can come around to the realization that while fully open source platforms may be the best technical option, that until open source focuses as much on interface and ease as much as it does performance, that there is a viable, important place for companies like Apple.

See this mailbox [apple.com] and search for "LMbench/results" (they apparently didn't archive back that far in their web archiving thing, so you have to checkout the mbox).

It will give you lmbench numbers for the same 400MHz Powerbook G4 running Linux, NetBSD, and OS X (2 diff versions). Granted, lmbench numbers probably only impact practicality and useability...

The summary: Linux out performs the others on the same hardware.

I use FreeBSD at work. It's awesome. I also use OS X daily at home and at work. And really, I can't see much difference between the Darwin core (pure opensource) and FreeBSD in terms of out-of-the-box functionality, except that several of the utilities and bsd apis are dated (no localtime_r, for example). That's not a big deal really, it's Apple's goal to keep Darwin in sync with FreeBSD, and anything that you are missing (as an application developer), there's not too much stopping you from getting sources and compiling it yourself.

My point is, Apple is shipping a fully capable open source OS. I'm talking about Darwin, not OS X. This is what Jordan is working on. If anything, it aims to succeed FreeBSD. FreeBSD is nice and all, but it's got everything that makes a modern Unix, which is exactly what keeps its market penetration small. It doesn't have the attention that Linux has to keep it growing.

The difference that Darwin has is the incredible number of NEW ideas that make a NEW OS. Darwin isn't just another BSD. Apple has learned a lot having several OS projects fail (you have to admit, you do learn a lot that way), and the good stuff has gotten into the Darwin core.

There are things like XML and Unicode support at the base level of the OS. XML is used to describe everything in the sytem, it's basically the conf file format of OS X for everything that doesn't have too many legacy dependancies (for example, fstab is still there, but from what I can tell, it isn't the source of the information at boot time- NetInfo generates it. mount et. al will use fstab still). High-level, object-oriented frameworks are available with at the base level of the OS through CoreFoundation. CoreFoundation is basically the core of the OpenStep Foundation framework without Objective-C. It's pure C. Everything in the core of OS X is written with CoreFoundation- it provides the XML and Unicode support (this means kernel modules, etc). Every string you use is a Unicode-capable string. The powerful array and dictionary 'classes' you use can be converted to and from XML (simple data archiving and unarchving, and human readable too). And you can download and install CoreFoundation onto Linux/FreeBSD if you want to.

I can hear people in the background yelling 'OMG! They're butchering BSD!' No, their upgrading and replacing some very old systems with new ones. They're replacing them with things that fit the needs of modern workstations, not just servers. Things like 'ls' and 'more' aren't touched. They're user utilities, and pretty irrelevant at the OS level (and fairly irrelevant for Apple anyway, because a cool ls isn't too useful in OS X).

You can check out Darwin yourselves from www.opensource.apple.com. You'd probably have more fun with Linux/FreeBSD for a few years, though. While Darwin doesn't have everything it needs to make a long-time *nix user happy, it does have everything it needs to bring all the power of Unix to the masses.

Even before Rhapsody was remade into Mac OS X, I remember Mac OS Rumors article about a rumor (surprise surprise) that what is now Darwin would be available free to universities, simply because Avie Tevanian wanted to give back to the community (as the BSD license doesn't force you). Well, they gave everything back to everyone, and then some.

I'm not saying that Apple is all good, but so many people really underestimate what Darwin is and what it stands for.

His speech basically came down to "open source failed to do anything on the desktop, and without proprietary, commercial vendors like Apple it will never go anywhere either". He almost sounded like he ment to say "only Apple can make UNIX a success on the desktop", but he explained all he ment to say was open source couldn't, when I asked him about that.

Martin Konold, who like me was present to hold a speech about KDE, responded that KDE already deliver all the stuff Jordan Hubbard was talking about, even before OSX was on the shelves.

The "open source developers can only developer for themselves and never think of end-users" view is just not true. GNOME and KDE prove that every day. Knowing these projects only exist respectively 5 and 4 years, while Apple (and Microsoft) have been in the desktop market for a much longer time gives me plenty of confidence and hope that open source can definitely bring UNIX to the desktop. Just imagine what KDE X (pun: OS X) and GNOME XP (pun: Windows XP) will look like.

Meanwhile, there's Apple, with its closed, secretive software design and its relatively toylike point-and-click interface. No self-respecting open-source geek would touch these products with a barge pole.

Now people have known that BSD was going to be the core of OS X for at least three years. To create this false "Apple vs. Open Source" strawman merely to knock it down is lazy writing, and this late in the game it's actively insulting for anyone even remotely familiar with BSD or OS X. This is "Look at me! Look at me!" writing that needlessly draws attention to itself, something real writers don't need to do.

Indeed, this paragraph mars what is otherwise a reasonably adequate column. But at least it's not as irritating as the average Jon Katz [slashdot.org] column. Speaking of which, I see that more votes have been dropped from the dump Katz poll. [slashdot.org] The numbers don't even add up anymore...

The propietary hardware will always hold me back from a mac. I like having the ability to install any OS on my machine.

Nice nonsequitur.

And what machine runs "any OS"?

My TiBook has MacOS X.x, MacOS 9.x, Darwin, Windows 98 (via VPC).

If I wanted to I could install various distros of Linux (PPC and, with VPC, x86), but with OSX's Unix underpinings I don't need to.

I'm currently running VPC v4.x. If I were to get a copy of VPC 3.x I could load Solaris and BeOS (support was removed with version 4). But I've no need for them.

A quick check at Emulation.net [emulation.net] shows a variety of emulators. I counted 34, plus emulators for game consoles, calculators, and handheld devices.

I have no idea if those emulators are useful. The only one I've used is the PalmOS emulator.

Even with this there are plenty of OS's that I can't run. MPE/iX and OS400 are two that I've worked with in recently.

Please tell me what machine can run any OS, and where I can purchase one. Theoretical Turing Machines don't count.

Steve M

Apple at least has a chance to push past that and get to the meat'n'taters of selling apps built on a real multitasking protected memory O/S. Building on 'nix clone was a biz decision, not a political one. MicroSofts unity of vision (at least as presented outside the company) gives it enormous advantage over what should be an insurmountable enemy of open source fanatics working their asses off for nary a penny. Except for Divide and Conquer. MicroSoft didn't have to divide the 'nix community, its quite capable of doin' that itself... of shootin' itself in the feet, kneecaps and elbows.

Here's hopin' that a strong market presence can bring some unity to the open source community, even if it is starting off with a few baby steps.

First and foremost, we must consider the interface. Here we are talking about OS X/XP vs KDE/GNOME. If you have used all four you can attest to the fact that KDE/GNOME have come a very long way, but are still very far behind, and if we strictly talk about KDE/GNOME vs OS X (since the play-doh theme in XP has shaken what faith I had in MS' interfaces), you must admit that the open source desktop environments are 2-3 years behind. Now what troubles me more is that readers are in denial about this, and this lack of understanding about what the experience needs to be stemming from the fact that OSS OSes are used primarily by programmers/admins/etc. prevents open source desktop environments from competing. Even you say,

KDE already deliver all the stuff Jordan Hubbard was talking about, even before OSX was on the shelves.

I hope this is not meant to insinuate that the KDE experience is comparable to the OS X experience. I actually read a post that said that Apple should, "port Aqua to X windows". If you think that you can run the Aqua interface on top of XFree86 (or one with comparable features, not just a bunch of pretty pixmaps, which is what the Mozilla organization seems to thing Aqua is, most unfortunately for those of us who want to use Mozilla for OS X), the future of OSS desktops is doomed.

Now, while I find the "open source is doomed forever" attitude unfair, if we take a look at where desktop functinality is right now, open source has lost. As I said, KDE and GNOME are not even competitive with OS X, the GIMP is nowhere near being competitive with Photoshop, nothing is competitive with Final Cut Pro or Premier/After Effects, nor are there substitues for the iApps (simple, but still extremely funcitonal consumer-level apps), there are very few games brought to open source operating systems, although Apple has a problem with this too, they manage to get a port of virtually all the top-shelf games, apps like Maya that used to be the domain of UNIX-like OSes are now on OS X, eliminating the need for a Photoshop Mac and a Maya SGI on your desk, and finally I must say that open source office products are competitive with MS Office, but must also admit that Office v.X is truly a very powerful suite and the best availible tool, although still only worth a fraction of its $500 price tag.

So to summarize my points, open source software for the desktop is currently not in the same league with the commercial software, but it could get there if more effort was focused on it, and it is completely reasonable for Hubbard to go with Apple and focus solely on making the best possible software, as open source solutions, even though they may become an extremely viable 3rd desktop platform one day, probably will never reach an elegance of interface of Apple products.

LOL! Doing something like this has been the holy grail of the open source desktop environments, and I think you trivialize both their work and Apple's work with that statement.

I also don't know where you get the idea that Apple "ditched development and server utilities". Yes, the DevTools are on a second disk, which you can optionally install. This isn't a bad idea since <gasp> many desktop users are not developers. So how are the server utilities crippled? The primary difference I see is that in OS X if I want to start up my Apache server with typical settings for serving my personal webpages, I open System Preferences, click on Sharing, and click the Start Web Sharing button, only needing to pop a terminal for tweaking the server, most of which I could probably do in a GUI text editor like BBEdit Lite.

Finally I must point out that having a system that they could mistake for a weird version of windows (not exactly the model interface itself) when used only for opening one application is not an achievement of the magnitude of having a system that they could have painlessly setup and configured all aspects of themselves.

If you want to setup servers, compile all your apps, muck around with source code, or uber-tune your window manager interface, then yeah, Linux (or bsd, or whatever) will be complicated. Take all that crap away, and setup a system with a standard graphical interface, and it can be just as easy and friendly as a Mac.

Or you could build Mac OS X, and have a system that lets you do the vast majority of your work easily, including GUI tools for development and servers, and lets you pop a terminal for any tweaks you might need to do under the hood. Lets face the fact that Linux can not be as easy as Mac OS X in terms of total experience, that's not what it was designed for, although open source desktop environments may get it there one day.