Apple Plans To Release Rendezvous As Open Source

Snuffub writes "According to MacCentral, Apple announced during an interview today that they would be releasing Rendezvous, their implementation of the zeroconf standard, under an open source license. I can't see this as being anything but great news for everyone involved -- the community gets a mature implementation of an emerging technology, and Apple benefits as more devices are created to support Rendezvous. For everyone interested, you'll be able to download the source from Apple's site in a couple weeks." uglyhead69 adds: "The article is light on details and doesn't mention what license will be used, but it's probably safe to assume that it's the APSL."

uPnP

[cscx]

I believe Windows XP's Universal Plug and Play is similar to this... it auto-discovers network components, such as gateways, etc and allows the OS to determine the external IP address, for example, which is useful in some applications. But this seems a whole lot cooler... and now that it's open source, hopefully we'll see it get integrated into a lot more OSes. Apple is really good when it comes to the "innovation" and "ease-of-use" way of doing things.

w00t!

[rice_web]

But seriously, how beneficial will this really be? I'm not an expert on open source (I'm not qualified for the term "beginner" either), but what advantage is this to Apple?

I can see where developers could use this to create thousands of cool applications for little tasks here and there, but what is the advantage outside of this? And how would it help the Rendezvous program grow?

Re:uPnP

[sportiva]

it is similar to universal plug and play but more than that....it it as more full featured solution to the network configuration problem. And to anonymous coward, easy doesn't always mean less secure :)

Autoconfiguration is Scary

[ebooher]

It will be nice when they do release some source for this, and make all of the technical documents available. I'd like something to look over about all of this autoconfiguration software.

I mean, am I the only person this scares? Microsoft Outlook had (has) the autoexecute feature that allows virii authors to introduce new and inventive ways to drop rootkits into IIS servers.

Linux has their own little features that have to be guarded against as well. In the basis of security very few of my companies Linux boxes are running any form of FTP. Way too many security alerts, and 90% of the boxes don't need to do file transfers anyway.

Now Apple offers us a really cool and interesting technology that will allow a computer to automatically find a printer. How long before one of these virii authors writes himself an object that allows his PowerBook G4 to introduce itself to a Rendevous network and take control of several machines at once.

Here you go, a really sweet streaming virus.

I for one, hope that there isn't just a way to turn this off, but delete it entirely from a running system. Because as of right now, I'm a little more worried about this than anything new from Redmond about automatically updating my systems.

We use all *NIX on the outside anyway, so that doesn't really apply to any sensitive systems ^_^

What exactly is your price??

[Big Sean O]

Lots of people complain that Apple is too expensive. My question is: How much do you want to pay for an Apple?

Seriously, what would be the price that would make all the "Apple's too expensive" camp shut up and buy?

I'm not trying to be fussy, I'm seriously interested...

What I'd like to see...

[TellarHK]

I'd really like to be able to take my iBook (or any networked laptop, really) into a public place with the AirPort card turned on and have it not only pick up a base station signal, but every once in a while send out a signal over the wireless card to see if there are any other non-base-stationed wireless cards present that might want to hook up for a small wireless mini-LAN. This sounds like the kind of thing Rendezvous would be a great start for. It'd be a good way to meet people, too. Set up your machine with a little program that does the 'ping' for other machines and advertises whatever it is.

Ping.
iBook, OS 10.2, anyone around?

It'd be like combining Wardriving with those weird "Beep if someone you'll consider hot is nearby." things they were selling in Japan a while ago.

how ya doin?

[awb131]

I like to think of Rendezvous as a much smarter analogue to NetBEUI, which I often refer to as the "butt sniffing protocol" that Windows machines use to detect each other in the absence of IP networking.

Re:w00t!

[tupps]

The more people who use this and the more machines that use this the more 'value' it provides to apple customers. Imagine: I walk into a company and hook up my Mac Notebook. I need to get printer access, one of the guys has a linux machine running rendezvous code, I can now print. That provides a heap of value to the person with a Mac. If it was MacOSX only it would be good for close shops. Also I don't think that this technology would be a deal breaker/winner. Eg I have to get a MacOSX box so I can use Redezvous. I am guessing iTunes, iDVD, iPhoto, Final Cut Pro, are all thinks that add to the deal winner for Apple. My guess is you won't ever see them open sourced.

Very beneficial to Apple

[El]

Apple is in the business of selling clients. If all the vendors of servers (yes, your network printer is a server) adopt this technology, then they can sell more clients. It's that simple -- make it easy for everybody to implement Rendevous, and you make more money. This is different from Micro$oft's business model, which calls for controlling both the client and the server, so they don't make it easy to implement ANYTHING that's compatible with their software.

Re:what is it good for?

[dhovis]

Suppose you want to write a distributed system.

You know, it is funny you mention that, because I've been wondering if/when Apple might introduce automatic clustering. The way I understand it, the threading implementation in Darwin is such that threads can not only be transferred between processors, but also between computers too. Rendezvous could let you find all the other computers on the network that will let you run code (in a sandbox, perhaps) and automatically throw threads to them if it will help.

Imagine the Photoshop benchmarks if everything was spread across a rack of XServes!

<DUCKS>

Re:I forsee a hiccup...

[Arandir]

If Apple uses the APSL, then the source code could not be used in Linux.

In the kernel, no. Only GPL or relicensable code can be used in the kernel. But it certainly can be used in the userland.

I'm uncertain if Debian would accept any APSL submissions.

What part of the DFSG does the APSL not meet?

Rendezvous has network effect

[Wesley Felter]

The more Rendezvous-enabled devices and apps are out there, the more useful it is.

Imagine a Beowolf clust... No, seriously.

[JohnsonWax]

Apple has yet to reveal their clustering solution for Mac OS X and Xserve, but consider how easy Rendezvous will make this task.

Re:w00t!

[ClosedSource]

"Microsoft never open-sourced anything and everyone hates them."

Well, If that's the only reason, not everybody could hate MS because most of their customers don't even know what source code is, let alone the difference between open and closed.

Re:Autoconfiguration is Scary

[g4dget]

Read the story. ZeroConf or Rendezvous is basically a way of defining a little better how computers can "guess" an IP address for themselves and try it out. That doesn't open up any new security holes; rather, it brings some order and standardization into the things people already do more haphazardly. Windows XP, for example, already uses a mechanism like ZeroConf, but in a way that is more disruptive to networks.

(BTW, the English plural of "virus" is "viruses"; the Latin plural would be one of "viri" (pronounced "vee-ree"), "virorum", "viris", or "viros", depending on case.)

Problems with GPL and APSL...

[MoneyT]

As I read the APSL, it's simply and open licence that also ensures that Apple remains removed from you. That seems perfectly reasonable. GNU doesn't like it because of the termination clause, but when you think about it, it's entirely nessesary. What if a version with your modifications becomes the norm, even becomes packaged with Apple machines. If that happens, and you get accused of infringing on someone elses patented work, Apple could be in serious trouble. By terminating the agreement and stopping distribution of your code, Apple can keep themselves free from you. Just because they terminate does not mean they will sue you. As near as I can tell, the APSL is a very very open license for a corporation and is what we arround here might call a Good Thing (TM).

OTOH, I seem to have picked up a flaw in the GPL, which may be the reason corporations have been slow to take up software released under the GPL. If as you say, proprietary or APSL and other less open licensed software was not permissable within GPL software, many companies would not want to take up that software. The reason being is many companies develop their own private modifications to software. For example, I worked for a time at a well know power company which shall remain nameless. This company had a software suit which they had purchased which provided for the creation and movement of troubleshooting "tickets". The software in it's basic form was useable, but the company had other needs. They wrote modifications to the software (with the original creators permission) to run within their networks and throughout the company. If under a GPL license the company would have had to opensource their modifications and release them under the GPL, the company would not have taken up the GPL software.

Freedom is a good thing, but forcing people to open their code is almost as bad as the closed code is.

Money Making

[Farley Mullet]

This might be a bit redundant, but it seems to me that the most interesting thing about all this is that Apple seems to have hit on a business model that actually makes money off open source software. First came OSX, which isn't really much more of a modifed PPC port of FreeBSD (Darwin) with a wicked nice (and nicely engineered) GUI (Aqua) slapped on top. Now we have Rendezvous, where Apple is making their implementation of an open standard open source, in hopes that its broad adoption will encourage people to buy Apple's software. Imagine what these guys could do with Ogg. . .

So maybe the moral of the story is this:

1. Find a niche for an open source project (using BSD to give MacOS solid underpinnings)
   
2. Add value by adding high-quality proprietary elements (Aqua) by making use of your existing strengths (GUI design)
   
3. Give back to the community (Darwin)
   
4. Profit?

Of course, you can't attribute all (or even most) of Apple's financial success to their OSS endeavours, but (and I speak from personal experience here) OSX has changed Macs from cute little toys to a viable and intiguing alternative to x86 hardware. And if Rendezvous takes off, not only will it be a boon for the community, but Apple could do quite nicely as well. In the end though, Apple might be a pretty unique case: Apple is primarily a hadware vendor, and Apple's involvement with OSS primarily adds value to the hardware it sells (I'll buy a TiBook because it's the only game in town for running OSX), and there aren't a heck of a lot of hardware vendors who are in a position to duplicate what Apple is doing.

Re:what is it good for?

[KidSock]

Without Rendezvous, you have several options-- all of them unappealing. You might start with some kind of application specific configuration file format

Why does it have to be application specific? Like using Rendezvous is less "specific".

and a cobbled-together system for distributing such data around to all the hosts in the system.

What's wrong with TFTP or NFS or any other network filesystem?

You might instead store such network configuration in some directory server on the network, like DNS

DNS is a directory server?

or LDAP or some kind of custom front end

So Rendezvous has a non-custom front end? That's not good. If my processes are specific to the particular problem domain (probably unique if it demands a "distributed system") then I would rather have a "front end" to match.

to some kind of evil database backend. Either way, you quickly encounter what we veterans like to call "the cache coherency problem,"

Then what do you call it? Because using a database sounds like a very good way to maintain cache coherency. You would rather state be strewn across the network?

i.e. the information in the directory must be consistent at all times with the actual state of the processes in the system.

So Rendezvous is going to guarantee state consistency between processes better than a database backend? It was compared to NetBIOS for cripes sake. I think you've made a pretty stong case against using Rendezvous for a "distributed system". My impression is that other than negotiating IP and multicast addresses a Rendezvous client is otherwise application specific.

Rendezvous is used to setup printers and wireless devices, not orchestrate large scale distributed processes.

Re:Make Rendezvous Open Source!

[Draoi]

Why is the APSL 'restrictive'? It's been given the blessing [opensource.org] of esr and the OSI team. I'm sure rms has issues with it, but hey ...

Apple have adopted open standards in just about everything they've done without trying to damage them a la M$ & Kerberos. I've seen plenty of Embrace but absolutely no Extend nor Extinguish. Please point some out ...

They've based their entire OS core on BSD/Mach and then went on to release the sources, including those of the usual services. I just downloaded bootpd a minute ago, BTW.

It Would be Nice...

[reallocate]

...if the so-called "community" would spend less time playing wannabe lawyers arguing about licensing minutiae and spend more time developing new applications for users. The users you need to attract have never heard of Richard Stallman, buy shrinkwrapped software (including Linux, if and when they do use it), and judge an OS by the quality and range of applications available to run on it.

Endless iterations of the same traditional Unix toolset, tools for the server side, and attempts to mimic Office and the Windows interface, won't cut it. Be imaginative.

When I've tried to explain Linux to people who make corporate buying decisions, their questions boil down to: Why buy a cheap knock-off when the real thing is available?

(Please try to refrain from the usual /. insults to users as too stupid to know what's good for them. In reality, they decide your future.)

Re:uPnP

[SuperKendall]

I like your post but I have one comment - I think Mac users (hard to say for sure since I've only been one about ten months) do not want things to work "The Mac Way". Rather, they wimply want them to work without fiddling!! Or perhaps that is "The Mac Way", which is a sad commentary on the state of computing in general.

Re:what is it good for?

[j h woodyatt]

You raise some points that call for rebuttal. (If you see me ignoring them, it means I think they're not worth rebutting.)

> What's wrong with TFTP or NFS or any other network filesystem?

Ever tried to deploy a distributed NFS server? By that I mean: if the primary NFS server goes down, a secondary automatically and transparently serves as a replacement without the NFS client ever having to be redirected? Such things exist. None of them are cheap.

> Then what do you call it? Because using a database sounds like a very good
> way to maintain cache coherency. You would rather state be strewn across the network?

You *already* have state strewn across the network, i.e. the availability states of the various processes that comprise the distributed system. Why try to maintain a cache of that state in a database when the processes can use the network to discover and locate one another directly?

Have you every tried to deploy a replicated database manager? Every transaction on the database must be ACID for this to work with high reliability. (ACID is an acronym, stands for Atomic Consistent Independent and Durable.) Easy to do with a monolithic database manager. Much harder to do with a replicated system. Again, such things exist. None of them are cheap.

My point: distributed systems with more single points of failure provide less reliability than systems with fewer. Rendezvous eliminates an important single point failure mode.

--

Re:Apple: The Community Company?

[MoneyT]

Why don't all the great OSS developers out there, who claim to be so wonderful at their abilities to create nearly identical products make their own Quick Time? I'm not trying to bash on people here or be a troll, but on one hand, you're complaining abou thow evil corporate software is, yet on the other hand, your demending a Quick Time port from Apple.

mac vs pc price comparison is irrelevant

[valmont]

At the end, i look at what the computer platform lets me do.

I started out as a rabid mac user, i did a lot of multimedia stuff in the early days, some time around the Quadra 840AV and a few years into the first PowerPC machines. Macs were fun and i could do what i wanted, which would have been way harder on PC platforms.

then when i went into hardcore web applications development and entered the corporate world, well, as cool as BBEdit is, i couldn't justify to my boss to get an expensive Mac Laptop over the DELL everyone gets. Win2K served its purpose, then DELL hardware and win2k started freaking out, randomly freezing the mouse, corrupting sectors on my hard drive. I lost *a lot* of time.

Then Apple came up with unix at the core of its OS. now as a developer, UNIX makes sense. my dell was crap. so my boss got me my early 400mhz TiBook, with OS 10.1. beautiful thing. it never ever crashes, i never need to reboot it aside from software upgrades, it does what i need it to and just WORKS.

What I'm trying to get at is:

How much are you willing to pay for "It Just Works". Frankly, I will wholeheartedly shell out an extra $1000 on an apple system running OS X, over any PC equivalent.

Why? Because:

1) eventhough linux occupies a special place in my heart while i'm running LinuxPPCQ4200 on an old PPC 7500 pci mac at home, it's still not the perfect desktop OS. It's getting very close with office suites, browsers, email clients, but it's not quite there yet.

2) there is no fucking way in hell i'll ever run windoz for any serious computing, in light of all the security holes this thing still has. Should i forget to disable netbios i don't wanna get fucked by script kiddies. plus the SSL issues, IE5/6+ scripting holes, i mean we could go on and on.

3) in the end i want an platform running an OS which has it all. and that's Mac OS X.

Until OS X came along, i'd say "fair enuff, macos is nice but it's really not all that powerful, not really enterprise-grade material and out-of-this-world networking. you can't really hack into it because you can't get command line. it's not super-stable. provided you've got good hardware, a clean install and some luck, you'll get great stability out of win2k. All in all, provided it doesn't crash on me, i can do more things pertinent to my job in win2k than macos, such as running cygwin".

But since mac os 10.1 came out, and now 10.2, in my book there is no other solution for serious computing, for doing work under tight deadlines, for which you are getting paid non-negligeable amounts of money, and where your ass is on the line, i know OS X's got my back.

Don't get me wrong i'm not saying apple systems are good for everyone, they *are* more expensive.

It boils down to this:

How much is dependability worth to you? How much is your time worth to you? to me, priceless.

Oh another thing worth noting ... apple's "digital lifestyle" concept works very well. i bought a sony digital camera, an ipod, i don't even own a dvd player but my TiBook does play DVDs so i buy DVDs. apple's iSoftwareSuite freakin' rocks. iPhoto totally ownz.

I've installed GNOME and Oroborus, i play Tetris in xemacs under OS X.

Re:w00t!

[theCat]

How would Apple benefit? Networking Macs in a Windows environment is currently a pain, and only gets easier if you buy a utility. This certainly creates a barrier for Apple to get a toe in the door of M$-only shops. If M$ ever adopts this technology then Macs and Windows boxes will have an easier time relating, and a few Macs will break into some really hard turf. M$ is not chasing Apple, but they are chasing Linux starting in the server closet. M$ is unlikely to adopt Rendezvous technology until it shows up in Linux and other server systems, then M$ will be all over it so as not to get locked out of the server closet. Linux is open sourced, so this critical networking issue for Apple must be an open source solution as well. Linux gets Rendezvous, Windows chases Linux, the corporate network gets Rendezvoused as a whole, and Apple hops on the LAN with everyone else. QED. ;-)