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Apple Businesses

How Can I Promote Open Source On The Macintosh? 179

Posted by Cliff from the stuff-to-read-and-contemplate dept.
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."
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How Can I Promote Open Source on the MAC? More

How Can I Promote Open Source on the MAC?

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  • Do it yourself... (Score:4)

    by drudd ( 43032 ) on Monday July 03, 2000 @07:55AM (#961479)
    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? (Score:4)

    by linuxonceleron ( 87032 ) on Monday July 03, 2000 @07:56AM (#961480) Homepage
    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? (Score:4)

    by AtariDatacenter ( 31657 ) on Monday July 03, 2000 @07:59AM (#961481)
    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?)

  • Like in any other businesses, there must be a demand for something beforce a it will do something about it. Get all your friends together, advocate, and hopefully earn more fallowers. When your voice is loud enough, and only then, will big companies listen. Most of the PC companies are too stubborn, lets hope Mac companies are a little more open minded.

  • Free Software (Score:3)

    by Dungeon Dweller ( 134014 ) on Monday July 03, 2000 @08:00AM (#961483)
    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.
  • Hey... why? I think this... i'm a MacUser for several years... and i see more most finnished software than form Windows and Other platarforms... i never had problems using mac... i think the key of future of sowftware will not selling software, but yes will be doing support.
  • Apple Sauce? Useful for calculating Apple Pi.
  • promoting open source is as easy as writing something useful, and letting people out there know it's for free. Everyone searching for a tool will appreciate having this great useful find. (if you deliver junk for free, however, that's usually when people say I don't need an orange peeler/pencil sharpener!) Catch my drift?

    CAD, kicked, good [cadfu.com]
  • The idea that companies will base their business strategies around selling support for their software (witness all the Linux companies) is kind of scary. Why? What incentive do they have to create high quality, easy to use applications? None. An easy to use or configure application means that their sole source of revenue is effectively dried up.

    That's probably the biggest thing going for commercial apps. Companies expect to earn their money selling a product that doesn't require much support. There's actually money to be made as a result of the development process itself.
  • sadly I haven't been able to go to 'The Hack' for some years but IMHO it still rates as one of the most fun conferences there is - the numbers are small, everyone stays in the same hotel - sessions start at lunch and run 'till midnight (except for the business track which occurs 9-12 while everyone's asleep) - there's rows of machines to play on - and a contest to produce the best 'hack' at the show - and completely worthless (and highly prized) prizes for the winners ....

    Sadly the Linux conferences seem much more like the big PC shows rather than the more intimate feel of the Hack - I think it's more like Usenix was back in the mid 80s

  • Re:Development Costs? (Score:5)

    by gwernol ( 167574 ) on Monday July 03, 2000 @08:08AM (#961489)

    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.

  • If you look at all the proprietary operating systems, their community is very different from
    the BSD/Linux community.
    Even the BeOS-community which seem to be rather
    enthusiastic is still mostly closed source.
    They have some OS apps, but the sophisticated ones, the ones that compete with Gimp and Kword,
    is mostly commercial.
    I'm not really sure that OSX could change this
    for Mac.
    OSX while opensource at the core, is still highly
    proprietary in the areas that are really visible
    to the user (User interface, tools, etc.).
    Also consider who is likely to be buying a Macintosh. Considering the price, it is probably
    mostly graphics, music and video -professionals
    for the good stuff (G4's), and "average Joe" for the iMacs.
    This doesn't create a very big base for an OSS-community. The windows market is HUGE,
    but the windows OSS-community is remarkably small.
    If Apple can release some sort of API that makes
    software easily portable between the MacOS and
    BSD/Linux, this whole situation could change.

    Finally, I just want to say that I'm not trying
    to bash either MacOS, Apple or their users.
    If someone gave me a brand new G4, I would be
    more than thrilled, but the price of them makes
    sure that I'll probably stick to cheap x86-hardware.

    MacOS X for x86? Hmm :-)
  • 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.

  • Re:Am I trolling, or am I serious? (Score:3)

    by Shadow Knight ( 18694 ) on Monday July 03, 2000 @08:11AM (#961492) Homepage
    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

  • For scripting and RAD there's AppleScript and RealBasic, respectively. And, of course, as mentioned, OS X will come with Apple's ProjectBuilder IDE and support all the Unix tools like make, gcc, gdb, etc.

  • ..with current mac developments, according to most of the reactions I've read to his talk. His comments to the effect that, Macs have good GUIs but need a better OS seem uninformed given the state of OsX development.. I think the negative reaction came from Mac developers who are well ahead in their OsX development who didn't appreciate being told to suck eggs by someone who hadn't done their homework. As well, Raymond's discounting the idea of the GUI as just a nice widget for users comes across as ignorant; the Mac interface (which followed PARC and led Windows) has set the standard for usability, which should be the FIRST priority of an OS, not just an add-on (with respect to projects like GNOME). It may be that the windows and mouse interface needs a replacement (i think so) and maybe the OsX Aqua interface goes some way to a rethink; maybe not. I prefer something like touch screens still, over voice access (i can type a CLI about ten times faster thanit would take to to explain it), but how do you deal with the messy fingerprints?

  • Spreading communism to the Mac... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What?!?!?! You mean Mac programmers want PAID for their work!?!? What an outrage!

    Suggested Reading: The Bizarre Cathedral by Eric S. Raymond and the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx

  • But it isn't true.
    Besides. The GPL makes an exception for linking
    against so called "system libraries".
    This means that non-GPL-programs can link against
    stuff like glibc.

    GCC is GPL. It exists for BeOS, Solaris, Irix, etc, and they are all proprietary.
    On the opposite side, Linux has plenty of
    closed source applications, like Applixware,
    Compupic, etc..

  • Re:Lamenting the demise of Hypercard (Score:3)

    by gwernol ( 167574 ) on Monday July 03, 2000 @08:17AM (#961497)

    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".

  • That's not necessarily true. Darwin is a very good first step for a large corporation. At least Apple is much more open about their OS than Microsoft has ever been. Microsoft is probably the worst at promoting nothing but proprietary crap.

    On the plus side for open source is Darwin. The fundamentals of the BSD kernel are open sourced allowing a lot of space for people to manuever with OS X. It looks promising.

    Apple has always had a loyal following and a disproportionatly large amount of freeware/shareware companies doing great things for it. There are some fantastic shareware games for the Macintosh. I think the Mac is probably waiting for a push toward open source. Maybe Mac OS X will be that shove.
  • I'm a former mac guy who turned into a unix guy when I started programming backends for websites.

    When I was just using macs I thought of open source stuff as just geeky stuff I didn't care about. I think if someone could have properly demonstrated to me the advantages of the model as it pertains to product quality I might have been converted faster.

    Right now, when I think of the dream mac OSS initiative, it would be an open source alternative to Photoshop which would eventually surpass the quality of Adobe's program. Maybe you coul explain to people "Look, Dmoz.org kicks yahoo's ass because they have a zillion people all helping, imagine how fast a great free photoshop could be created with all the smart mac folks out there?", and then explain how great Apache really is, and why it could only have been developed using OSS. I know that right now that would totally convince and excite me, but I can't say if it'd fire up a mac guy. Mac programming is a completely different culture far removed from Open Source.

    I guess though the trick really is to get a critical mass of mac programmers not just interested but excited about the possibilities of open source. If you can convince them what great work could be done with open source, you've got em!

  • And I've wondered this myself. Frankly, I get pissed off when I see someone ask $5 for an AppleScript that I could write in 20 minutes. There are a few open source Mac programs out there (Gerry's ICQ, Mactella...), but it's mostly stuff that has its origin on other platforms.

    Why haven't I written anything myself? Well, I haven't been in the game too long, and I haven't yet gotten past the "I wish there was a program that did this..." stage yet, and I just don't have a lot of spare time. If I was going to write an Open Source program, it would probably be for Linux or Mac OS X. Memory management on the Mac is kind of painful (damn handles).

    What would it take to get me to write for Mac OS? Well, I wouldn't bother with Mac OS 9, since it's on its way out. Mac OS X is appealing, but it would really help if Cocoa was cross-platform (I know it is, but Apple won't license it for Windows any more). I think Mac OS X will see a major increase in the amount of open source development, especially since a large portion of the OS is open source.

  • NewsWatcher - Macintosh Open Source success story (Score:3)

    by opus ( 543 ) on Monday July 03, 2000 @08:19AM (#961501)
    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.)
    --
  • 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?

  • Sorry (Score:1)

    by tbo ( 35008 )
    Goddamit, sorry about the italics. I stupidly closed the italics tag with a /A tag. At least it wasn't a blink tag :-)
  • there have also been a couple of ports of GCC to run under MPW
  • I seem to remember there is a GCC module for MPW,
    www.funet.fi/pub/mac/programming/ [funet.fi] (read 00Index). this thing (programming FAQ for Mac) [faqs.org] might answer some questions too. If you want a MacOS (non-MacOS X), it is always possible to get. - Try search on Google (or any other search engine), and you will find it quickly)

  • Mac open soure software catalog (Score:3)

    by disarray ( 108 ) on Monday July 03, 2000 @08:23AM (#961506)

    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
  • As an attendee of MacHack for several years, I would not take the tension between Eric Raymond and several other other attendees to reflect all Macintosh developers in general. Eric made many points, which everyone agreed with, but when it came to discussing the economics of open-source vs. closed-source proprietary applications, people questioned whether Eric defend his views in the marketplace.
    The Macintosh community is on the verge of a transition from the old MacOS 9 to the new Mac OS 10 (X), which is unix based, but developers are just now getting their hands on the API's released at WWDC. When MacOSX is shipped with new machines, beginning early next year, probably January, I expect that many apps on MacOS9 will be "carbonized", so they will run well with the new OS. So far, Apple has placed OS Core, Darwin, under open-source licensing, and has a team of 4 people overseeing the project.
    I would expect that other projects, e.g. web browsers, will be ripe for open-source, but remember that Apple will still use a lot of proprietary graphic libraries, from Quartz to Quicktime. In addition, much of the NextStep frameworks will be available via the Cocoa libraries, but be prepared to learn Objective-C
    in order to use it.
    Unfortunately, it looks like that C++ will not have an open framework available, outside of Metrowerks's PowerPlant. Most new apps will be written in Java or Objective C if they use Cocoa, and will use the Carbon frameworks, if they use C++.
    I expect the transition to MacOS X and Unix will take at least 3-6 months for most conventional apps, although the effort to make a Carbon app will be less than expected. If open - source projects want to be successful, they need to mobilize their resources quickly, and work effectively with user groups.
    As for tools, most of Apple's tools are based on gcc, and the other GNU tools, with GUI based IDE tools built along side. If you to get involved, sign up for a Select developer membership, sign your NDA for now, and apple will get you all the tools you need to get started. Codewarrior remains an important tool for Mac, but Visual Studio has very little value on the present or future platform.
    The advice I have is to remember the golden Rule when dealing with other developers, as everyone has mouths to feed and bills to pay.
  • I have a little site [jmac.org] that lists, describes, and links to a bunch of open-source projects available for the current MacOS. Starting the site and getting it linked from Macintouch [macintouch.com] was all it took for me to contribute my little bit of open source advocacy to the Mac community, and I strongly recommend similar routes for people with messages of their own. It's easier than you may think.

    In the year I've been maintaining the site I've received enough feedback from people to convince me that open-source projects have as much of a place in closed-source OSes as open ones. It's all good.

    J
    MacOS Open Source [jmac.org]
  • "How do I convince a Mac geek to become an Open Source Mac geek?"

    Funny how times have changed....did'nt apple have
    a pirate flag on there building for a while?
  • Has this 'game' been written? If not, I'm going to toss a clone together tonight, if you don't mind..

    It's at least as entertaining as paranoia!!

  • I submitted a thoughtful TidBits article [tidbits.com] on this subject, as well as an Andy Ihnatko article I can't find again. Both were rejected -- a week ago! (There's also a MacWeek interview with ESR [zdnet.com].) Didn't occur to me to frame them as an Ask Slashdot ;-)

    Anyway, on the subject, there's a long history of freeware for the Mac, frequently with source available. I think that FSF-style free software never caught on because of the difficulty of Mac programming and the lack of good free development tools.

  • The average Mac user does dink around with his/her box once and a while, but the environment is not suited for real tweaking (yet - OS X looks sweet [except for it being COMMERCIAL :{ ]). The *NIX world is built around tweaking -- using perl and shell scripts for EVERYTHING, for example. The glut of STANDARD (and usually free) tools has made "programming" (even with shell scripts and piping stuff through grep) a fact of day to day life. Mac users live in a static desktop world where Apple has placed simplicity / ease of use over power in many cases (not that Macs aren't good machines - I like 'em). The point I'm trying to make is -- Mac users are fairly apathetic about their desktop experience. It has changed very little (in comparision to desktops on Windows and UNIX machines) since its conception -- honestly its a pretty good design for novices. Mac users don't expect to change the way things work. (Now I'm referring to the Evangelista-types without trying to avoid using a cult metaphor so this doesn't get modded down as flamebait) They assume that Apple has their best interests in mind.

    There. See If I made ANY sense.
  • The reason, as I see it, that open source thrives on linux is because a large proportion of the linux community are coders. Certainly we aint all kernel hackers but most people can tweak bash and perl scripts to get them running.

    I've only been using linux a lot for under a year now and already I have been required to learn quite a lot about how it works, just to make it work. As such i'm in a far better position to write or contribute to open source.

    On the other hand I've been using macs since 1986 (age 6 :) and even still dont know very much about how it works. Sure I can knock up simple stuff in RealBasic and i've played with Microsoft Basic for Macintosh from the outset, but I still dont fancy coding anything complex on it. Added to that before an ordinary Mac user will accept open source software it'll have to be a fully graphical application... I used to hate it when things ran in a console like window.

    The requirement of having a graphical OS must surely push up development times, and costs, and hence make open source less attractive.

    Added to this, mac users are used to paying over the odds for their hardware and many dont mind paying for software too.

    Computers seem to be something of a trade off between cost and ease of use.

    Macs are comparatively expensive but at age 8 I could upgrade the operating system in total confidence.

    It took me another 3 years to feel happy doing that with a PC, yet it took me til age 18 until I could fully configure and recompile the linux kernel.

    However having said all that, I expect that the advent of OsX will make it easier to port existing linux/bsd software to this platform and by then any coders still left on the mac platform (sorry guys but my Powerbook 100 is getting a bit dusty) will be able to add cutesy aqua interfaces and it'll all be good :)
  • $5 for a script that would have taken you 20 minutes to write is a pretty good deal, considering in all likelyhood that you get paid much more that $15/hour. That person just saved you a nice chunk of time so that you can continue being productive and work on your $50/hour project.

  • Hmmm... replying to my own message. I must be cracking up ;-)

    Anyway, I forgot to mention Java. The Macintosh Runtime for Java SDK includes all the usual Java development tools (javac, javah etc.). You can download it for free here [apple.com]. You should also check out the MRJ developer's home page here [apple.com]. It includes links to a number of freeware and open source Java projects for the Mac.Java also lets Mac developers take advantage of Open Source software developed for other platforms, of course.

  • How Can I Promote Open Source On The Macintosh?

    It seems to have something to do with programming backends [goatse.cx] or something. Friends of the he-haunch, anyone? that fits the whole Mac scene real nice.

    Ok, ok. I realize that it is getting ridiculous, trolling everything in goddamn sight, but slashdot needs a lesson to be taught - They shouldn't sue the frickin readers, folks. Anyone notice that trolling ratio has been upwards of 15:2 as opposed to the usual 5:2 from before osm went silent? is this rate climbing? when does it stop? Will any of you fall for my ratio numbers? correct me! correct me! correct me! make a troll happy today.
  • 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.
    How can this be? The GCC is GPL'd. Can you simply get a copy from a paying member of the Apple Developer Program (ADP herein)? If Apple required ADP members to sign an agreement disallowing them from distributed the GCC port, then Apple didn't have any legal right under copyright law to give those ADP members copies of it, per section 6 of the GPL.

    Or maybe I misunderstand what you mean by "gcc-based".

  • Well, I wouldn't use it to replace apps that I would write in a full power programming language, but for simple little apps things that you wanted to put together in an hour or 2, or presentations, it couldn't be beat (excel will always eat hypercard's dust).
  • Huh? Steve normally fails to get it. He was opposed to 3.5" floppies (the engineers pushed them through, impressively enough); more than 64KB of RAM in the original Mac; networks; laser printers; well-documented, accessable hardware; Hypercard (as noted); IIRC color; and there are probably a fair number of other things I'm forgetting as well.

    He's a nutcase, he's just really persuasive.
  • Not really. But it seems somehow strange to me, that Apple doesnt make it clear enough for its end users how much MacOS X depends on free software. E.f. just look how bash introduces itself. You realize imemdiately, that it is some kind of unix shell, but you have to look twice to see, that is is actually bash.

    The same is obvious when you look at some Apple Software like WebObjects (it sucks!): It includes gcc, gdb, bash... but here gcc is called the "Apple Compiler" or something like that... Disgusting!

    Mac OS is actually a free OS with a proprietary GUI, and Apple should honour this. Perhaps there are also some legal implications about this. Perhaps the FSF could find out. Remember: A few years ago the FSF tried to boycott Apple for their "Look and feel is copyrigted"-approach.

  • No flames here...it just occurred to me that in your /. user prefs you can omit any authors you choose. Think I'll go zap Cliff right now.
  • Evangelise OS X...

    Seriously... as a Mac fan and LinuxPPC user myself, I've noticed that Apple, these last couple of years is getting more respect... especially from the part of the geek community who usually would have, a few years ago, dismissed Macs as toys.

    And I think that OS X is a big part of this. Aqua "gooiness" (all defined in editable XML files... first thing I'll do is put the widgets back where they're supposed to be... to hell with the "traffic light" model) aside... OS X really IS the first attempt to market a Unix OS to mass consumers. And I, for one, am definately fascinated to see how it turns out... if it will REALLY be so easy to use that you'll NEVER have to see the command line if you don't WANT to. I'm doublely impressed that the command line WILL be available when I WANT it...

    Choice, as they say, is good.

    And we'll have perl, gcc, java and all the other "traditional" development tools, PLUS some pretty nifty stuff from NeXT... projectbuilder and the "bundle" application model!!! Cool stuff, I would say... it sure looks like OS X is gonna be very "hackable".

    Add to that the fact that, with the rise of Linux, and the forituitous actions of the DOJ, microsoft is rapidly losing its credibility in the "windows r00l3zzz apple dr001ez unix bl0wz" FUD department. And, as such, gates is losing it's ability to propagate his ever-so-popular "anyone who has ever used a Mac is an idiot" propaganda.

    It's also worth noting that Apple is becoming (albiet, slowly) more and more "open"... Darwin is open, Quicktime server is open, OS X reportedly does not require the infamous boot ROM.... (tho I don't know if the Darwin liscense meets RMS's strict standards... but then who appointed him open source God? I like ESR's fork of open source philosophy better myself).

    Indeed, when Apple was "Steve and Steve", they were "open source" fifteen years BEFORE Linux and the popularity of open source Unix-like OSs. The Apple II used to come with complete schematics (good enough that you could use them to build your own Apple II from parts), commented assembly for the ROMs and a disassembler in case there were undocumented changes!!! And Woz freely gave out schematics to all of his designs to anyone who asked. But then came the suits...

    (I find it particular ironic that Be whines about Apple not giving them the G* specs (FUD anyway, they're available from Motorola (enjoying that intel money jean?)), when it was jean louis gassee who, after being insturmental in the expulsion of the Steves, was the biggest OPPONENT of Apple licensing its technology)

    john
    Resistance is NOT futile!!!

    Haiku:
    I am not a drone.
    Remove the collective if

  • How do I convince a Mac geek to become an Open Source Mac geek?

    Maybe forget about the geeks and concentrate on Joe Average user. Let him get dependent on some program that runs under MacOS 7/8/9 and then for some reason breaks under MacOS X (not that far fetched, considering how different X is from 7/8/9). When he can't get it fixed because the vendor is out of business, or the vendor wants to charge him an arm and a leg for an "upgrade" that doesn't have any extra functionality (except that it works under MacOS X) then perhaps that user will begin to understand the value of having source.


    ---

  • Huh? Steve normally fails to get it. He was opposed to 3.5" floppies (the engineers pushed them through, impressively enough); more than 64KB of RAM in the original Mac; networks; laser printers; well-documented, accessable hardware; Hypercard (as noted); IIRC color; and there are probably a fair number of other things I'm forgetting as well.

    He's a nutcase, he's just really persuasive.

    Well, speaking as someone who has worked closely with Steve for a number of years, I can say this is just not true. You are confusing focus with "getting it". Most of the technologies you mention Steve didn't want because he was focusing on a particular product at the time (either that, or you're just plain wrong - for example about laser printers). By focusing on a specific goal he often had to nix other people's pet projects.

    Now, you may not agree with the decisions he makes, but then you are probably not the type of customer he is trying to build a product for. I have always found that he is very insightful and really on top of the technology. HyperCard was one of the few times I've seen him completely fail to see the potential of a product.



  • I think that one of the major things holding back opensource development on Mac is the lack of readily available _free_ compilers. Sure there's Apple's MPW but it doesn't come standard with the MacOS. How can you expect your users to download the 21 megs worth of MPW just to compile your software. I don't mind downloading source for an application under linux because it's simply:


    > tar xvfz sourcefile.tar.gz
    > cd sourcefile/
    > ./configure;make;sudo make install


    Simply because I already have gcc installed with my distro. However, under MacOS it's a much larger headache - especially if the user doesn't have MPW (which is 98% of Mac users anyway). Just my $0.02
  • Reliability before usability, ALWAYS.

    Both NT and the original MacOS followed the "Usability, then reliability" devlopment model. They both had horrendous reliability, and nothing short of a complete rewrite can fix either.

    OSX IS a complete rewrite, and despite what you say, the development model is "Reliability then usability." The reliability comes from using an existing (BSD/Mach) core.

    When you take a close look, OSX is exactly what you knock GNOME for being - An add-on layered above a UNIX OS. It just happens that the layers Apple has added to BSD are a lot more polished than GNOME, but Apple did NOT say, "How can we make our OS reliable.", but they said, "How can we make this reliable OS easy to use?"

  • My guess is that there's a lot more to it than GCC. GCC would be redistributable, but other things wouldn't. Include files, libraries, etc. GCC by itself may not be enough to get hello.c working.


    ---
  • Linix, though a typo, is actually a better name than linux. it devolved itself from MINIX not MINUX, right?. it is actually the best correction to a lousy name EVER.

    Besides, to the American Eye, Linux is often pronounced Line-ucks, not leeenush as the Scandanavians would have you believe. By using two "i"s, this would make it SO MUCH SIMPLER TO PRONOUNCE. but I guess linush isn't about ease-of-use or universal accepted pronunciation, is it?

  • How can this be? The GCC is GPL'd. Can you simply get a copy from a paying member of the Apple Developer Program (ADP herein)? If Apple required ADP members to sign an agreement disallowing them from distributed the GCC port, then Apple didn't have any legal right under copyright law to give those ADP members copies of it, per section 6 of the GPL.

    Sorry, I should have been clearer. The gcc and other GNU-based development tools that Apple ships with Mac OS X are part of the Darwin core. This is Open Source and freely downloadable here [apple.com]. This can be freely distributed, along with the rest of the Darwin project (basically the Mach kernel and BSD software layer of Mac OS X). The full Mac OS X Developer Preview that you get with a paid ADC membership includes the complete software layers (Cocoa, Carbon, Quartz etc.) that live on top of Darwin.

    Or maybe I misunderstand what you mean by "gcc-based".

    I was unclear. Sorry.

  • Mac developers begin as Mac users. They are used to the Mac way of doing things, just as windows, Linux, BSD, BeOS, etc. developers begin as users and are used to the practices of the general communities that support their platforms. Mac developers, therefore, see the projects that are successful on the Mac and write code in a similar fashion, for the most part. The OS becomes tied to the method of software development, and the two will generally go together. When you convince someone that a different standard/model is a Good Idea(tm) it's quite possible that you will also convince him or her that the operating system developed under that model is inheirently the best. In this way, Mac developers convinced that open source is the way will go to an open operating system and thus cease to be mac users.

  • a Open Source skeptic (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There's no reason to believe that Open Source produces the best software. Just become some Best-of-Class software is the Open Source, that doesn't mean that all Open Source is best of class. For example, there isn't a single Open Source OS that is genuinely consumer friendly. But consumer friendly OSes have been around for over 15 years.

    The Mac developers were extremely skeptical because ESR didn't give them a reasonable business model should the Dev's open their code. If they do that, then how will they make a living? Providing Services, etc, is a weak and half-assed answer.

    Both Open Source and Proprietary code have their place, and both have produced quality software.
  • I've looked into starting Mac versions of one or two open source projects, and I've heard of similar problems from others. The problem I had was that open source projects often make assumptions about the platform, despite the goal of being platform independent. Like they assume you can have arguments passed from the command line, or they assume you're working with a sockets based networking architecture. The Mac often doesn't follow the same conventions as other platforms for a variety of reasons (some valid, some not).

    Further, when the tools do exist to do the porting (you *can* have a console app that will prompt you for arguments, and you *can* use GUSI, a sockets based networking API), it usually means putting a further burden on either the developer or the user in order to get the port to work. As a developer, I might not mind so much, even if it does involve learning an additional way of doing something I already know how to do, but as a user, most wouldn't bother learning anything new.

    Every barrier that gets in the way means you lose another large percentage of your remaining audience.

    -D
  • Shameless plug: Cannons and Castles [phroggy.com] is a HyperCard port of the old Apple II game. Largely done as an exercise in pushing HyperCard to its limits, and of course for the nostalgia of bringing back a game I loved in Junior High, but also to demonstrate some of the power of HyperCard to those infuriating masses who think it's a glorified Rolodex. Remember, the number one best-selling computer game in history was created in HyperCard (not that mine is comparable, but hey...).

    If anyone still develops with HyperCard, and is interested in comparing notes, etc. I wouldn't mind finding a kindred spirit. :-)

    --

  • Mac OS X GCC sources are available (Score:3)

    by stanshebs ( 171914 ) on Monday July 03, 2000 @09:00AM (#961534)
    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
    shebs@apple.com

  • Umm... OSX is finally catching up with where every Unix has been for quite some time in terms of technical capability. On top of that OSX is not out there yet, so 99.9% of Mac users are using the very crufty MacOS 9 or less. ESR's comments about the state of the OS seem accurate to me, and are consistent with most Mac developers I've talked with (John Carmack would seem to agree as well).

    As far as the GUI thing goes.... MacOS X is built on a Mach/BSD kernel, similar in many ways to Digital Unix. However, there can be little question that part of MacOS X was a porting of the MacOS GUI to a modern OS kernel. So it is very MUCH an add on. Indeed, this is the way it should be, otherwise MacOS X will inevitably be outdated when touch screens, voice access, etc. come in to the fore. Indeed, MacOS could arguably be described as NeXTStep 5.0 with a MacOS look-and-feel. Either way, the kernel of MacOS X is indeed a Mach kernel, and it's safe to say that usability was not the first priority when that thing was built. ;-)
  • In what way is gerry's open?
    I have never seen any source, just looked at the page, nothing there...
  • >the FSF tried to boycott Apple for their "Look
    >and feel is copyrigted"-approach.

    .... that I'm not too fond of RMS's fork of the open source (or in his case, free software) philosophy.

    Not that he doesn't mesn well, I'm sure that he does. But it seems like RMS gets so wraped up in the "all software must be free" aspect of his philosophy that he ignores the "big picture".

    Remember who Apple was struggleing against in that suit? If Apple had won, it's quite possible that windows would have been stillborn. Think about it... a world with no "gates in a sweater" commercials, no win95/98/2000 hype, no outlook viruses, no explorer integrated into windows, no ability to "embrace, extend, and extinguish", no halloween papers, no ability to steal the work of any potential competitor and call it his own, and possibly, even no microsoft at all!!!

    Imagine where the computer world would be, were gates not holding us back. Where would we be if he did not have the monopoly power to supress any superior technology that might compete with one of his own offerings?

    There's and old saying that RMS might want to look up... "The enemy of the enemy is your friend".

    john
    Resistance is NOT futile!!!

    Haiku:
    I am not a drone.
    Remove the collective if

  • If Apple can release some sort of API that makes software easily portable between the MacOS and BSD/Linux, this whole situation could change.

    They were working on Cocoa for Windows, and there was a definite possibility of porting it to other operating systems as well. The project has been Steved. I'm pissed off. I actually wrote Apple an e-mail expressing my annoyance on this issue.

    For you non-Apple people, "Steved" means a (usually cool) project was axed by Steve Jobs, usually for no apparent good reason.

    --

  • Paying for tiny tools -- Macintosh culture? (Score:3)

    by SamHill ( 9044 ) on Monday July 03, 2000 @09:07AM (#961539)

    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.

  • *ahem*

    Myst was a Hypercard stack.
    --
  • Portability is an issue in software development, because it has a strong potential to decrease development costs. This can be achieved in many cases by using portable libs wherever applicable. For GUIs wxWindows [wxwindows.org] could be a good choice. Also the OS libs of Mac OS X make portable development easier.

    These portable libs are free libs too. So portability should be a strong argument for free software to convince mac geeks.

  • project builder... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    should hopefully kill MPW off, once and for all.

    Betas of this software have been shown around the valley for months now, and it looks quite promising. (If apple was really really smart, they would BSD/GPL this puppy, and make some friends in the hacker/free software developer community. As an added benefit, all the apps developed with it could then target linux and mac os X.

    Rule number one for radicals: don't let the forces of evil divide and conquer...

  • Right now, when I think of the dream mac OSS initiative, it would be an open source alternative to Photoshop which would eventually surpass the quality of Adobe's program.

    Why Photoshop? It's expensive, true, but the features and stability are excellent. Plus, it's my impression that free projects work best when they're building software that developers build and understand. That's why the GIMP isn't competitive for print work and why nobody working on it or using it cares. To my mind, the graphics professionals using Photoshop on Macs aren't going to start messing with some new toy and aren't going to give developers the feedback to make something really useful.

    I'd say the number one priority should be a free web browser. Fortunately, there already is one [mozilla.org] in progress. The Mac version is really lagging, though. It needs lots of help from testers and developers.

  • Mac OS X is not GPL. Darwin is not GPL. It's all released under a BSD-ish (sort of) license. The operating system itself does not include any GNU code at all (or at least it's not supposed to).

    However, GPL'd utilities such as bash, gzip, gnutar, gcc, etc. can be bundled with the operating system, as long as it's clear that they're not part of the operating system.

    Apple Legal is actually being very careful about not breaking the GPL, from what I hear.

    --

  • With all due respect. Myst is great and all, but I could envision putting that together in hypercard much more than I could say... Quake. All in all, I love hypercard (believe it or not, I've written a lot in it, even fairly complex programs. Still, there will be A HIT. I'm not for ANY sacrifice when processor time is essential.
  • I forgot one other point - if you want to promote open source development for Mac OS X, look at the toolkits. Ports of tcl/tk, gtk, fltk, etc will enable many already-mostly-portable apps to come up with little extra effort. I'm personally working on Loki's SDL (http://www.libsdl.org) and it's now far enough along to play SDL Doom on OS X, though it's still lacking sound.

    To learn more about OS X porting, look at Apple's developer pages, mail me, or get on macosx-dev@omnigroup.com, which has a lot of useful discussion.

    Stan Shebs
    shebs@apple.com

  • Making stuff freely available falls into the mythic category of "if you build it, they will come" on the Mac. We have several open source Mac projects and while there are interested parties, we've failed to reach critical mass on any of them. (Check out our open source pages [biap.com] for specifics.)

    I'd have to attribute this to two causes, which share equal parts of the blame. The first is the somewhat esoteric nature of these products. In our case, they're all Web server related add-ons, testing tools, applets, etc. Second, I'd have to say that the relative shortage of Mac programmers contributes significantly to the dearth of Mac open source projects.

    The amount of arcana you have to master to be a successful Mac programmer greatly outweighs the relatively small set of APIs you have to conquer to write code in the Unix/Linux universe. And these aren't usually taught in university environments which breed the bulk of the open source aficianados. Coupled with a relatively small marketshare afforded Mac applications and the smaller number of engineers required to satisfy those needs and you end up with a pretty small collection of developers able to work on any Mac application. Ask them to do it essentially for free and you've got a smaller number yet.

    I'd have to guess that the tiny number of Mac engineers out there with an interest in working on an open source project probably spend it working on their own stuff instead of someone elses' (or a collaborative effort with multiple engineers.)

    The "FilterTop" project was one of the few long-lived Mac open source projects that ultimately produced a useful product, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find evidence of that exercise anywhere on the net today. It's weird and ultimately depressing, because I'd love to have a cooperative group of open source Mac developers to work with. We had something like that with the Macintosh Internet Developers Association that was formed in late '97, but even it evaporated in the wake of Apple's '97-'98 crash.

    Anyone up for trying it again?

  • You are an idiot. Have you ever heard of LinuxPPC or Yellow Dog Linux? Linux runs very well on Mac hardware. Not to mention that a G4 is the only super computer that can be owned personally and run Linux. My Linux on a G4 will spank your Linux on Intel any day of the week and twice on Sundays. By Intel's own benchmarks, G4 is 2-3 times faster than any Pentium.
  • MacHack has gone a long way to promote open-source on the mac - for way longer than 'Open Source' was a popular refrain - namely the proceedings disks containing all the hacks - including most of the sources .....
  • >Yeah, the demise of Hypercard has been a real low point in the history of Macintosh.

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

    The demise of Hypercard was correctly ordained. Although Hypercard was one of the heroic precursors to whole idea of graphical browsers, Apple did not have the right networked vision at the time,and so Hypercard was totally displaced in the grand scheme of things by HTML/Mosaic and follow-ons (and at a time when Next did have a networked vision...)
  • Don't forget that almost all of those apps you are describing *will* run in the classic environment inside OSX. Hence, there is no loss of functionality for the user... except maybe waiting for classic to boot.
  • 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.

  • Steve is a real visionary. I've read about him, and seen a lot of his stuff. I might not know him personally, but if there was someone that I would want to work with for a few days, it would be him. He might not have been popular with a few people (fired from Apple), but man, NEXT was really... good. I'm glad he's back with Apple. Now, the fruit flavored macs might be aimed at a different kind of user, but I can see the concept and the marketting. Other stuff that Apple is doing is real great, we just get hung up on some of the stuff that they do that we consider to be "goofy shit" and the relatively aggressive stance that they take with their platform (usually).
  • right but its window dressing basically.
  • A very good introduction to Mac programming (from what I've read so far -- I've only gotten through Chapter 4) is Macintosh C [mactech.com], a book available free on the Net in HTML, MS Word, and PDF formats. In the preface, K. J. Bricknell (the author) describes his purchasing hundreds of dollars' worth of reference books, then says:

    Professionals, I concluded, need Inside Macintosh, but the beginning hobbyist needs a gentler (and, above all, cheaper) introduction to all this complexity. Having arrived at that conclusion, I decided to turn my notes into a full-blown manual in the belief that I just might be able to save other amateurs from what many would regard as cruel, unusual, and pocketbook-depleting punishment. Macintosh C, then, represents my attempt to provide an easier and more economical entry point to Macintosh programming for the beginning hobbyist.

    The book assumes you already know how to program in C, but know nothing about the details of the Macintosh API. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to get started writing open-source software for the Mac.
    -----
    The real meaning of the GNU GPL:

  • Well, if nobody else ever said "thank you" for writing MacHTTP, then consider yourself thanked.

  • I have been programming with the MacOS for a few years now, and all of my efforts are so far open-source. The main reason is because they are rubbish and no-one would ever pay more than nothing for them.

    But the other reason is because starting off as a developer in the Mac community was very difficult. Open-sourcing my programs may help others get started (i hope). It is not easy piecing together all of the information necessary from the various Mac programming web-sites that offer useful advice (of which there are few), and at the same time trying to wade through the Windows/Linux specific information that is all too easy to find.

    What is needed is a web site aimed at Mac users interested in learning to program. If an experienced Mac developer would collect information on compilers/APIs etc. and show how rewarding programming can be, it would be a good investment for the future of the Mac programming community.

    If you have ever compared a general Mac magazine to a Windows one, you will notice a huge difference in the content. Mac magazines continually contain Photoshop tutorials, beginners guides and other less-technical issues. On the other hand, PC magazines cover almost every computer-related issue, from the basics right through to programming with languages like C and Perl.

    What I am getting at is that the average Mac user never comes across programming. I'm not calling them ignorant, its just that no-one ever shows them the joys of staying up all night in front of a monitor, staring at lines of code. And I wish someone would do something about it.

  • As bad as the Microsoft dominance is, I feel that things would have been a lot worse off if Steve Jobs won the "Look and feel" lawsuits. Programs like KDE (looks and feels like CDE, MacOS, and Windows), Gimp (looks and feels like Photoshop), Gnumeric (looks and feels like Lotus/Excel), and in fact Linux itself (looks and feels like UNIX) would be destroyed by "Look and feel" lawsuits.

    The free BSDs would almost certaintly been killed by AT&T performing a "Look and Feel" lawsuit against BSD. AT&T tried unscucesfully to destroy the free BSDs by claiming they had copyrighted UNIX code--imagine how much stronger a "look and feel" lawsuit would have been.

    If Microsoft was stillborn, it is very possible that PCs would not have the success that they have today, and the dominant computer would be overpriced, proprietary Macintoshes. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to port Linux or another free OS to this platform. People would pay more for a lesser computer.

    As bad as the Microsoft dominance is, it could have been a lot worse.

    - Sam

  • Actually, I'm a poor exploited co-op student, so I only make $14 :-)

    Also, it would have taken 20 minutes to do as good or better--I could have written a hack that would have done the job in under five minutes.

    My point was that the mentality in the Mac community differs from that in the Open source community. An Open source developer writes a somewhat useful hack, and throws it and its source out into the world. A Mac developer writes a little utility in 2 hours, and tries to gouge people for it. !!!Generality alert!!! There are many exceptions on both sides... Don't flame me...

    Don't get me wrong, I think a $15 shareware fee for something really cool that took a lot of effort (like Ambrosia's Escape Velocity or Ares) is quite fair. It's just people charging for stupid one-day hacks that bugs me.

    I'm thinking of creating a modified version of the GPL called "Guiltware", with the added clause that all software developers that don't use an Open Source license must hang their heads in shame every time they use my program.
  • I forget where, but I got the source to part or all of Gerry's ICQ... If you want it, email me and I'll see if I can dig it up. It's probably not big-O Open Source, but it's free, and the source is out there.
  • The Mac market is a strange bird. The way it's been treated, it's no surprise.

    Here are some of my thoughts on the matter, in no particular order.

    Like other posters have pointed out, Mac programming has a high barrier to entry: the Toolbox. It's powerful as anything, with upwards of 5,000 subroutines in it. When was the last time you thought, "I feel like cranking out a program. I'll just refresh my memory on the 5,000 most common system calls and hit the keys!" Compare it to the difficulty of becoming a Perl master, times 10. "Hello world" is about a 15-line program unless you use a special STDIO runtime library.

    Source code has never been an issue. I've played with Macs for over 10 years and never had any trouble getting working source code to learn from. Documentation, on the other hand, wasn't always as easy as it is today.

    One important social issue to remember is that the Free Software Foundation snubbed Mac users pretty hard. How long did that silly boycott last? That always seemed awfully hypocritical to me, since FSF programs have always been supported on other platforms that are just as closed and proprietary as Mac: HPUX, SunOS, DOS, etc.

    It's really amazing how the attitude toward the Mac has been poisoned in the PC and Unix communities. I think it all derives from one simple premise: DOS and Unix users between 1984 and 1995 were perpetually sick with envy and too stubborn to admit it. It's all sour grapes.

    I honestly can't imagine anyone giving the Mac a fair, open-minded try for a couple of months and not concluding that it is, in many ways, still years ahead of everything else (even though the kernel lags). Some of its features are amazingly slick. Aliases, for example, are much smarter than Shortcuts or symbolic links.

    Also like other posters have mentioned, a lot of the grassroots Mac development took place in Hypercard, not something likely to catch the attention of the rest of the world. I prefer to do my Mac hacking in MacPerl nowadays; AppleScript I mostly ignore.

    Finally, I'd like to try (once again, in vain) to put to rest the twin myths of software drought and overpriced hardware.

    In over 10 years of using the Mac, I don't think I've ever been forced to do something on a PC or Unix because there was no software to do it on the Mac. I may have done it if I couldn't find appropriate free software, but there was always something. The Mac shareware and freeware communities have produced a steady stream of high-quality apps. Some are so good I have used them daily for over 6 years. On the commercial side, there are over 25,000 shipping applications. This is not exactly what I think of as a platform bereft of runnable code. Maybe you're thinking of Minix. ;-)

    Finally, I have yet to be convinced that Macs below the top-of-the-line have been significantly overpriced in the past 5+ years. I keep pretty close tabs on current Mac and PC prices, and low- and mid-range Macs don't cost much more equivalent PCs -- in fact, they often cost LESS than an equivalent PC from a first-class maker like Compaq, Dell, Gateway, Toshiba, Sony, HP, or IBM. It doesn't bother me that Apple charges an extra $1000 for that last 50 MHz; the top-of-the-line should be the high-profit-margin gravy. I want the guys with all the bucks to subsidize my mid-level machine!
  • I can understand how the can licence distribution of binaries (since they include proprietary library code), but what legal justification od they have to prohibit the distribution of source code? Is there "wizard" based or other generated code which includes copyrighted material? And if so can you get around it by using the compiler only to compile code which is 100% open source?

    They may quite reasonably prohibit the distribution of header files and generated code. Beyond that I doubt they have any right to restrict your code.
    --
  • cool.. I'll change my finder icon to the dogcow. and.... make apple+delete eject disks

    hypercard is kinda cool though...

    what can you REALLY do though?

  • Open Source Development is a misnomer (Score:3)

    by Junks Jerzey ( 54586 ) on Monday July 03, 2000 @11:15AM (#961591)
    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.
  • Because mac users actually expect quality software that just works, with no configuration hassles. That aesthetic informs all [good] MacOS developers.

    Open-source, when you get away from the hype, is basically a cabal of *nix developers, who tend to be willing to jump through all kinds of hoops to get things done. MacOS users, though, earn $$ from their Macs, and lose $$ when they have to mess with config crap. When you're billing $400/hr, the last thing you want to do is tweak that annoying config file with the option that you read about 2 years ago and isn't in the man page.

    Sofware that's too hard to use = lost time, and time in the Mac world is more valuable than it is in other worlds. If your product doesn't save users time, they won't use it.

    "Welcome to the Real World."

    And, just to whip it out, I've configured virtual domains in apache, used perl and shell on 4 *nices enough to hate it, and wondered why the dumb gnu configure script doesn't stash its info in a repository so it doens't have to look for it over and over and over every time you compile another tarball of stuff. I've forgotten more *nix system administration that I ever wanted to know, and I believe that compared to a real *nix like AIX or Solaris, Linux is 2-4 years off-the-ball. And yes, I do use smit(ty).
  • Thanks jmac :) saved me the trouble of mentioning your site ;) all my Mac OSS projects are mentioned there.

    'How can I promote Open Source on the Macintosh?' WRITE SOME. How else?

  • Let him get dependent on some program that runs under MacOS 7/8/9 and then for some reason breaks under MacOS X

    Actually, that's not a bad intro for even very novice programmers. Apple provides a tool called Carbon Dater that runs through your Classic source file and then, essentially, gives you a list of things that are non-carbon compliant.... and there's a fair stack o' docs on how to carbonize from there. This is almost a sort of "paint by numbers" approach.... but it does do a lot of good in that

    a. It gets newbies used to fiddling with stuff in CW/MPW
    b. The most commonly "broken" part is the event handling... and that has always been the bane of mac developing. Memory management is also a popular broken spot (no more masters!!)
    c. It's a confidence builder... and, with god and his lawyers as my witness, you need confidence to program a mac...

    So, how does that help open source? Programmers want source. End users want bins. More programmers = more source. Get people into programming, and you'll develop a user base that also cares about source.

    As the saying goes: "If you compile it, they will come... if you open the source, they will come and fix it"

  • What can you NOT do? I use perl to script my environment even more in Mac OS than I do in Linux.

    I am doing a talk at the Perl Conference later this month called "How to Be Really Cool Using MacPerl" that will show some of the stuff I use. What do you want done? Lemme know, I'll whip up a script for you. :-)

  • They have some OS apps, but the sophisticated ones, the ones that compete with Gimp and Kword, is mostly commercial. I'm not really sure that OSX could change this for Mac.

    But Gimp can be made to run on Mac OS X. I think this fact alone makes it so Mac OS X "changes this for the Mac."

  • Reliability before usability, ALWAYS.

    Then stop using a PC and use a crash-proof embedded system.

  • Reliability before usability, ALWAYS.

    That was Raymond's attitude as well. And frankly, in the Macintosh world, it's bullshit: the most reliable computer in the world is just a doorstop if you don't know how to use it. In a world where reliability is placed above usability, the user interface becomes an afterthought, with horrible inconsistencies and atrosities abound.

    To a certain extent these sorts of user interface inconsistencies are acceptable on Linux, which is to some degree an experimental development platform. But in the Macintosh world, this sort of "lassie-faire" user interface model would get your application drop-kicked to the moon.

    Where Raymond seemed completely out of touch came from his (to the Macintosh developers out there) casual dismisal of the most central part of the Macintosh experience: the completely anal consistency in the user interface and user experience.

    It doesn't matter one whit if that user interface is an added layer or part of the kernel or transplanted from an FTP server from Mars--so long as it's consistant, obeys the well defined user interface rules, and always keeps the user in control (rather than forcing the user to do what the computer wants him to do), then it'll be fine.
  • try http://www.macslash.com/ [macslash.com]. Not only does it use /.'s code [slashcode.com] but you can post programming articles/questions [macslash.com] to a mac orientated crowd.
  • The original post said that usability had to be the overriding priority from the begginning of the OS-design process. My point is that this is not true for MacOS X, as it's built from the Mach/BSD basis which was not focused on usability, something you've only reinforced.

    And my two cents: this worries me. That is, it worries me that MacOS X is being built on top of an operating system which isn't exactly known for it's stellar usability track record.

    While I don't have a problem with Mach itself (which is just the process/thread management kernel with hooks for operating system modules and file system modules to flesh the whole thing out), it's the BSD heritage of the file system, the driver system, and the file hierarchy that concerns me.

    While I'm sure Apple is doing it's best to eradicate the BSD heritage, at least from the user's perspective, having played extensively with MacOS X DR4, the whole thing still feels like it's a Macintosh on top of BSD, rather than just a Macintosh. That is, the user interface experience is still a little jarring, especially when it comes to the organization of files and mounting disks.
  • Most people don't compile for Linux anyway! They just use dselect or rpm or yup. The availablility of compilers is mostly irrelevant when you are talking about user adoption of software.

    • droplet (drag & drop a file onto the icon to run) front-ends to stuff like ps2pdf, etc. The droplet is a very familiar interface to Mac users, and it oughtn't to be that hard to do.

    Let's see how Bill treats droplets: If you compile an ANSI C program to run in DOS or Windows, the shell treats a droplet. When you drag a document onto an app (or a shortcut thereto), the shell launches the app with the document's path as the first arg.

    Now how Steve does it: When a droplet is started, it is sent an "Apple event" of type aevt.odoc (open document) that gives the path to the document dropped onto it. If a C library were to translate an `odoc' event into argv[] and additional `odoc' events into fork()/exec(), that would fit in just fine.

    • This is really blue-sky stuff, but how about a graphical interface for stuff UNIX people now do in their favourite shell. eg. allowing pipelining from one droplet to the next by dragging arrows and visually building a new droplet to represent this pipelined command.

    I've seen this in products such as Prograph and Widget Workshop.

  • Apple's supposed transition to OS-X has low credibility with developers. The "new OS" has been Real Soon Now since about 1992. And Apple just slipped the ship date again. Too many developers have been burned by the various Apple fiascos. And now they're trying to get people to convert to, of all things, Objective-C, which is a dead dialect superseded by C++ years ago, on top of Mach, a dead variant of UNIX.

    I used to develop for the Mac, but gave it up when Copland didn't ship.

  • Until they actually run a free operating system how can you expect them to believe in free software?

    That doesn't make any sense. Some of the best advocates of free software are Mac users. True, it is rare to find a Mac user who is religious about the issue, like RMS is, but that has nothing to do with "believing" in free software.

    People who use Mac OS use it because it has the best graphical user interface around. If you offered "use KDE with a Mac OS theme" as a serious suggestion, then you don't understand user interfaces at all. Having widgets that look a certain way are only about 10 percent of what makes a UI. No user who relies on the great Mac OS interface could possibly be satisfied with KDE.

    The Apple 'open-source' license isn't free, and as such running Mac OS is out of the question.

    That is false AND it doesn't make sense. Perens and the OSI says it is a free license. Maybe RMS doesn't; I personally couldn't care less what RMS says, since he is often wrong.

    And even if the APSL were not "free," what would that have to do with Mac OS? Neither Mac OS nor Mac OS X are licensed under the APSL.

  • Apple's supposed transition to OS-X has low credibility with developers.

    That was true for awhile, but not anymore, since they started shipping Carbon, DR4, etc.

    And now they're trying to get people to convert to, of all things, Objective-C,

    No they aren't. They are trying to get people to use C and C++ and Carbon, not Objective C. The focus on the Objective C stuff was for the Rhapsody marketing scheme, not the Mac OS X marketing scheme.

    on top of Mach, a dead variant of UNIX.

    Mach is not a variant of Unix. It is a microkernel that can have any number of operating systems sitting on top of it. It just so happens that the one they are using is BSD-Lite / FreeBSD, which is not exactly a "dead" variant of Unix.

    I used to develop for the Mac, but gave it up when Copland didn't ship

    Well, when you stopped developing, you also apparently stopped paying attention, because you don't know what you're talking about.

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