In Just
for Fun, Linus Torvalds' recent memoir of the early days of
Linux, Torvalds recounts meeting Steve Jobs and Apple technical
chief Avie Tevanian.
"Basically, Jobs started off by telling me that on the desktop
there were just two players, Microsoft and Apple, and that he
thought the best thing I could do for Linux was to get in bed with
Apple and try to get the open source people behind Mac OS X,"
Torvalds writes.
"Jobs made a big point of the fact that Mach's low-level kernel
is open source. He sort of played down the flaw in the setup: Who
cares if the basic operating system . . . is open source
if you then have the Mac layer on top, which is not open
source?"
Well, no one says the Mac layer has to be open, but on the other
hand - if OS X is built on a free Unix, does Apple have an
obligation to return something substantial to the open source
community?
Legally, no, and let's face it - the goals of Apple and the
Linux folks are mutually exclusive. Apple says "We have the neat
stuff. Come buy it from us." Linux says "You can build the neat
stuff yourself. Let us help."
However, you can argue that there's a moral obligation on
Apple's part. Mach and Unix are why OS X is so stable, so
Apple is profiting from open source software.
That's okay: after all, there are a number of companies
profiting (or attempting to profit) from the sale of Linux.
However, they don't keep big chunks of their code under lock and
key.
And Apple? Apple provides the plumbing for OS X in the form
of "Darwin," which is released under the company's own version of
an open source license.
However, Darwin is flawed as open source. A recent posting on
penguinppc.org points out,
"Apple does not fully release the Darwin source into the public
source. Key drivers are left out, and some workarounds for chip
bugs are pulled before the public versions are made available."
The point? Penguinppc.org concludes "This keeps Linux
developers from using the Darwin source as a reference."
If true, this strikes me as a shot directly at the open source
folks. You can make a pretty good case for keeping the "Mac part"
of OS X private: what case can you make for taking from open
source and then not providing the bare minimum needed to get open
source running on your hardware?
Apple is not likely to listen to such arguments, anymore than it
is likely to see the foolishness of suppressing the user groups
that distributed older versions of its software, but it makes the
company's continuing claim to somehow being hipper, better than the
rest (read: Wintel) nothing more than advertising.
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