Does Apple truly help the Open Source Community?

Ive began to question whether linux and the other open source operating systems truly benefit from Apple's new commitment to the open source community. Anyway, read this article. http://www.badconnections.net/portal...3e40c515b6005&

One benefit is that mac hardware (power pc) is really awesome hardware. Suse Linux for example has brought linux OS distros for the power pc (i dont know about other distros though). So i find it cool to use linux on some really cool hardware. Sorry that this does not fit your posts subject, just wanted to add that comment though.

Cheers. :)

It might be Linux/*nix will have benefit from apple cause the famous "Jordan Hubbard" (the FreeBSD release engineer and FreeBSD core team member) working for apples, so I guess Apple will have a new perspective or even new commitment to open source software community.

And last week I was checking out Apple laptop G4..look like a good laptop and might be one day when I have enough "cash money" I will get that one :)

Apple's huge installed consumer user base (compared to any free UNIX distribution) will give developers the motivation they need to better support a UNIX operating system.

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. Suse Linux for example has brought linux OS distros for the power pc (i dont know about other distros though).

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YellowDog, LinuxPPC, MKLinux, Debian, Mac68K Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD... SuSE was actually pretty late in the game, they just were one of the first to offer a pretty boxed set...

I think that there is a problem with the question that is being asked. I mean why should it help the OpenSource community as a whole? Apple is not some user group, or distro company, they are a hardware company that used to sell an antidiluvian closed source operating system, and that now sells a modern partially OpenSource OS.

In terms of developement, Apple's opensource program is fairly young. X11 is in Beta for example. And there isn't a very large dev group (I don't think, I mean, I wouldn't know numbers, I'm not exactly a good enough coder to try and work on Darwin's kernel or X11's code). Right now the focus of the Mac OpenSource stuff is to bring the goodies of *nix to MacOS X. This is the first time that there has been such an abundance of quality programs widely available for Macintosh users, it is like Plato's analogy of the cave, we were just looking at shadows on the wall with the Classic MacOS, then with the MacOS X Beta we saw what was casting the shadow, then with X 10.0 - 10.1 we were ascending out of the cave. With Jaguar we are seeing the trees and the rocks and the wonderfulness of the modern computing world. But, we haven't been able to look at the sun yet, we aren't quite all the way there. We still have to get further to see the Forms/Truth.

So now people are wondering what the hell I am saying. Well, to put it plainly, once all these Mac users start playing around with the software that has been ported to Mac, and once all the Mac programers start seeing just how easy it is to right something that works well in *nix form OS X, those developers are probably going to start diversifying their markets. Why just program for Mac when you can get a whole bunch more users from the *nix crowd?

Basically, you are asking the question too soon. Though OS X and the Apple OpenSource dev aren't in their infancy anymore, they aren't exactly to the adult stage, I wouldn't even call it teenage, try pre-pubescent. Give it time. Cross-developement is a good thing.

Be of good cheer,
Dhej

I'll leave it up to you to decide if the following gifts are valuable or not, but Apple has released generally useful open-source code for the following:
Streaming Media Server
OpenPlay network layer
Rendezvous
KHTML & KJS
... and other listed in their open source page

They're clearly more helpful than other companies who take open source code and then have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the most minimal compliance.

the answer is yes