Re: Apple and Open Source

On Thu, Mar 18, 1999 at 02:33:02AM -0500, Lynn Winebarger wrote:
> On Wed, 17 Mar 1999, Darren Benham wrote:
>
> > I'm amazed at the near total lack of trust in the Gnu developer community
> > towards their fellow developer. We have a long history of matching and
>
> It's not the developers I don't trust. It's the management. We have
> no way of knowing what kind of politics are being played here, i.e. how
> much of this arises from their developers thinking its a good idea, vs.
> the management seeing it as a free work force.
It's not even that. Who cares of Apples sees the Free Software community
as a free work force? We havn't met, but I'm going to assume you don't
work for Apple, but let's say take Apple's source and add the neat FooBar
system that causes apple to blow away Microsoft and even Linux in their
commercial software... and that commercial software is non-free.

Surely you, or someone you know that is interested in Apple's software,
will take Apple's released code.. and your change and put together the same
(and probably better) system. And if Apple also added (but never released)
the barfoo option, the team that's taken of Applzilla will surely implement
it's on barfoo option, too.

As long as Apples doesn't (and it does, so this is all hypothetical) have
that dratted termination clause on the original release of source code,
there is nothing that can stop the Free Software community from having a
free version of Apples' software.

My initial... rant... was directed more at a general situtation. More
directed at the GPL or nothing people. That license displays the same lack
of belief in the Free Software community to match and beat the Closed
community in anything the Closed community can put out.

> In other words, I'm impressed to see Apple take this step in the right
> direction, and not surprised that the first step is somewhat timid in its
> scope. I'm sure someone had to have some guts to even propose the idea
To change the topic... Apple even had a pseudo-accepted (we havn't been
loud enough in our objections to reach Apple's ears) example to go by in
IBM.

- Darren