[nycbug-talk] WWDC representation for NYCBUG

[Isaac Levy]

Hi Sunny, All,

On Jun 26, 2004, at 7:43 PM, Sunny Dubey wrote:

>> With that, I'd really like to See apple put more direct code out into
>> other projects, in order to not only share particular technologies by
>> making them usable outside of Apple stuff, but also to make Apple 
>> stuff
>> natively more interoperable (and therefore desirable) to start 
>> slipping
>> into our respective IT infrastructures.
>
> Erm,
>
> IMO those sound like some pretty self-serving OSS contributions ...

Not sure if you mean self-serving for Apple, of self-serving for me :)

If you mean me, well heck yeah it's self-serving.  I constantly find 
things in Apple/Darwin/OSX machines that are AWESOME and eloquently 
executed ideas, and would save me oodles of time if they existed to 
provide clean interoperation with my other *NIX boxen, which are what I 
use for the bulk of the work I'm involved with.  As an Apple lover with 
a relationship with Apple stuff for over 15 years, I almost feel more 
like a shareholder here, and totally want to make sure I keep paying 
for systems I WANT to use, for various reasons...

--
If you mean Apple being self-serving, well, Apple isn't in OSS for 
kicks here- they are a business, and IMO need to see direct monetary 
ramifications to feed their ability to contribute (big picture through 
small strategic acts).  Every OSS project must sustain itself, and this 
manifests in MANY different ways- from FSF to Apple, every project must 
sustain itself and it's own growth- (btw your talking to a 
card-carrying FSF member, BSD fanatic, Zope/Python Contributer, and 
long-time Apple fan).

With that, Sunny: I'm curious to know similarly what has IBM done in 
this area with Linux?  They are clearly using linux and providing a lot 
of support to OSS, (much like Apple here), and are a large corporation 
with business interests first, (much like Apple again).
Besides being good connoisseurs of Open Source, how has IBM given back 
to OSS (directly or indirectly?), and what is the general Linux 
developer opinion on IBM's practices?


>
> How about doing some stuff just for good-will ? Like sponsoring some 
> of the
> great work Eirc Anholt does for the *BSDs in terms of Xorg? Right now
> *linux*fund pays him to do that ...

Well, Sunny, I'm not really sure what you mean here.  Why would Apple 
have any incentive to get involved with the Freedesktop project, when 
part of it's business is selling a desktop of their own?

If this question is merely flame-bait, pipe it to /dev/null, but if 
this is a serious question in some context I'm missing here, please 
tell me-

Fun fact: Apple has contributed some very cool patches back to the 
XFree86 project, while they were in the process of creating an X86 
distro of their own which interoperates with the Aqua finder.  In that 
case, some OSS code came out of Apple, which they wrote while they were 
doing something for themselves- (and which they re-distribute as OSS), 
but I still don't see how Xorg fits into that picture...

>
> The likes of redhat/suse (pre-Novell) are much smaller than Apple, but 
> I've
> seem them do more for OSS in general which in turn effects the *BSDs.

I still don't understand this question here- does RedHat do anything 
directly that doesn't affect their own strategy and market share for 
RedHat in enterprise?  What about SuSe, I mean, even before Novel, they 
had to make decisions that benefited SuSe by letting it's developers 
get feed- so asking them to get involved writing something outside of 
their vision would be a silly sidetrack which SuSe would have no 
reason/resources to do- have they stepped outside of this in some 
signifigant way which I have missed?

Rocket,
.ike