Google Gets Serious About Open Source Mac Projects

mjasay sends us a link to a CNet story, which begins: "In the '20 percent time' that Google employees have to work on projects of personal interest, it turns out that an increasing number are spending time writing open-source projects for their Macs. Google has long had a fondness for the Mac, with upwards of 6,000 of its 20,000 current employees opting to use the Mac over Windows. It is in the 20 percent employee development time, however, where this statistic becomes interesting. At Google, development time translates into products. The more Mac-friendly employees, the more Mac-related development. The more Mac-related development, the more Google-sponsored Mac-based open-source code. As Google's Mac Developer Playground demonstrates, some of this code is quite interesting."

Re:Mac developers don't do cross platform.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not desktop apps, but Apple has a put good effort into OSS server and network apps.

http://www.macosforge.org/

Re:Mac developers don't do cross platform.

[GalionTheElf]

If you disagree, can you name a single significant open source desktop application that originated on the Mac and is now cross platform (supporting Windows, Mac and Linux at least)?

Handbrake. [handbrake.fr]

Please note though that I'm not particularly up on the politics here, but handbrake is a brilliant, once mac-only, video conversion tool.

Re:Mac developers don't do cross platform.

[cleatsupkeep]

Transmission.

http://www.transmissionbt.com/ [transmissionbt.com]

Re:Mac developers don't do cross platform.

[0100010001010011]

And i nearly forgot: launchd [wikipedia.org].

"The launchd daemon is essentially a replacement for init, rc, the init.d and rc.d scripts, SystemStarter (Mac OS X), inetd and xinetd, atd, crond and watchdogd."

Yeah, it's open source and even written by Apple themselves.

Re:Mac developers don't do cross platform.

[Randle_Revar]

Cocoa is not a language, just as Win32, GTK and QT are not languages.

Re:Mac developers don't do cross platform.

[slarrg]

Ruby on Rails

Incorrect summary

[sentientbrendan]

>with upwards of 6,000 of its 20,000 current
>employees opting to use the Mac over Windows.

Actually, Google developers have *Linux* boxes by default, so many of these people are opting for Mac over *Linux*.

Currently, there are way more development tools available for the mac than Linux. Things like textmate, araxis merge, DTrace, etc. Thus a lot of people, inside google and out, use mac workstations to develop software that gets deployed to linux servers.

Re:Incorrect summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Incorrect summary and incorrect correction. I work at google and we get to choose twice: on the desktop and on the laptop. Most developers choose a linux desktop and mac laptop. A few choose a windows laptop, but end up installing linux on it as well.

Also, nothing in the company is 'by default'. If it involves how you work, you get asked how you want to do it. If it's not something completely insane, it's usually approved, since forcing you to go work in a way that you're not used to causes loss of productivity until you get used to the new way.

Re:GCal Sync

[Midnight Thunder]

I just wish they would use standard WebCAL which anyone can use

Just to be pedantic, the protocol specification is caldav, and yes I wish this too. I actually looked into what it would take to do this in Java, though the biggest hurdle is trying to understand the basic WebDAV architecture, and the lack of time to be able to truly commit. If there is anyone out the who has started such a project, or has a good understanding of webDAV, I would certainly consider getting back into this.

Re:Mac developers don't do cross platform.

[blacklint]

Did you actually look at that link? Darwin Streaming Server and CalendarServer are Apple written server applications that can be run on other operating systems, not the other way around. I've personally run Darwin Streaming Server, the open sourced version of QuickTime Streaming Server, on a Debian box.

Re:Yes, there are plenty

[profplump]

No, but they started on Mac, you know, the environment that is supposedly intentionally hard to port from, and were then ported to other environments. Moreover they eventually spawn clones like OpenOffice, some of which are open source. I realize that clones aren't strictly ports, but it's still software that originated on a Mac and is now in wide use on a variety of platforms.

You don't have to like Apple, or use a Mac. But it's ridiculous to claim that Apple intentionally tries to make porting difficult. They may not be interested in making porting easy (though I'm not sure that's an entirely firm point in the first place) but you're assigning intent and malice to a situation that can be adequately described by simple apathy.

That isn't just a bit off topic....

[Anonymous Coward]

Photoshop isn't a need for the average desktop user. Manipulating RAW certainly isn't either!

However, Photoshop works on wine & Linux has plenty of tools to do RAW conversion for many popular cameras. See rawtools, for example.

Re:Open source on non open OS?

[mrchaotica]

Really, how many people need to dink with the kernel... Sharing code is useful at the application level.

That's a bad example to use in this case, because for Mac OS the kernel is actually one of the Free Software bits! In fact, it is the application-level libraries (e.g. Cocoa) that are not Free.

Re:Mac developers don't do cross platform.

[mrchaotica]

Actually, Handbrake used to be cross-platform between Mac and BeOS. Apparently the BeOS version has been dropped in favor of Linux and Windows (a reasonable decision, I must say), but it could very well have been the original version.

Re:Here's why

[Draek]

Why in the fucking world was the above post modded +4 Insightful? Other than the fact that it praises Apple, of course.

First, "superior" is in the eye of the beholder. Personally I'd rather have Linux+Xfce than OSX, even without considering the price difference, but I don't go around claiming it's inherently "superior" (other than for me). And classifying Linux developers as "childish" and Mac's as "mature" is a sure sign of *way* too much kool-aid.

Mods: just because a post praises your favorite OS doesn't mean it's not flamebait.

Google engineers' equipment

[LauraW]

>Actually, Google developers have *Linux* boxes by default,

True, on the desktop.

>so many of these people are opting for Mac over *Linux*.

Not true, mostly. Most developers have Linux desktops, since most of us work on server-side applications. (Many of us have more than one, actually. I have an extra one that runs my group's continuous builds and tests.) But engineers who are working on Windows or Mac apps have a desktop box running one of those. Or maybe more than one if they work on multiple platforms. All of us also get a laptop if we want one. We can choose between a Mac or PC laptop. Most of the folks with PCs run XP on them, but some run various flavors of Linux. (I have an XP laptop because that's what I still use at home, mostly due to Photoshop and Lightroom. I dumped the Mach for NT 4.0 back in the days when Macs had no protected memory or hardware multitasking and crashed all the time. Next time I upgrade my home machine I may switch both back to the Mac.)

The reason I said "mostly" is that some people I know run their main monitors off of their Mac laptops and do remote X sessions on their Linux boxes so that they get the best of both worlds: the Mac UI and all the development tools on Linux.

One thing I love about working at Google is that they give us all the tools we need to do our jobs. You get all the computers you need, and primary workstations come with a 30" monitor or two 24" ones (your choice) and a ton of RAM. If you need another software package (say, an IDE) or more RAM, you just file a "ticket" asking for it, and it shows up on your desk a few days later. Most items don't need approval. I just asked for an 8 Gb RAM upgrade for one of my workstations recently (for analyzing insanely large heap dumps) and got it with no questions asked.

-- Laura

Re:Incorrect summary

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

I work at Google. Most full-time engineering developers have both a Linux desktop and a Windows or Mac laptop. It's a great combination, since all of Google's web backend stuff runs on Linux, but it's often nice to have a Windows or Mac box around too, and they tend to be better choices for laptops.

There are lots of exceptions, of course - Mac desktops, Linux laptops, etc. - plus of course everyone whose full-time job at Google is to write Windows or Mac client software.

I don't have any statistics, but my observation is that even more than 30% of laptops are Macs - probably close to 50%. Desktops are 90% Linux.

Anyway, when you consider that most Google developers use Linux as their development machine and they're trying to decide between a Mac or Windows laptop as a second machine, the article is accurate.