Google Gets Serious About Open Source Mac Projects 193
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."
Open source on non open OS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Open source on non open OS? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Open source on non open OS? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's just plain silly. You don't have to have the source code for every tiny little bit on the computer for source code to be useful. Really, how many people need to dink with the kernel, be it Windows, OS X or Linux?
Sharing code is useful at the application level. You should re examine your zealotry, son. It's gonna cause you some grief. Mark my words ... You'll grow a beard, be shunned at parties. You will want to put posters of RMS on your wall. Your mother will disown you.
Re:Open source on non open OS? (Score:1, Insightful)
Can you really call
void main() {
ProprietaryFunction();
}
an open source program? And even if it can, is it useful with out the proprietary part?
Re:Open source on non open OS? (Score:5, Insightful)
The nice thing is that they can put wrappers around the proprietary function call bits and potentially make the software run on multiple OSs. (As Firefox does.)
Here's why (Score:2, Insightful)
Superior interface, mature developers vs Whatever bad interface you want to use, we got 10 of them and childish political programmers who think what software license one uses is the civil rights battle of our time.
Oh and users. As in Macs have more non-programmer users than Linux does.
When you look at it that way its not much of a contest.
Re:Why Mac, though ? (Score:2, Insightful)
You can, pretty much, take Google and insert $SEXY_COMPANY_HERE and expect Google to be best buddies with them when it comes to what's relayed to the public. This helps form advertising partnerships, makes investors balls swell, etc.
The more I've been reading about what Google employees do, the more it becomes apparent that most must be driving new Beetles, wearing "Can you hear me now?"-guy glasses, latte sipping, looking serious while browsing myspace at the coffee shop, goatee donning weeners.
Re:Mac developers don't do cross platform. (Score:5, Insightful)
main()
{
printf("Hello World");
}
-
Hrm. Seems to work just fine on my Mac and my Debian Box. I guess I foiled apple again.
Or if you mean Apple has their own language, Cocoa, which isn't ported to XP or Linux. Funny thing is, you're not forced to use it.
Since we're on the topic of cross plat form stuff, it's not OSS, but it was one of the best selling games ever: Myst.
Re:Open source on non open OS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, it's a fair number, but it's not necessarily the number of people, but the _right_ people we need to be dinking around with the kernel. Unfortunately, with proprietary operating systems, it seems the right people are not necessarily doing that.
I don't personally dink around that much in the kernel (altho I've bypassed a bug or two in drivers), but I certainly want the genius with too much free time and the same hardware that I have who can fix the bugs to have access to the source. I dont want to hack my own paravirtualising hypervisor, but I'm very pleased to use xen technology, which would have been very difficult to implement without open source.
As a user of programs and operating systems I usually dont need the source. But I do need many improvements made by people with similar interests to me; interests that may overlap very much less with the strategic thinking of a single monolithic corporation.
Sharing code is useful at the application level.
Free software is useful at any level you want to have improved. Which is pretty much all of them. Personally I dont have the patience for proprietary products anymore; I find most tend to have issues that would never survive a few iterations in an opensource product. With free software products I know that if it annoys me enough it'll annoy someone else enough to fix it.
Now go away. I have a beard to tend to.
Re:Why Mac, though ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why Mac, though ? (Score:2, Insightful)
It has nothing to do with appeal to Google...
At Google, people get paid to work on whatever they want (some of the time), and those developers (not Google as an entity) choose to create open source Mac software.
Re:Mac developers don't do cross platform. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you misunderstand how it works. The original author rarely ports it to a platform he doesn't use. He makes the source available, and someone who is willing and able to make it work on another platform can do that. You even said it yourself - "They've ported." If few Mac open source projects have been ported to a particular platform, blame the users of that platform, not the people who don't use it.
Re:Why Mac, though ? (Score:4, Insightful)
And do you think Google are so penny-pinchingly cheap that the massive boost in developer productivity they get from using Macs isn't worth the small extra cost over a system running Windows or Linux? Give me a break. What are they spending, maybe $50 000 extra total for the Macs? Google earns that in probably around 5 seconds.
Re:Open source on non open OS? (Score:5, Insightful)
My biggest gripe is with repositories. It would be absolutely trivial for MS to set up a repository & kill off 90% of the malware. Apple supposedly cares for its users - an add-remove button like ubuntu's would go a long way towards providing quality applications. I'm sure it's possible to add a repository afterwards, but it's nowhere as easy (popular) as ubuntu's default. When you find yourself having to explain to yet another person that legal, free, world class software actually exists -- remember that you're doing it because you're on someone else's platform & they want to make it difficult because they're in the business of selling proprietary software.
Re:Why Mac, though ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Mac developers don't do cross platform. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Open source on non open OS? (Score:3, Insightful)
Operating systems seem to come with culture. Linux comes with "free" culture, and if one uses Linux (forgive me, RMS), one tends to adapt the culture and consider free soft natural state of things.
On MacOS, however, the culture goes like "you pay for everything". Apps are crippled and if you need something good - you pay. In this environment you consider being paid for software natural state of things.
Note, I have never in my life used MacOS. What I have just said is more like theoretical observation.
On windows front this issue is very unclear. People expect everything for free [articles.tlug.jp], but it should have a price tag, or it is shit.
I have no idea what developers think there. Do they?
Re:Why Mac, though ? (Score:1, Insightful)
Oh wait. They have a terminal, emacs, gcc, perl, shell, python, ruby, and a bunch of command line development tools. So that can't be the reason why linux is your thing, can it?
Desktop OS that can't run Photoshop? (Score:2, Insightful)
Thanks but no thanks. With Mac OS X I get the best of both worlds (terminal, UNIX tools, VIM, gcc) but also Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, and Nikon Capture, and all my Epson printers work with no driver installations in Leopard.
Re:Open source on non open OS? (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, I'd expect MacWorld to focus on the Apple products, but this has misled CNET into thinking that Google has a special focus on the Mac, just because it can list a handful of pet open source projects that Google developers work on in their 20% time.
The headline should be "Google gets serious about Open Source", not "Google gets serious about the Mac".
Re:Mac developers don't do cross platform. (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like KDE works hard to ensure that applications written for KDE aren't easily ported to other APIs? And GNOME works hard to ensure that applications written for GTK aren't easily ported to other APIs? And X.org works hard to ensure that applications written for xlib aren't easily ported to other APIs? And Be works hard to ensure that applications written for belib aren't easily ported to other APIs? And Microsoft works hard to ensure that applications written for Win32 aren't easily ported to other APIs? And Sun works hard to ensure that applications written for Swing aren't easily ported to other APIs? And Open Group works hard to ensure that applications written for Motif aren't easily ported to other APIs? And QNX works hard to ensure that applications written for Photon aren't easily ported to other APIs? And Donald Knuth works hard to ensure that documents written for TeX aren't easily ported to other markup languages? And Intel works hard to ensure that x86 assembly code isn't easily ported to other architectures? And Toyota works hard to ensure that gasoline-powered internal combustion engines can't easily run on hydrogen?
Re:Mac developers don't do cross platform. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Desktop OS that can't run Photoshop? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Open source on non open OS? (Score:3, Insightful)
And this supports my initial premise that OSS on non-OSS is no fun. (I know you weren't disagreeing with me)
You ask most ubuntu people they'll probably tell you it's working as intended. If it's not free it's not GPL & probably not OSS either. Chances are it's a binary blob & that opens up a host of issues. Is it "zealotry" to actually want control over your own computer?
Yeah they're working on it. Did you see the new apt:// protocol [linuxhack3r.com]?
Re:Yawn. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Mac developers don't do cross platform. (Score:5, Insightful)