Apple needs open source in the enterprise
Given how rich Apple's recent earnings were--buoyant in the face of the recession--it's perhaps an inopportune time to suggest that Apple needs to figure out its enterprise application strategy.
And given how dependent Apple's earnings are on a tightly integrated mass of proprietary hardware and software, it's perhaps cheeky in the extreme to suggest that open-source software can help, though perhaps not entirely unexpected considering the Mac's popularity with open-source advocates.
Yet this is precisely what Ned Lilly suggests in MacNewsWorld, and I agree. The deeper Apple gets pulled into the enterprise by people eager to use their home-based technology at work, the more it is going to need to figure out an application compatibility story for the enterprise.
Open-source software applications have tended to be multi-platform, for a variety of reasons, which makes open source a potentially useful tool for Apple, as Lilly points out:
One consequence of the intersection of open source and Mac worlds...has been that newer open source offerings are not just Mac-friendly but are equally PC-friendly. They expect to live in a world where multiple platforms and systems interact and interconnect seamlessly. This result of the community approach is yet another advantage of open source, as proprietary offerings often favor either Macs or PCs.
What's exciting is the potential of this approach to drill down into even more specialized demands of businesses. Currently, the "missing piece" of many Mac-friendly enterprise applications is vertical-specific functionalities; the open source community approach is equipped to fill this gap.
Lilly is right, but he's speaking of potential, not actual software being delivered today. To make it happen, Apple needs to help foster a rich ecosystem of open-source applications, but not by writing the vertical applications itself.
Rather, Apple simply needs to exert some leadership with a hint of missionary zeal.
This wouldn't require a big investment of Apple resources, but it could go a long way toward making the Apple easier for CIOs to swallow. Open-source applications are on a tear, as recent Forrester data shows. Apple should be tapping into this trend.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
They will support basic enterprise function, because if they don't it will hurt their basic consumer market, however, they will not go beyond that most likely... at least not without a larger market share.
I'd also suggest looking at Macosforge, checking where some of the major BSD Unix code committers actually work, or look into LLVM and clang. I'm not saying Apple's gives more than it takes from open source, and they are - of course - big supporters of proprietary software too - but then that is one of the whole points about BSD as a licence - unlike the GPL, BSD doesn't care how people use the code, but trusts that it is within your interest to changes back into mainstream.
OS X server still needs alot of integration work, app certification work, app validation work. For a basic OS X server it's more cost effective to get a dell or hp server and slap Linux on it. There is no OS X server app or function that makes it an effective (cost or functional) to a Linux box.
Enterprise Apple will be a slow evolving story to watch...
Sure, some of what Apple does is proprietary, but the BSD licence allows for that. Some of Apple's contributions are on the GPL license, because it mproved technologies that were under that license.
What's your gripe again? That Apple acts in a self interested manner? Well.. so do you. So do all human beings.
The Enterprise Market is presumably code words for the business and government markets. That is, anything but the Consumer markets. But the Enterprise Market can be further broken down to the Server Market (which Apple barely dabble in), the Big business markets having more than 200 employees with IT departments which act as screening devises against Apple and the Small to Medium sized businesses having few than 200 employees which tend to be more flexible about employees choosing a computer for themselves. Apple only caters to the latter group.
The SMB market is what is driving Apple toward Enterprise, because the SMB companies often must interact with Enterprise. This is also why Open source must provide solutions, because Apple is uninterested in the rigidity and bureaucracy of Enterprise.
Let Apple do what it is best at and open source what it is good at. There are many people in Enterprise who are disgusted with Microsoft, that is why companies have refused to migrate to Vista.
Apple doesn't pretend that it is the best solution for all occasions. Apple does its thing and often that is the best solution in Enterprise. Apple will be extending its software to cover a wider group of people, but it won't be pushing itself upon them. The people must choose for themselves what is best.
I do know universities that are seriously considering the next upgrade of all computers to Macs, because you can run everything on it(windows runs better on a mac, linux works fine) and the unit cost difference is low 3 figures. Just triple boot it and give the user a choice.
Besides that , Linux is far better equipped to take over the enterprise.
They're not interested in the Enterprise because that's been wrapped up by the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and others. How do they compete in an environment where the bean counters reign supreme. And by that I mean those who are penny wise and pound foolish. They know the up-front costs of buying Macs vs. PCs, but never bother to read the long-term benefits of using Macs in terms of longevity of equipment, and productivity gains by knowledge workers when they have the tools available on Macs that don't exist on PCs (like Applescript). But all that doesn't matter, because the bean counters can't see past the cost of admission. Which I find ironic, considering about five years ago I bought an HP laptop that was the equivalent of our Mac laptop of the time and it cost $1,000 more than the Mac because IT demanded we buy a business laptop (HP) and not a consumer laptop (Compaq) from HP. Same specs essentially with a $1,000 difference in price.
Open source as a phrase is like the principle of the instrument. Give a child a hammer, and everything he encounters requires hammering. Open Source is the magic fairy dust that people sprinkle over everything to make it all better. When in reality, I'll take Apple's proprietary software (Keynote, Pages, Filemaker Pro, FinalCut Pro, Aperture) over the free stuff any day, let alone the Microsoft alternatives. (Adobe, some yes, some no.)
Actually, I'm speaking of at least one piece of actual open source software being delivered today - our xTuple ERP product, which is built with Qt (client) and PostgreSQL (server). Thanks to those underlying open source architectures, both client and server run equally well on Mac, Linux, and Windows.
Qt in particular deserves some praise here; as I noted on our xtuple.org blog, <a href="http://www.xtuple.org/node/435">things have actually improved quite a bit</a> since the former Trolltech was bought out by Nokia. How many open source acquisitions can we say that about?
Cheers,
Ned
But open source in the Enterprise I think is different as they will slowly and steadily approach the Enterprise from a desktop perspective and enable their desktops and their niche enterprise customers to play well with the other clones and drones. With their X server I believe they are at least making inroads as workgroup servers or small render cluster which extends or is an extension of their desktop philosophy.
It's also only been a couple of years since Compiz emerged, and it doesn't seem quite settled enough yet, to me, as a project (we now have 4 branches, aiming to merge back to 1).
As for your earlier comment on OS X Server - I'd love to play with their Wiki server, but it's evident that the real intention is for serving a workgroup of OS X clients, rather than as a standalone Unix workhorse, and there's simply no point getting into that market (especially considering the problems Sun have . . . and they are effectively trying to sell the Apple proposition in the Enterprise - i.e. paying more for better kit and closer OS/hardware integration).
On another note...
The Apple Stock options Scam was made public when Apple suddenly announced in 2006 that it was "voluntarily investigating itself". Why would a corporation publicly announce that it has commited fraud? Because I filed a lawsuit against them after they had stolen thousands of my stock options given to me for outstanding performance at Apple for the relase of their flagship Mac OS X. This was part of a retaliation where I was "layed off" from the company right after September 11 and todl to leave the country (I am a minority).
Apple realized that I was going public with the options theft through my lawsuit (and that dozens of other employees had unknowingly had their options stolen/redated as well). Immediately after the "voluntary self investigation", Apple claimed that Steve Jobs had nothing to do with the scam.
These are all lies and attempts at covering up fraud. Steve Jobs' disapearance from public view for "medical reasons" for the last year is also a scam.
Apple has so far paid out $14 million to share holders over this (paid for by insurers), but the victims like myself have not receieved a penny because of the crooked Palo Alto Superior Court which claims in its records that I "dismissed" my case against Steve Jobs and ignored the fact that Jobs had illegally sent Apple lawyers and staff to the court in spite of the fact that the lawsuit was against HIM PERSONALLY AND HE HAD BEEN SERVED.
Steve Jobs is hiding from getting served again with lawsuits over the options scam and all of this is under the guise of his "illness".
- by cyclelogicpress.com April 26, 2009 9:12 AM PDT
- I wonder if Apple's recent interest in getting iPhones into enterprises will be their trojan horse?
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