November 10, 2007 8:34 AM PST
Apple's Leopard has a lot of open source running behind the scenes
The Mac takes a lot of flak for being "the most proprietary computing platform" on the planet. In many ways, it is. But in the case of its source code, there's a heck of a lot of it available as open source, as this list from Apple shows.
Try to find a list like that for Microsoft's products, many of which (secretly) include open-source software. You won't.
Apple is about inventing new wheels, not reinventing old ones. Open source makes this possible. There's always a siren singing you to shipwreck...but this is no siren, and Leopard is no shipwreck.
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. 
browser thing. Do me a favor and look at the acquisition history of Microsoft
before you make claims like this. Pretty much every major tech company is guilty
of this, even Apple. It is called "use the wheel that is already out there and save
time and money, or try to reinvent it and watch the rest of the world pass you
by".
The same can be said about Microsoft, ask all the other software developers that they've either absorbed or sued to death before you make such a proclamation. You must not have a Mac to say something like this.
- Do you acutally believe that?
- by mikejuliet November 10, 2007 1:36 PM PST
- I'm wondering if you actually BELIEVE that spin yourself... Apple is inventing new wheels because it lists its open source projects? If Apple actually (1) worked with third party developers (which they are notorious for NOT doing) and (2) actually encouraged software development on their platform, then you could compare them to Microsoft, since they have been doing that for years. Of course, that would just be reinventing the wheel. Microsoft has been giving computer users more options for years while Apple cannibalizes any entity that tries to pull the curtain on the Wizard of Oz.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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- Believe it
- by jsaiya November 13, 2007 8:22 AM PST
- >> If Apple ... actually encouraged software development on their platform, ...
- Like this
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(5 Comments)... maybe they would include a full development environment with each copy of their OS? Oh, wait; they do.
When was the last time a Microsoft OS came with programming tools? GW-Basic on MS-DOS?