Apple's Christmas gifts to open source
Apple gets a lot of grief for being a net pillager of open source. The company has adopted open-source software into critically important products, yet gives little in return (so the story goes). And yet the Mac gets a lot of love from the open-source crowd. Why? What has Apple done to deserve it?
Roughly Drafted offers a range of reasons, but here are a few that I find particularly salient, starting with the importance of Apple's patent portfolio:
Most open source-centric developers only have a smattering of patents, but companies that back open source, such as Apple, Google, and IBM, have huge portfolios of thousands of patents covering a broad range of technologies. That makes Apple an unassailable ally of open source development and lends corporate legitimacy to the very distributed projects Microsoft is working to undermine with its fear-based anti-marketing....
The reason for Apple's natural alignment behind open source isn't due to a halo of righteousness, but because the company is contending as a minority player in several markets dominated by Microsoft and the proprietary technologies it has established as de facto standards. Apple's position is identical to Linux, BSD, and other open source projects, giving it strong reasons to intercede on the behalf of victims of patent terrorism.
Indeed. Apple is but one of several companies that fits this description (IBM, Oracle, HP, and others, including Novell, if it would stop aiding and abetting), but it's a critical one, both because of the power of its brand and because of its corporate rise among consumers.
In fact, it is this class of customer that makes Apple's interests align so well with open source:
Of course, Apple's interests don't always align with every member of the open source community. However, the company's consumer-oriented focus regularly matches its strategies and interests with the needs of users rather than corporate managers, studios and labels who might want to dial up the prices and restrict the use of consumer media, and other anti-consumer interests.
Apple, in sum, has plenty of reasons to stand behind open source. Instead of looking at it as an open-source villain, we may well one day have reason to refer to it as the new open-source friendly sheriff in town.
Read the rest of the article for more. Apple is open source's friend.
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. 
VoIP is near to running on iPod Touch, courtesy of open source (see http://blog.pjsip.org/2007/12/20/pjmedia-running-on-ipod-touch-good-news-for-open-source/)...
Apple is not a friend to Open Source, it is merely a business acquaintance. What Apple does that benefits Open Source is undertaken, primarily, to benefit Apple. When Apple's interests do not align with Open Source, the organization advances itself, sometimes at the expense of Open Source.
There is nothing particularly wrong with this; it is the way business is done. Apple deserves neither to be scorned nor lionized for their conduct. But don't get too warm and fuzzy over Apple, it may obscure your vision when the dagger comes out from under the cloak.