The Apple imprint on open source continues
The VAR Guy was on location at the annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention. Despite it being an open-source conference for developers, the event was awash in a sea of (highly proprietary) Macs.
...Apple Corporate is nowhere to be seen at OSCON. Steve Jobs must be locked away, designing the next proprietary software platform tied to proprietary hardware and proprietary online Apple services. And yes, The VAR Guy will buy it.
Still, Apple is EVERYWHERE here at OSCON. The VAR Guy estimates that 20 percent to 35 percent of the crowd is carrying MacBooks or MacBook Pros....So here we are, at a big event where Microsoft is spending big marketing dollars - and Apple won the hearts and minds of attendees before they even arrived at OSCON.
I've written on this before, but I'm increasingly of the mind that open-source developers appreciate the excellence of Apple's products, and like the Mac's quick access to the command line and the increasing array of open-source applications that run on the Mac (like Adium, Handbrake, etc.).
Perhaps open-source developers care as much about usability as anyone else.
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. 
