NewsFactor Network | Is Open Source Apple's Salvation?

Is Open Source Apple's Salvation?
By Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier

April 21, 2003 12:01PM

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While Apple's reliance on open source has changed the nature of its products, it is not likely to result in a huge change in market share. Open source is not the key to Apple taking over the world, says Roger Kay, director of client computing at IDC.

It has been reported, ad infinitum, that Apple's shiny new operating system is based on an open-source Unix OS. And Apple recently embraced the KDE project's KHTML rendering engine as the core of its Safari Web browser.

The question is whether adoption of open source has any real impact on Apple's overall strategy and health or is just an interesting side note.

Best of Both Worlds

While Apple is using open source as the core of its operating system, the company is not a pure open-source play. Darwin, which provides the underpinnings of OS X, is freely available under the BSD license -- the same license that is used for most of FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. And the core of Safari, WebCore, is based on the KHTML rendering engine, which is available under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

But Apple is no Red Hat. OS X is not freely available, nor is the whole of Safari. Only bits and pieces of Apple's pie are available under open-source licenses. The rest -- like Apple's Aqua user interface -- are available only with OS X and are not to be found under an open license.

While Microsoft complains bitterly about open source, Apple has found a way to have its cake and eat it too.

Cost Savings

A great deal of code that winds up in OS X is not developed by Apple, nor does the company have to pay to license it or pay developers to produce it. Open source is "absolutely core to Apple strategy," Brian Croll, senior director of Apple's OS X product marketing, told NewsFactor.

Using open source gives Apple "more bang for their engineering buck," adds Dan Kusnetzky, vice president of system software at IDC, by allowing the company to focus R&D money on "things that are unique to them."

Croll notes that Apple is not just saving money on development, though. "A real benefit to the open-source community and philosophy [is that] you can really build on the shoulders of giants. The community can build on each other's work, get something to market really rapidly and participate by putting [code] back into the community."

In addition, open source is not a bad public-relations move. Kusnetzky told NewsFactor that Apple gets an additional PR boost from its use of open source. "They have discovered that if somebody mentions something related to Linux, they get broad coverage. If they talk about proprietary products ... they might not get the same coverage." (continued...)

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