From: Adam L. Beberg (beberg@mithral.com)
Date: Wed May 31 2000 - 03:04:14 PDT
On Wed, 31 May 2000, Wilfredo [iso-8859-1] Sánchez wrote:
> I'm Fred. I have opinions. I like to share. I even like being told
> I'm wrong, though I don't tend to agree. (Ernie can vouch for that.)
Welcome, you're not wrong, you're just not right ;)
> Open Source Engineering Lead
> Apple Computer, Inc., Core Operating System Group
Wow...
There are legends of one who will come.
The story is told to freshman, during an all night study break.
One with the power to speak both the Open and the Mac.
who will draw on the power of the open to lead them to freedom...
That .sig is a good excuse for me to write this up, been pondering it a
while.
I've been running into issues with the intersection set of Mac
programmers and open source participants for about 4 years, which seems
to be the empty set. This problem applies to any non-UNIX system. Feel
free to s/Mac/non-UNIX/
Where are the Mac programmers who do open source or other such projects?
Why is open source only a UNIX thing? When I Ran (big-R)
distributed.net, we were constantly needing a mac coder, and the fiasco
of that was an all too public horror story too painful to remember.
SETI@Home had to pay someone to work on the Mac version, becasue no Mac
person existed in academia with an interest in SETI. We've ported Cosm
to 20+ systems now, even MacOS X, but I'm fairly convinced we'll never
find a Mac coder to spend a couple hours on the port to MacOS. So much
for that 5% of systems. Oddly, we can't find a Win32 coder to fix 2
lines of thread code either! If Mac coders don't want anyone to know
they exist, why should the rest of the world care?
But wait... why...
Open source depends on the concept of lots of young programmers with no
bills or lives, each doing part of the project. Since Apple lost
academia, there aren't any idle Mac programmers, only working ones with
experience and lives = no interest in open source.
You can also still make money doing Mac programming, so why not get
paid, only a fool doesnt get paid for time away from their life right?
UNIX is a saturated system, preaty much everyone knows it, so no
shortage = no money. Coders like to code, and they know if they can't
get paid for it, they should do it in UNIX, which isn't a threat to
their day job. The money is in the new new thing, so only the old old
thing should be open source. Don't see to many open source B2B portal
engines do you...
Now Apple has entered and openly embraced open source, but with...
*blink blink* a UNIX kernel... wait a minute, everyone knows UNIX is
free! (you only pay if you need it to work) Error, Error, don't follow
SGI into oblivion.
Maybe it's a good thing I can't find a Mac coder. If I could, those
people would be out of Mac day jobs, having to take McJobs instead.
- Adam L. Beberg
Mithral Communications & Design, Inc.
The Cosm Project - http://cosm.mithral.com/
beberg@mithral.com - http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/
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