How free software contributed to the success of Steve Jobs and Apple
We all celebrate Steve Jobs' successful career and are grateful for the huge improvements in computer interfaces and electronic devices. He's just great. But at the same time, Apple is a centralized, controlled organization with strict supervision of the App Store and announcements of new products. The hidden reason for the fact that now dissatisfied users and adherents of free software have turned their historical dislike to Microsoft in the direction of Apple - the fact that this company is a brilliant business story in the new era. So I want to reconcile both sides and tell you how important free software is for the success of Jobs and Apple.
After his remarkable Second Coming in 1996, Steve Jobs immediately made two important changes: he ported the OpenSTEP interfaces from NeXT and chose the version of the open BSD system as the new Apple operating system. OpenSTEP was a proprietary, platform-specific API set for Solaris, Windows, and NeXTSTEP. Initially, these interfaces worked only on NeXTSTEP - that is, on the operating system for NeXT computers, Jobs' company. However, NeXT collaborated with powerful at that time Sun Microsystems, which made its widely popular BSD-based SunOS operating system. OpenSTEP has become the basis for familiar Cocoa libraries and other libraries that Apple developers are currently dealing with.
(It may seem strange that they used the word “Open” in the name of the proprietary system. But at that time - and in certain circles until now - even the rudimentary beginnings of inter-platform interaction were the reason for using this term. Someone remembers the Open Software Foundation ?)
The foundation for the breakthrough and still powerful Mac OS X operating system was the BSD version based on NetBSD and FreeBSD with the addition of some unique elements . Using BSD gave numerous advantages: it brought multitasking to Macs and allowed porting a huge number of Unix and BSD applications to them, after which Mac computers got rid of their original positioning as a tool for creative artists, and became a more universal system.
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Especially valuable for Apple was the ability to port an open source Samba program developed for Linux. Thanks to the reverse engineering of SMB / CIFS protocols, this program allows you to access network drives on various operating systems, that is, Macs were able to connect to Microsoft local networks. In addition, Apple (like NeXT) used the GCC compiler developed by Richard Stallman and adapted the KDE browser engine (now known as Webkit) for Safari. All of these free software packages were incredibly good; that's why Mac OS X used them.
I think, among geeks, "Macs" became popular due to the recognition of Unix and BSD software; Now at computer conferences these are the most popular laptops, with a large margin. And thanks to the excellent server software from the BSD kernel, Macintosh computers are increasingly being used as servers for home and small businesses.
Apple fully understood how good technologies it used with the BSD-based OS kernel, because it chose the same platform for the iPhone and for subsequent products. As I mentioned earlier , the presence of BSD libraries and tools allowed a group of free software advocates to reverse engineer the iPhone API and create an open library that allowed anyone, not just Apple, to install applications on the iPhone for the first time. This led to the emergence of a large number of great iPhone applications, none of which was approved by Apple, however, after many months, Apple itself released its own API and allowed third-party applications through its App Store.
Although the BSD license allowed Apple to release a proprietary system, it decided to choose a free license for its OS called Darwin. However, as a separate product, Darwin did not gain much popularity.
BSD was not the first time Steve Jobs used free software. The NeXT computer was based on the Mach 3 open core developed by Richard Rashid of Carnegie Mellon University. The computer emulated FreeBSD (although Rashid himself didn’t like it) for the software and user interfaces. Some elements of Mach 3 were included in Darwin and (if we take a step back from the topic) Mach 3 influenced the computer industry quite a bit, becoming a model for the design of the Microsoft NT microkernel - the system that brought Microsoft into the modern era of operating systems and especially servers. Yes, and Rashid himself a few years ago got a position of senior vice president of research at Microsoft.
Behind Open Source there is a broad, ideological movement without clear leaders. Its influence sometimes leads to surprising results, although it can be difficult to track them. The triumph of Steve Jobs clearly demonstrates this principle, even though the open source ideology contradicts all Apple business principles. Innovators such as Andrew Tridgell, the developer of Samba and rsync, continue to impress us more and more and show that the success of free software is truly endless. Without it, most of the computer history would be completely different, more scarce.
After his remarkable Second Coming in 1996, Steve Jobs immediately made two important changes: he ported the OpenSTEP interfaces from NeXT and chose the version of the open BSD system as the new Apple operating system. OpenSTEP was a proprietary, platform-specific API set for Solaris, Windows, and NeXTSTEP. Initially, these interfaces worked only on NeXTSTEP - that is, on the operating system for NeXT computers, Jobs' company. However, NeXT collaborated with powerful at that time Sun Microsystems, which made its widely popular BSD-based SunOS operating system. OpenSTEP has become the basis for familiar Cocoa libraries and other libraries that Apple developers are currently dealing with.
(It may seem strange that they used the word “Open” in the name of the proprietary system. But at that time - and in certain circles until now - even the rudimentary beginnings of inter-platform interaction were the reason for using this term. Someone remembers the Open Software Foundation ?)
The foundation for the breakthrough and still powerful Mac OS X operating system was the BSD version based on NetBSD and FreeBSD with the addition of some unique elements . Using BSD gave numerous advantages: it brought multitasking to Macs and allowed porting a huge number of Unix and BSD applications to them, after which Mac computers got rid of their original positioning as a tool for creative artists, and became a more universal system.
')
Especially valuable for Apple was the ability to port an open source Samba program developed for Linux. Thanks to the reverse engineering of SMB / CIFS protocols, this program allows you to access network drives on various operating systems, that is, Macs were able to connect to Microsoft local networks. In addition, Apple (like NeXT) used the GCC compiler developed by Richard Stallman and adapted the KDE browser engine (now known as Webkit) for Safari. All of these free software packages were incredibly good; that's why Mac OS X used them.
I think, among geeks, "Macs" became popular due to the recognition of Unix and BSD software; Now at computer conferences these are the most popular laptops, with a large margin. And thanks to the excellent server software from the BSD kernel, Macintosh computers are increasingly being used as servers for home and small businesses.
Apple fully understood how good technologies it used with the BSD-based OS kernel, because it chose the same platform for the iPhone and for subsequent products. As I mentioned earlier , the presence of BSD libraries and tools allowed a group of free software advocates to reverse engineer the iPhone API and create an open library that allowed anyone, not just Apple, to install applications on the iPhone for the first time. This led to the emergence of a large number of great iPhone applications, none of which was approved by Apple, however, after many months, Apple itself released its own API and allowed third-party applications through its App Store.
Although the BSD license allowed Apple to release a proprietary system, it decided to choose a free license for its OS called Darwin. However, as a separate product, Darwin did not gain much popularity.
BSD was not the first time Steve Jobs used free software. The NeXT computer was based on the Mach 3 open core developed by Richard Rashid of Carnegie Mellon University. The computer emulated FreeBSD (although Rashid himself didn’t like it) for the software and user interfaces. Some elements of Mach 3 were included in Darwin and (if we take a step back from the topic) Mach 3 influenced the computer industry quite a bit, becoming a model for the design of the Microsoft NT microkernel - the system that brought Microsoft into the modern era of operating systems and especially servers. Yes, and Rashid himself a few years ago got a position of senior vice president of research at Microsoft.
Behind Open Source there is a broad, ideological movement without clear leaders. Its influence sometimes leads to surprising results, although it can be difficult to track them. The triumph of Steve Jobs clearly demonstrates this principle, even though the open source ideology contradicts all Apple business principles. Innovators such as Andrew Tridgell, the developer of Samba and rsync, continue to impress us more and more and show that the success of free software is truly endless. Without it, most of the computer history would be completely different, more scarce.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/127182/
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