LinuxJournal: Apple Importing OS Development Talent from Open Source UNIX Community
Over on LinuxJournal, Doc Searls reports that Apple is importing a lot of Open Source UNIX development talent into its Darwin Project, the core of MacOS X. According to the article:
While Apple pitches radical hardware and practical software to the
masses, UNIX geeks are quietly adding big value to the company's
open-source, BSD-based operating system....
In past years at Macworld my Linux Journal shirt would have seemed more out of
place than a leisure suit. But this year it fits right in. There were people in line wearing
Sun and SGI schwag too. One guy told me he thought OS X was "subversive"
because it "seeds" millions of otherwise unsuspecting households with open-source
UNIX. "I can go to my Mom's, fire up her iMac, open a shell, ssh to my own server
and get some real work done", one guy said to me.
When you combine the low level features of MacOS X with the cheap, powerful software tools that Apple is providing for digital media management (iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, iDVD), it's pretty easy to see why people at the geeky end of the spectrum are looking at Apple products quite differently than they did even a year ago.