Developer Don Yacktman says Apple Computer Inc could make more money and save on engineering costs if it gave away the source code to portions of Mac OS X. Yacktman’s Modest Proposal to Apple executives is available on the Object Foundation web site at http://www.of.org. To defend his radical position, Yacktman points out that Microsoft NT and Linux are about to start competing head-to-head in the server market. In particular, if Linux continues to grow at its present rate, it will soon overtake Mac OS as the second most-deployed PC operating system. Going open source is: The best way Apple could avoid being caught in the crossfire, Yacktman explains. A developer since 1991 for what Apple is now calling the Yellow Box API, Yacktman first made his mark in the open source community by persuading NeXT Inc to release the source of its defunct 3DKit and IndexingKit technologies. That’s significant because the head of NeXT at the time was none other than Apple founder and interim CEO, Steve Jobs. It’s one reason I feel Jobs is more open to an open source effort than some people believe, Yacktman says, I don’t think I put much better than a 30% chance on Apple actually accepting the proposal, but at least they’ll be thinking about open source. We felt it was very important to at least make sure they were thinking about it. Yacktman says he consulted extensively with the open source community and with Apple developers in order to refine his detailed proposal. He concedes that Apple cannot simply give away its intellectual property. The trick, he says, is to determine which piece is the right piece. What Yacktman proposes is that Apple should ship Mac OS Server 1.0 on Intel as planned. However 1.0 should not be the final release. A developer release should follow, with an open source driver development kit and the complete source code for the Mach/BSD layers underneath. In fact a large proportion of this source code has already been published, in MkLinux and elsewhere. As Netscape has done with Mozilla, Apple can retain the commercial rights to the code and collect promising-looking software for commercial distributions. In particular, the company could package Yellow Box, NetInfo and the applications currently bundled with Mac OS X Server, charging universities very little for the package but making businesses pay full price. Yacktman contends that this policy would engender grassroots support and an open source development effort for Mac OS on Intel. He says Apple’s traditional customer base doesn’t want source code access and wouldn’t buy Intel hardware, so existing sales won’t fall. On the other hand, hackers want raw speed and are attracted to the PowerPC, so sales of Apple hardware could actually increase. Most compellingly, however, what the Linux community most needs is what Apple already has: an intuitive graphical user interface. Could it work? Yacktman hopes so. I’ve got a lot at stake here and I know Apple has a lot at stake, he says, I just want to see this thing succeed. รก
