Courtesy of OSWeekly.com

Continued...

Apple has also made some commitments to open source, and recent updates have helped to further prove this point. First of all, the source code for the Intel x86 version of the Darwin Kernel has been released. Even more notable is the fact that Apple has created and is hosting a community site called Mac OS Forge. Those of you who are familiar with OpenDarwin.org may have caught the announcement that it's closing its doors, and active visitors of that site were left wondering if there would be some sort of a replacement for it. Sure enough, Apple came along and gave back to the community in a large way by officially backing such an initiative.

The site focuses on being a repository for open source projects for OS X, and you might think that such a site would be filled with corporate filler to justify the fact that Apple's hosting it, but you'd be wrong. The site is surprisingly sparse, and if you didn't know in advance that it was from Apple, then you probably wouldn't be able to pick up on it. It's almost like they went out of their way to make it look like they weren't behind it. Just like a normal community site, it's powered by WordPress and allows comments. Anyone could build a similar site on their own, and that's why I think it's so powerful. It's sort of like Apple's way of looking out for the little guy. In addition to these open source developments, Apple has also released the source for iCal Server, and they've made licensing changes to Bonjour and Launchd (now distributed under the Apache License).

Apple deserves a round of applause for these advancements, and it's very fitting that they timed the announcements of them during this year's WWDC. Developers can rally together and get behind this stuff, and it's obvious that Apple is trying their best to please its third party developers in any way that they can. The more people that are developing and collaborating on software for OS X, the better. Apple can build as many cool applications in-house as they want, but that doesn't eliminate the need for outside software. They need the developers more than the developers need them.

One of the biggest attractions to Windows for some people is the variety of software that is available for the OS. It's nice to have a large number of options, and this competition leads to better software. There's not enough variety in software on OS X right now (at least not in comparison to the Windows world), and Apple hopes to improve that by strongly supporting both the standard developer community and the open source development community.