Mark F. Murphy writes:
> At 4:19 PM -0500 8/17/06, Dave Schroeder wrote:
> >The bottom line is that I think Apple needs to reconcile these
> >issues, and not necessarily ALWAYS err on the side of secrecy and
> >non-communication, especially in the context of dealing with
> >larger/enterprise customers.
>
> You're asking for transparency (something common in the open source
> community) from a company which doesn't live in a transparent
> business environment (i.e., trade secrets, competition, etc).
>
> I just don't think the two can *always* be reconciled and to expect
> it so will certainly lead to unnecessary disappointment.
Apple could learn a lot from Sun about how to do a better job
reconciling transparency with business needs.
Sun has similar constraints to Apple, and yet OpenSolaris is *much*
more transparent than Darwin. You can browse the source code to the
development version of Solaris (Solaris 11) on line
(http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/). Changes are integrated in the
cathedral, but pushed out to the world every few weeks. Additionally,
installable binary distributions (and the corresponding buildable
source) are published every few weeks (see
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/onnv/). There are even 3
non-Sun distributions of OpenSolaris (Nexenta, SchilliX, and BeleniX).
Contrast this to Apple, where you must join the ADC for $500 to get
access to the next version of MacOSX, you do not even get the source,
and you are banned from talking about it in public.
There should be at least some middle ground where the "community" can
get access to future versions of Darwin and help influence its
direction. Most of the fanfare (and hence the secrecy) surrounding
future Apple releases is on the gee-whiz GUI enhancements and eye
candy that are Apple's bread and butter. Nobody is asking for
that. The cool Darwin stuff in Leopard (Dtrace, true 64-bit support)
are basically footnotes that the majority of Apple's customers either
don't care about, or don't even understand. So I'm not sure what
benefit there is to Apple from keeping them secret.
Drew
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