{"id":22,"date":"2005-06-09T00:07:36","date_gmt":"2005-06-08T14:07:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/?p=22"},"modified":"2005-06-09T00:07:36","modified_gmt":"2005-06-08T14:07:36","slug":"apple-and-sun-a-most-unlikely-duo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/?p=22","title":{"rendered":"Apple and Sun: a most unlikely duo"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like many who heard the news<\/a> this week, I have a few opinions on what the short and long-term implications for both Apple and the industry will be as a result of Steve\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s decision. But I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not going to reveal them, at least not now. My immediate attention is draw to the interesting ambitions<\/a> of Sun Microsystems\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/a> President and COO Jonathan Schwartz<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In his open letter to Steve Jobs, Jonathan invites Apple to adopt Solaris 10 as the platform for next-generation Intel-based Macs. Although Jonathan was being quite shrewd in suggesting Apple might switch (no pun intended) to Intel on the basis of a rumour<\/a>, I think he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll sooner witness Dell ship an AMD-based box than Apple adopt Solaris, for a few good reasons.<\/p>\n

As Steve mentioned during the keynote, Mac OS X has been \u00e2\u20ac\u0153leading a secret double life\u00e2\u20ac\u009d for the past five years. So project \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcMarklar\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, as rumoured a number of years ago, indeed does exist. Big deal? Not really. Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s scratch the surface a bit to find out how easy the port would have been for Apple\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s talented software engineers.<\/p>\n

Even before the OpenDarwin<\/a> project began three years ago, Apple released the source code<\/a> to Darwin 1.3.1 which was the underbelly of Mac OS X 10.0 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c yes, the first release five years ago. And that version was also available as an x86 binary so anyone could download and run it on an Intel machine. With that in mind, let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s look at Apple\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s open source stack to see which packages have not only been ported to Intel but are being actively developed<\/i> on Intel (read x86)\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

Mach kernel \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Intel
\nBSD subsystem \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Intel
\nBash \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Intel
\nGCC \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Intel
\nGNU file utilities \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Intel
\nApache \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Intel
\nPostfix \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Intel
\nWebcore (fork of KHTML) \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Intel
\nX11 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Intel
\nOpenGL – Intel
\nCUPS \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Intel
\nGIMP-Print \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Intel
\nMySQL \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Intel
\nSamba \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Intel
\nCyrus \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Intel
\nOpenSSH \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Intel
\nPHP \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Intel
\nPerl \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Intel
\nPython – Intel
\nJboss \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Intel
\nJabber \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Intel
\nEmacs \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Intel
\nVim \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Intel<\/p>\n

So there you have it, a list of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcIntel compatible\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 software within Mac OS X. There is more \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and I hate to think of the amount of open source code hidden inside OS X\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s proprietary eye candy – but surely that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s enough. My point being that Apple\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcport\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 of OS X to Intel seems more of a case of compiling all the x86 software and then porting the GUI on top of that. But as Steve revealed both architectures are from a common code base anyway.<\/p>\n

What does that have to do with Solaris? Well, nothing for now and it probably never will. Why on Earth would Apple now \u00e2\u20ac\u201c after supporting two architectures with a common open source code base \u00e2\u20ac\u201c take an abrupt left turn and port all of this software to the Solaris kernel and subsystem? What would Apple gain? A bunch of high-end features that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hardware doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even support?<\/p>\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not sure why Jonathan would even suggest Apple should support Solaris now when it has done such a good job with BSD and GPL code. Remember, when Apple started working on OS X, x86 Solaris was proprietary and lacked the vibrant development community FreeBSD<\/a> has enjoyed since its inception. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ironic that A-UX – Apple\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s System V-based Unix well before OS X \u00e2\u20ac\u201c was dropped in favour of a BSD code base, while Sun dropped its BSD-based SunOS in favour of System V which now underpins Solaris.<\/p>\n

Rather than being future collaborators, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d go so far as to say that Apple and Sun will become even more competitive as the former<\/a> begins<\/a> to encroach<\/a> on the latter\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s turf<\/a>.<\/p>\n

By the way, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m glad you appreciate innovation<\/a> Jonathan, just be wary that inventing may be closer to counterfeiting<\/a> than we are led to believe… \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

Rodney<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like many who heard the news this week, I have a few opinions on what the short and long-term implications for both Apple and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,27,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apple","category-open-source","category-sun"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gedda.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}