Sep 22, 1998

Apple Says “No” to Open Source

Earlier today, Apple Computer, Inc., made an official statement concerning the recent requests by many of its employees and Open Source community leaders to make the lowest levels of Mac OS X available as source code under an Open Source license.

In their statement, Apple cited many reasons for its decision to keep Mach 3 for OS X proprietary, among them being that they wouldn't want “those stupid Pee-Cee hacker geeks mucking around with our system software and mailing us suggestions.”

In light of this announcement, many are calling for Apple to take even more drastic and unexpected steps in order to embrace the Open Source community. “We want the source code to Apple's big flop, Copland!” says one young hacker. “A/UX is the other OS we want. And we'll get it!” One can only surmise what means the hacking community has to supply the Open Source coders with fodder for their compilers. “Apple is holding a lot of operating systems prisoner. We'll free them all!”

Among the other operating systems Apple holds in its vaults beside the afore-mentioned Copland and A/UX are Newton OS, Pink/Taligent, and Pong for Open Firmware.