Apple Embraces Open Source -- Kind Of

Sporting a graying beard, Steve Jobs yesterday unveiled the biggest overhaul yet of Apple's 15-year-old Mac operating system. Although the product is meant only for running web servers, it's the first release of the "modern" operating system that Apple has been struggling to get to desktops for most of the decade. And borrowing a page from the Linux playbook, Jobs announced that the actual code for some -- but not all -- important pieces would be posted on the web in the hopes of attracting developer interest.

Although Netscape made a similar bold move last year with the source code to its browser, this is the first time that a major computer maker has made any of its system software available to the open source community. Just as Jobs has showed his knack in the past for inviting the right guest when he had the Quake developers tout the Mac as a game platform, yesterday Jobs brought Eric Raymond, president of the Open Source Initiative, on stage with Brian Behlendorf, a cofounder of the Apache web server software project, to voice their support for Apple's move. MORE>>/time/digital/daily/0,2822,21618,00.html