Andreas Haas 
 
 
 
 

I'm the product manager for the central European region which includes Germany, Austria and Switzerland. This means I'm very tightly connected to our technology and especially the MacOS X server and its basic technologies and the foundation which we made widely available in terms of the open source. Therefore, I'm here to speak to you tonight about the Apple Public Source License and what it implies. I'll talk about where we are coming from and the background, what you need to know to understand about what is the importance of open source and what it means to Apple, and where we are planning to go. You will see a nice little road map, nothing very undisclosed, so stay cool. We will talk about what the Apple Public Source License implies actually, and what we want with that and finally, I will highlight some questions like why do we do it and why do we expect you to do it.  

First of all, we have to talk about that at Apple, we have a dual operating system strategy with MacOS and MacOS X. Here is the short road map. MacOS is the operating system that is connected with Apple in the heads of the people. MacOS is literally the system which is used by almost 60 milion users worldwide, and makes Apple the number two vendor in terms of operating systems. Therefore, we are definitely going to continue to develop this operating system. On the other hand at the beginning of this year, we introduced the MacOS X Server. Together with MacOS X, we announced our new open source strategey. MacOS X will also evolve and we will see early next year the client extension to MacOS X Server which then will be named MacOS X. From then on, we will have two operating systems.  

One will ask why we have two operating systems. Why don't we just skip one, there must be a difference. Well, frankly let's use this picture: If you develop a bicycle and it has two wheels, a steering wheel, and you start to evolve, you add brakes, a motor, it will remain a bike. It has two wheels and it is a bike. Sometimes people come up and ask for something with four wheels, and then you start developing something else that you might call a car. It has four wheels, steering wheel, brakes, and a motor. So from then on, we will have the bike, Mac OS, and the car, MacOS X. And we will continue to develop both of them as long as people ask for the bike. So the customers themselves will decide when we end Mac OS, when they stop buying the bike.  

So the Apple Public Source License, what is it? When we introduced the MacOS X Server, we introduced an operating system which is already widely using open source technology, there BSD and Apache in it and some other stuff. Therefore, the idea to make parts of that, what we add to those open source packages also available as open source, is not far off. At that point, we set up the Apple Public Source License Agreement.  

Under this agreement you can get every open source project that we provide on our website. We have one license for all of those projects. This license in its 1.1 version complies with the Open Source Definition, which I don't have to explain. And yes, it is version 1.1, we had a version 1.0 , and the community came back with some criticism because it didn't fully comply with some points of the OSD. One is free distribution. We are used to acting under Amercian laws and there is a special one regarding exporting software to other countries. So with regard to that law we decided to keep that restriction also in our public source license. And the second thing we were criticized for, as soon as there is a lawsuit between us and one of our developers, he wouldn't have a chance to proceed by shipping his source code. We changed that, so now we fully comply with the Open Source Definition. You can ship it where ever you want. As soon as there might be a lawsuit, you can write around the contested part of the source code. So you can do a work-around and continue to ship your product. The response to 1.1 is great. We have more registered developers now who have downloaded this source code than we knew before.  

Why did we do it? Well, first of all, we want to make our techonologies the foundaton for innovative and compelling solutions. We have leading technologies in our industry and we want you to use those technologies to make your own products, which also might be leading in your own niche of the market. On the other hand we want to get our -- and because it is open source, it is also your -- technology improved by the brainpower of the Internet community.  

Let's focus on what we have now. Altogther, we have three projects up and running. The most important one is Darwin, which is the first time ever that a commercial operating system goes open source. Let's have a brief look at what this operating system that we ship, that we sell, is all about. We have MasOS X Server, based on the Mach kernel 2.5. We have put in our file services, BSD 4.4, Apache, Java, WebObjects, and *NetGood, which is a brand new technology, if you ask me. We are targeting this product at four different core market segments. They are publishing, Internet, WebObjects and *NetGood. If we take away the last two, WebObjects and *NetGood, then you find that what we made widely open on our public source website -- which means that you can download it -- is the core OS foundation of MacOS X. It contains all core OS technologies like kernel, files system, net info, network commands, as well as the other open sources that we have adopted by ourselves, which means, Apache, Java and other similar stuff. There is also a complete OS installer available, which means you can download a binary of this Darwin project, burn it on a CD-ROM, put it in your Macintosh and boot from that CD and install Darwin, just by clicking the installer. This is available today, this is not an announcement, it is there today. You can go there, publicsource.apple.com and it is there.  

The second interesting project that we now have is the open source streaming server. It's the first commercial streaming server that is really for free. And I just want to show you a little about what this means. QuickTime streaming or streaming in general is that you have a source, video or audio, you know it, Realnet is out there, Microsoft is out there. And actually, they don't do anything else but taking a source and streaming it through the Internet. You can go there and see it, you don't have to download it, but it is a little bit like seeing it live. By loading it down, you see it. The problem there is that you need a special technology to compress and decompress the data. When Lucas Film initially released the first trailer for Starwars it looked like that. They were using current technology at that time, and this is the quality that you could get then [example of the trailer shown]. It is small, you couldn't get different resolutions. The sound is rather poor, it is mono, 8 bit. So the next time they did the trailer, they chose our technology. You notice first that it has a different shape, it has 16 bit stereo, and it's way much better. Just on our technology. The quality is better, the images smoother, and the sound is much more dynamic [example shown].  

So as you have seen, we have now a way much better technology to offer than anybody else in the streaming area. The "Institut fuer Rundfunktechnologie" which ist the research and development institute of public television in Germany, Austria and Switzerland stated that our QuickTime streaming technology is the best available on the market, and they are also part of our respected customers. We offer this technology for free. The complete source code is already available on the Internet. We have recently found there, on the Internet, a Linux version for Intel-based systems. Actually, we don't do this, but somebody else did -- it's open source, and we are also proud to announce that. And you can download it today.  

On the other hand, we have not only software components which we make open source, but we also offer hardware. And I can say that we have a really powerful hardware concept. We play with the Power PC advantage, we use a RISC processor, and I think most of you know that RISC processors are much faster than CISC processors can ever be. And even at lower cycling speeds as you might see here [chart shown] -- we have only measurements up to Pentium II, but I have another chart that compares our processor to a Pentium III at 500 Mhz. This is a kind of combined real time test, with Photoshop and sixteen other tasks running and we are faster. And you all know what this means. If you are familiar with the SETI project, Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, you will find that there are millions of different benchmarks for every single hardware-software combination you can think of, Intel RISC, Intel Alpha combined with NT or OS/2, you name it. Go there and take a look at the benchmarks they do based on our hardware systems and you will see that we are really awfully fast. The best combination is our hardware concept and our software design.  

So why join us? There are three good reasons. First, you then play with the inventors of industry leading technologies and standards. We have invented the MacOS, we were the first to sell computers using a mouse, having windows, the desktop, the trashcan. This was invented by us [booing and laughter from the audience]. I see that you are very aware of Microsoft's marketing [more noise, "Xerox invented those."]. Oh no, I'm not talking about having had the idea, I'm talking about selling the first computer with those features ["That was the Xerox Star."]. They didn't sell it. ["They did."] OK, we can do this later. I always like that part of this presentation when people are waking up.  

The next thing is QuickTime 4, which will be the foundation for the MPEG layer 4. And last but not least, one of the other interesting things, Firewire, is also invented by Apple. You find it in DV camcorders out there. You now can buy a Sony at about 1,500$ which uses DV which actually comes from Apple. We are a strong and reliable business partner. We want to do business, and I think at the end of the day, there are some people out there who also want to earn money with what they are doing. So we are strong, and we have proven in the past, in the last one and a half years that we are a strong partner. And we have shown that we have a clear strategy, both for hardware and software.  

And third, we offer powerful products which are compelling in price and performance. Even if you go out and install a Linux, you can have a Linux-for-PowerPC distribution or MK Linux, you can install either on our hardware and you even get a faster Linux machine than you can buy for the same price anywhere else. So with those three points, I'll close my presentation.