Apr 01 Viewpoint
Volume Number: 17
Issue Number: 4
Column Tag: Viewpoint
By Rich Morin
In this month's Viewpoint, Rich Morin revisits some themes that he discussed in our
first Viewpoint, two years ago. Fortunately, Apple has now released Mac OS X, so much
of what used to be speculation is now reality.
I am an unapologetic fan of both Mac OS and Unix. My desktop system (cerberus) is a
three-headed G3, running Mac OS. A FreeBSD server sits downstairs, providing
support for email, ftp, telnet, etc. The Mac provides a pleasant user interface and a
fine set of "productivity tools"; the server gives me a reliable platform for my
Unix-based programming projects.
Although I find this to be a very workable combination, it can prove awkward on
occasion. The FreeBSD and Mac OS environments are not tightly coupled, so moving
information between them can be a nuisance. Also, Mac OS apps have a tendency to use
undocumented, proprietary file formats. The idea of an integrated system, based on
both Mac OS and Unix, is therefore quite appealing to me.
More to the point, I once had such a system. A/UX, which ran on the Mac II and
follow-on machines (e.g., Quadras), was a very promising blend of Mac OS and Unix.
Unfortunately, Apple never gave the product any real marketing support, so it never
built a large customer base. Nonetheless, it was a useful and interesting "proof of
concept", solving some hard problems in an elegant fashion and offering some real
innovations.
A decade later, hardware advances have given us Macs that are a thousand times faster
than a Mac II, disk drives that are a thousand times larger, etc. This computing power
has allowed a number of "hideously inefficient" software innovations (e.g., Interface
Builder, Java, OpenGL, XML) to become practical. Bringing all of this together, Apple
is set to try again, in a much more splendid fashion. Apple's engineers have managed to
combine great engineering with a very stylish and appealing appearance. I think they
are poised to shake up the industry.
Nonetheless, Apple faces some real problems in presenting this mixture to the world.
They want it to be accepted as "the next generation of Mac OS" by their users and
developers. If they allow the Unix infrastructure to show through, they may scare
away their traditional user base. Even talking up the Unixish benefits of the product
(e.g., stability, performance, industry standard interfaces) may work against the aim
of easy acceptance by their current users and developers.
On the other hand, these same Unixish aspects are critical to bringing in users and
developers from Linux, Solaris, etc. Two years ago, I dared to predict that "Apple will
cater to, and actively woo academic, research, and otherwise technical users; in short,
the bastions of the Unix community. Apple may be quiet about it, but mark my words;
it will be a large part of their planning." Apple has, in fact, been so quiet about Unix
that it might as well have disappeared from their plans, entirely. They also made some
discouraging decisions, such as killing off any possibility of case-sensitivity from
HFS+.
On the other hand, a few positive indications have also surfaced. For one thing, Apple
opted to keep UFS around, providing case-sensitive file names for situations that
really need them. Then, at WWDC, Steve Jobs said that Mac OS X used a "Linux-like
kernel. At MacWorld, Apple actually used the "U-word" on the large banner that sat
atop their pavilion. Finally, and most usefully, Apple made its developer tools
available to Mac OS X Beta users, without demanding a stiff entry fee that might have
discouraged casual developers.
None of these indications prepared me, however, for Apple's recent moves. Making the
Unix command line (and a full suite of commands) available to all users is really a
bold move for a company that preaches (and practices) extreme simplicity in user
interfaces. Shipping a developer CD-ROM in the Mac OS X distribution is even more
radical; what do they think the typical Mac OS user is going to do with Interface
Builder?
Well, Joe and Sally Sikspak may not want to load the developer disc, but their son or
daughter may. The BSD command set found in Mac OS X is almost indistinguishable
from that of the Linux machines the kids have been using, so they'll find the basic tool
set quite comfortable. In addition, however, they will be able to try out Interface
Builder (a real step up from hand-coding X11 calls), Project Builder, and Apple's
other innovations. In short, kids who have been hacking on Linux systems for years
should find Mac OS X to be a real treat!
If Joe or Sally happens to be an engineer, the kids may have some competition for time
on the machine. But then, Power Macs are cheap enough that each member of the
family may have one. They are also cheap enough that Joe or Sally may decide to
replace the Sun or SGI box on their desk with a G4 cube. Apple may claim that it isn't
in the workstation business, that that won't keep people from buying Macs and using
them as workstations!
In any case, it appears that Apple is finally ready to acknowledge the value that the
Unix user and development community (formal and informal) has to offer. By making
powerful development tools available to all users, they hope to entice all sorts of Unix
aficionados to consider Mac OS X as a real platform. If they succeed in their effort, the
results will bring some real changes to the Mac OS developer community.
Traditionally, Macintosh developers have constituted a vanishingly small percentage of
the overall community. Let's say that there are 24 million Apple users. MacTech, the
technical publication for developers, has a circulation of something like 20,000 -
less than of the entire user community. These are generally the more serious
developers in the community. Even if we expand the definition of "developer" to be as
broad as possible, we only get a total of 150,000 developers (still less than 1% of the
Mac community).
Now, let's look at the Unix community (including Linux, *BSD, Solaris, etc). I don't
know the total size of this community (nobody does, actually :-), but it's clearly in the
millions and quite possibly in the tens of millions. Now, how many of these folks are
"developers"? Well, that's a hard question, because the definition is a lot fuzzier than
is is in the Mac community.
I would guess that at least half of the Unix community (i.e., users, system
administrators, programmers) have written some shell or Perl scripts. I would not be
surprised to learn that the majority of Unix users have written and compiled a few C
programs. Just using the command line, which essentially all Unix users do, is in fact
closer to programming than most Mac users ever come. In short, it's a very different
user community.
Capturing a million or so of these users for the Mac could be a real coup for Apple. The
raw numbers aren't that impressive; a million additional users would only add about
4% to Apple's user base. Most of these folks would qualify, however, as potential Mac
OS X developers. They might be scientists, engineers, students, or hobbyists, but many
of them are in a position to create new software (and retrofit old software) for the
platform.
Although existing Mac OS developers could view this as unwanted competition, I think
this would be misguided. Instead, I hope that the current band of developers will
recognize the newcomers as a source of cross-fertilization and useful lore. Unix is,
after all, an enormous, decades-old, distributed laboratory for computer science
research. It would be very surprising if the old-line Unix hackers didn't have some
interesting tricks to show the Mac OS developers.
Also, the Mac community has been largely unaffected by the "Free Software" and "Open
Source" movements. Freeware, in Mac parlance, is proprietary, binary-only software
which is distributed at no charge. This kind of distribution is almost unknown in Unix
circles, where "free software" always allows inspection, modification, and
redistribution of the source code. An influx of Unix-style free software might well
change the thinking of many Mac OS users and developers.
By the same token, Mac OS developers have a great deal to show (and tell) the newbies.
Mac OS X may change some things about the UI, but a lot of the principles of Mac
interface design will carry right through into the new system. More to the point, if we
want Aqua to avoid the anarchic state of X11 applications, some advice and counsel will
be quite necessary!
In short, it's a win-win situation. We all get to play with some really nifty
development tools, on some really terrific hardware. We also get to try out thousands
(literally!) of Open Source programs, either under their original command-line
and/or X11 user interfaces or with new, Aqua-based front ends.