Yahoo! News - Is Open Source Apple's Salvation?

It has been reported, ad infinitum, that Apple's shiny new operating system is based on an open-source Unix OS. And Apple recently embraced the KDE project's KHTML rendering engine as the core of its Safari Web browser. While Apple is using open source as the core of its operating system, the company is not a pure open-source play. Darwin, which provides the underpinnings of OS X, is freely available under the BSD license -- the same license that is used for most of FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. And the core of Safari, WebCore, is based on the KHTML rendering engine, which is available under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

By using a BSD core, Apple gets more than just an operating system and browser. The company also is cashing in on the wealth of applications that are available for BSD and Unix-type operating systems.


Instead of funding development on its own Web server and database, Microsoft-style, Apple puts Apache and MySQL to use. And instead of developing its own tools from the ground up, Apple has leveraged Perl and the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). Apple also has used Samba to help integrate OS X systems with Windows systems, and the OpenOffice.org project is working hard on producing a port for Mac OS X.

Apple may manage to be the middle ground between Windows and Linux that many people are looking for, Kusnetzky said. "[Because] some of the developer tools and Microsoft products are available on Mac OS X and not on Linux, it could turn to Apple's advantage." Apple's platform could manage to unify those two worlds, he added, and "we'll see how successful that will be over time."