[waffffffle]

I was taking a look at beunited.org and I thought it was very interesting that there are 5 separate projects going on right now to rebuild and continue BeOS in some form. Three of them look like open source projects with the goal of building complete operating systems, one of which is linux-based. I've never used Be, but I've read about it for years. I remember being disappointed back in 1996 that Apple chose NeXT over Be since at the time I knew nothing of NeXT or unix but I had been looking at Be screenshots for a couple years and had played around with the BeView system extension and later Kaleidoscope from Greg Landweber to simulate the Be interface on my Mac

So it seems that there is a very strong BeOS user base, and that user base is taking the initiative to continue their OS. So that leads me to the question, what if Apple were to die/fold/get swallowed up/something similar and the Mac OS officially ends. What then?

I don't think this will ever happen, despite what Business Week and Michael Dell think, but I think it presents a very interesting hypothetical. It seems to me that recreating OS X, even building it off Darwin, is such a massive task that I just don't see it possibly happening. OS X took Apple 5 years just to get it out the door, and then another 2.5 years to improve it to the point where it is right now. Apple is a very large company with thousands of employees and a unified focus. Can open source do the same?

Some of the justifications as to why it is possible to reverse engineer the BeOS are that since the APIs are well documented, it is possible to use that as the design spec and build from there, which I agree with. However, isn't one of the problems with OS X that there are undocumented aspects of the APIs? I heard this more in the 10.0-10.1 days, but developers seemed to complain that that Apple would use undocumented APIs to make their software better. Also it seems like a majority of the third party carbon applications are built using Metrowerks Powerplant and that could pose an additional challenge.

And then there is the issue of hardware compatibility. Unlike the situation with Be, who already ported their OS from PowerPC to x86, long before they were bought out, Apple has not completely done so (or so we think). Is Darwin for x86 enough of a start to rebuild the OS on x86? It seems that this would be necessary if Apple were to go under since they wouldn't be producing PowerPC hardware anymore. There is also the issue of Apple's proprietary ROM system, that they would use to ensure that only Apple machines can boot the Mac OS and copyright issues with the Apple interface. It seems like it would be necessary to recreate the entire interface without copying Apple's. That seems hard, but then again we have OS X themers who do this regularly.

So what does everyone here think? If Apple died tomorrow and your only hope for continuing your Mac way-of-life would be to join an open source project to re-create OS X on x86, would you help? What would you contribute?

I think I would probably help. I'm not sure with what, but if it meant that I could continue using this OS I think I would definitely want to help out. It would be a bummer to use a PC though...

[MacGorilla]

Yes.

[Appleman]

Yes.

[ManOfSteal]

The opposite of "No".

[Appleman]

Originally posted by manofsteal:
The opposite of "No".

[ryju]

Originally posted by Appleman and other fellow schoolyard chum:
Yes.

[Kenneth]

who knows

[Boochie]

Something based on the Darwin kernel might live on as a niche open source project, but that's a far cry from the thing we know as OSX. You can be sure that Steve Jobs wouldn't release the source code to OSX were the company to go belly up. Sure, a sufficiently motivated open source community could re-build a reasonable facsimile to OSX, but why bother when there's Linux? I'm not saying the two are equivalent, but where would the push to create and sustain an open source "OS X" come from?

The key thing would be the developer community. I don't see the likes of Microsoft, Macromedia, Maya, etc. hypothetically bothering to continue supporting a dead OS.

[Brass]

Originally posted by Boochie:
Something based on the Darwin kernel might live on as a niche open source project, but that's a far cry from the thing we know as OSX. You can be sure that Steve Jobs wouldn't release the source code to OSX were the company to go belly up. Sure, a sufficiently motivated open source community could re-build a reasonable facsimile to OSX, but why bother when there's Linux? I'm not saying the two are equivalent, but where would the push to create and sustain an open source "OS X" come from?

The key thing would be the developer community. I don't see the likes of Microsoft, Macromedia, Maya, etc. hypothetically bothering to continue supporting a dead OS.

The main difference between Linux and a theoretical-open-source-OS-X, is probably the API's. This is what really makes the OS shine. It give application developers the ability to produce quality software quickly, and easily, and provides the platform for that software to run on.

[Horsepoo!!!]

It'll live on forever.

Mac OS X is a rich development environment. If Apple died after releasing Tiger (a very unlikely scenario), I'd wager development for Mac OS X would continue for almost 2 decades (at which point it will live on under emulation).

If Apple died, though, MS and Linux would eventually come up with something equal to OS X. Eventually...whether it takes 10 years or 20, they'll eventually have something as easy and fun to use as OS X is/was.

[voodoo]

Apple Macintosh is here to stay. Forever.

[driven]

I hate hypothetical "what if" questions.

If my aunt had a weenie would she be my uncle?

[ManOfSteal]

Originally posted by driven:
If my aunt had a weenie would she be my uncle?

I'm hot and bothered over this scenario.

[Krusty]

Originally posted by driven:
If my aunt had a weenie would she be my uncle?

That depends ... would she take you fishing or shopping ?

Seriously ... I'd think that IBM or Mot would be the most likely to take a stab at continuing as they have invested money in making G3. G4, G5 chips. The market isn't really too tiny, and the loyalty level is almost fanatical. Look at the Amiga freaks ... OS X could live on for years in its current form. Longhorn certainly doesn't look like its going to surpass OS X. It may be 5 or 6 years before M$ clearly surpasses the current Mac OS.

[Appleman]

Originally posted by Kenneth:
Fan of Hilary Duff and Michelle Branch.
I'm going to watch Hilary's concert on September 9.

How was the concert Kenneth? (completely off topic, but who cares in a thread like this?)

[Graymalkin]

If Apple were to go under I think that OSX could easily live on, not only merely live but even thrive. The open source Darwin aspect of OSX is fully functional even without the "Mac" interface running on top of it. X.org is making some serious headway improving X11, to the point where it will be largely competitive in many respects to Quartz. Even going without the OSX-specific frameworks that makes it MacOS Darwin with X.org and some forethought into GUI design would yield an extremely useful operating systems. With some work developers could port their Cocoa applications to GNUStep or improve GNUStep to the point where it had far more feature parity with Cocoa as on Panther or Tiger.

While GNUStep still doesn't have complete feature parity with Cocoa the project is seeing quite a bit of interest lately. NetBSD has an active project aimed at providing Darwin/Mach binary compatibility for NetBSD on PowerPC computers. When the project matures a bit more it will be possible to run OSX in its entirety on top of NetBSD instead of Darwin. There's also Apple's own open source projects.

Apple has something with OSX that they largely lacked with previous versions of MacOS, a good relationship with developers. For starters they give a pretty nice development environment to users for free with every copy of the OS. Not only does this support the system's hackability but also fosters a meme that suggests that anybody can write a program to make their lives easier. Apple also did a pretty good job in making the system friendly to developers who aren't longtime Objective-C nerds or old school Mac geeks. With the development support and even excitement OSX has it is hard to imagine it disappearing any time soon.

[Arkham_c]

The simple answer is that if for some crazy reason Apple went out of business, someone would buy their assets, including OSX, and would continue to sell and support it. Who wouldn't want 25 million+ fanatical users with above-average income?

If not IBM, then Sun or another vendor would be the likely buyer.

[someone_else]

Originally posted by Brass:
The main difference between Linux and a theoretical-open-source-OS-X, is probably the API's. This is what really makes the OS shine. It give application developers the ability to produce quality software quickly, and easily, and provides the platform for that software to run on.

Right, and that is where GNUStep would come in. All of the OS X Cocoa hackers would jump to that and bring it damn close to where Cocoa is now within a short time period. So you take Darwin and GNUStep, and you could have something pretty similar to OS X. Carbon would be a lot harder to emulate, but it could be done.

[sambeau]

Apple wouldn't just die.

They would be bought - they own to much good stuff.

Unless they were bought by M$ it would survive in one way or another.

[mitchell_pgh]

I would say OS X is just fine and would live on for a few years if Apple folded tomorrow.

[yukon]

I'd disagree with almost everyone above. No, it would not survive.

Linux and Windows (surprisingly Linux is taking the lead) are both quick to copy features from OS X. In general, we're about a year or two ahead of the other platforms (feature for feature). In stability, OS X is "as good as linux", for speed it's not as fast as Linux (hard to quantify, depends on your WM...).

While OS X is an awesome development platform, I'd believe it would be difficult to sustain development if Apple died - the OS would fall behind the times, especially the hardware (apple dies, so does mac hardware development, legally), and the lack of apple's tools would simply be lamented by developers when they switch to other platforms, a lot like what happened to BeOS users.

To me, OS X's stregnths are in it's compatibility, it's use of a stable and well documented/known base, and it's ease of use. Windows has proven that two of those are unnecessary for success, and who needs MacOS+UNIX+VPC compatibilty when you're on a Windows+Cygwin or Linux+VMWare platform.

Put simply, were Apple and it's IP to simply vanish, OS X would be dead in the water. This doesn't mean that the technologies making it up would be as well, there are imitations and derivatives, GNUStep/OpenStep are testament to that, I'm certain the best features would be copied or reimplemented properly in other systems to mimic OS X.

BeOS survives because some of the feats it achieves are still impressive today (boot time, file system, uh....impressively bad networking....), a superior yet ignored underdog inspires a lot of loyalty....Apple is more mainstream now I'd wager.

[Appleman]

Originally posted by yukon:
I'd disagree with almost everyone above.

You disagree with my "yes"????