Apple makes money off of OSS, but doesn’t give back

Actually, I honestly don’t know if Apple ever has done a single thing for the OSS community. They most likely voted against OOXML but other than that (someone correct me if I’m wrong) Apple doesn’t care about the OSS community, and has recently made moves which thwart its advancement and acceptance with it’s iPod, to let them know exactly how much they do care. Will says:

This affects Linux users – there’s no iTunes for Linux, so popular Linux iPod management tools like gtkpod and Rhythmbox will not work with the new range of iPods.

Granted, this might be a side effect of bigger things going on that we don’t see, I’d like for once to see Apple give back for all of the great things that it takes from the open source community, primarily all of the great things which it conveniently puts on it’s Xserve stack.

The open source, UNIX foundation of Apple’s operating system makes it easy for developers to port their existing enterprise database and UNIX server applications for deployment on Xserve. In fact, tens of thousands of UNIX developers are already turning to Mac OS X to combine the performance and reliability of a UNIX-based platform with Apple’s innovation and ease of use.

Let’s count the number of OSS applications which earn Apple money:

1. Apache Web Server
2. Webmail
3. WebDAV
4. JBOSS
5. Tomcat
6. MYSQL

There are probably many more like OpenLDAP and others. Apple, if you want to keep being the cool kid on the block, you are going to have to do more than deliver top notch products, you are going to have to deliver top notch products that play nice. If you mess with the OSS community, your popularity will suffer. People should voice their concerns and email Apple and let them know you are unhappy. Let them know they should extend support to the Linux platform, or at least let the good people who reverse engineer the iPods for the Linux community a break.

Technorati tags: iPod, iPod Classic, iPod Nano, Linux, ipodminusitunes, Linux and iPod, iPod and Linux, bad iPod, Evil iPod, Apple