The Core of Apple: open source spirit to guide the Mac OS

The Mexican wave started on the left of the auditorium and people jumped to their feet in a frenzy of applause. The wave petered out by the time it hit the media stand in the middle and although the claps turned to boos later in the show the message was clear - to the Apple faithful the company's CEO Steve Jobs is a hero.

His standing rose even higher when with his announcement halfway through his keynote at Apple Expo last week that the Mac OS is going open source. Well, part of it anyway.

The heart of the operating system is an open source BSD Unix kernel called Darwin, which has been available to the Mac developer community since early 2000, allowing programmers and Apple software engineers to extend its range of features. Apple's hope is to have masses of developers adopting Mac OS as they have Linux.

"We finally have the underpinnings of a super modern kernel and we can make Mac OS very robust," said Jobs. "We made it open source so that we can have an active computing environment to ensure it is the most robust reliable platform out there."

But according to Chris Bourdon, Mac OS product manager, the thinking behind it is more simplistic.

"Mac OS X is the future of the Macintosh. Making it open source is a bold move. No other major operating system is open to developers - Microsoft Windows is not open in any way shape or form.

"A lot of people are attracted to Linux. They love the concept of open source so everything they love about Linux we have put in Mac OS X - modern technology and open source."

Apple said it will rely on "community spirit" to enhance its product, but the company still has its critics.

"I doubt that interest in developing open source enhancements for Mac OS X will spread far beyond the Mac developer community. Apple no doubt hopes that the open source community will in time allow the new operating system to extend beyond the boundaries of the Mac," said Tim Jennings, analyst at Butler Group.

While there has been enthusiasm from the grass root supporters analysts are more sceptical claiming the company is trying to be all things to all people in order to survive, and relying too heavily on independent developers for success.

Jennings added: "Apple will be dependent on developers to produce new applications to popularise the operating system, and these depend largely on two key technologies - Carbon and Cocoa. The Carbon environment is designed to allow modifications to legacy applications so that they will run on both the current Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X, while Cocoa is an advanced object-oriented development environment for building next-generation applications for the new operating system."

Jobs also got a cheer for including Java as an important part of the Apple strategy. The company has been a Java advocate for some time, and continuing this theme, Mac OS X has Java support built in.

However, the cult of Jobs began to revolt with the news that in direct opposition to the break for open source freedom is news that Apple has released Microsoft Office Mac 2001 - an announcement greeted by booing from the audience.

To pacify the crowd, Jobs claimed the application suite is "full of features not found in the PC version of Microsoft Office", while Bourdon claimed it is in Apple's interest to work with its arch-rival.

"The relationship we have with Microsoft is that of us as the operating system vendor while they are an applications provider. We have competing systems and we offer advantages by running their software on our systems. We have leap-frogged the applications they give on their system. But it is in our interest to work with them - we want to offer our customers all available technology," Bourdon said.

And that's even if it's met with disapproval from the Apple faithful.

Clive Longbottom, analyst at Quocirca, defended Apple's decision to release Microsoft Office Mac 2001.

"It is totally arrogant of Apple users to think that their machine is so superior that they don't have to bother with the PC. But Apple cannot live in isolation. You might be a designer on a Mac using Quark 90 per cent of the time but when you send that design to potential customers they won't be happy if you send it in a Quark format, or another arcane format," he said.

However, he claimed Apple is in a no win situation.

"Apple is good at what it does and full marks to Steve Jobs for pulling it from extinction but they have to have mainstream applications and who else are they going to go with? Corel doesn't cater for the Mac and Lotus is not really a choice, or Sun and its Star Office."

And that is the position Jobs now finds himself in. After years of anti-Microsoft banter the Mac evangelist is walking a fine line between pleasing maverick developers and the semi-converts to the Apple way. Regardless of what Microsoft lawyers plea in their anti-trust case, this is a world where the software giant has huge influence and while Apple is successful without them, it never hurts to give a nod in the right direction.

Apple is proving that operating systems can be open source without losing control of the kernel and that Microsoft does have part to play in the market - even if it causes ripples among the faithful.