“APPLE Computer is at the centre of a bitter political war being
fought between factions of the Open Source software movement.
Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, last week proclaimed Apple’s embrace of
the Open Source movement at a high-profile press launch for the
company’s new operating system, MacOS X Server. Open Source is an
increasingly valuable marketing position that has grown from a
philosophy that software and its programming code should be shared
among all programmers.”
“At the launch, Jobs announced that Apple had “embraced Open
Source” by releasing the source code for MacOS X Server.”
“And Richard Stallman, influential leader of the hardline Free
Software Foundation, said: “I think that the OSI has made a mistake
in approving this licence and I hope they will change their
minds.””
“Raymond claims on the OSI site (http://opensource.evolution.com/osi-launch.html)
that before leaving SPI, Perens assigned the Open Source trademark
over to Raymond personally.”
“But the SPI (www.spi-inc.org) claims it still owns the term and
that Raymond, Perens and the OSI have no legal entitlement to
it.”
“So why would Apple buy into this mess? What’s in the Open
Source movement for Apple?”