How Free Software Contributed to the Success of Steve Jobs and Apple

“We all have to celebrate the career of Steve Jobs and thank him
for the tremendous improvements he has brought to computer
interfaces and hardware. The guy’s amazing, OK? But Apple is
something of a control-freak environment with a hard-handed
approach to things such as product announcements and the App Store.
An undercurrent of disgruntled consumers and policy-minded free
software advocates has transferred their historic antipathy for
Microsoft to Apple, now that it has become the brilliant business
success of the new century. So I’d like to bring everybody together
again for an acknowledgment of how important free software has been
to Jobs and to Apple.

In the great Second Coming, when Jobs returned to Apple 1996, he
drove two big changes right away: porting over OpenSTEP from NeXT
computer and adopting a version of the open source BSD as Apple’s
new operating system.

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