I’ve mentioned earlier that I think Apple is a rather anti-open company. They have enthusiastically used DRM to lock users into iTunes, and their recent overtures to move away from DRM seem half-hearted and hollow. They even opt for a proprietary connector on their iPhones and iPods so they can collect licensing fees on accessories rather than using the near-ubiquitous mini-USB connector, which of course has the industry-chilling effect of causing third parties to tailor to the largest demographic at the cost of pushing openness and competition aside.
The most notable exception to their closed nature has been WebKit, the rendering engine that powers their Safari web browser. WebKit was originally a fork of the KDE project’s KHTML engine, and after some initial grumbling by KDE developers that Apple was following the letter but not the spirit of the GPL, Apple publicly released its source code versioning and bug databases. As a result, both WebKit and KHTML enjoy wide developer support today, and a healthy ecosystem of collaboration has evolved around and between the two projects.
Apple’s motive in maintaining this collaboration is clear: they want web pages to render correctly in Safari. But that’s OK — contrary to popular belief, companies can demonstrate openness while still looking out for their own financial interest!
So I was a bit surprised today, when reading up on the upcoming “Snow Leopard Server” Mac OS X release, that they have been doing extensive work on open-source Calendar and Contacts servers as well, released under the Apache 2.0 license. The so-called “Exchange killer” of the open-source world is still a very elusive animal, and its absence is particularly frustrating for those of us trying to stay connected and synchronized while still supporting open standards. Outlook and Exchange are both horrible products, but the fact remains that they still have no peer in this area, open or not.
Once again, Apple’s motives here are rather self-serving (as explained in the article): they want the iPhone to crack into the lucrative enterprise business space, as well as give regular consumers the type of reliable push email and synchronization services that business users have enjoyed for some time. Well, all I can say is: that’s great, more power to them!
Kudos, Apple, for taking a bold and welcome step in supporting openness instead of just writing another proprietary server technology. I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on these developments and look forward to being able to someday (hopefully soon) deploy reliable Calendar and Contacts servers for my personal use.
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