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. OpenSTEP was a proprietary, platform-independent set of APIs for Solaris, Windows, and NeXTSTEP. It was derived from NeXTSTEP itself, the operating system that ran on Jobs's m68k-based NeXT computers. But NeXT worked with the then-powerful Sun Microsystems, which had based its own wildly popular SunOS on BSD. OpenSTEP became the basis for the familiar Cocoa libraries and run-time that Apple developers now depend on....