It may not make people's eyes spin around and turn into little dollar signs, but the fact that Apple is making part of Mac OS X Server into an "open source" project may have even greater long-term ramifications than the news about the product's spiffy low price. Apple has done something few of us would ever have expected and announced Project Darwin, an initiative that makes much of the source code to Mac OS X Server freely available to the developer community. Programmers can make their own changes to the code, which is expected to foster a development community that continues to improve the OS much faster than Apple ever could while working alone. It's this sort of effort that has made Linux such a success; Apple hopes for the same kind of dynamic. Included in the initial release of Darwin is the source code to the foundation layers of Mac OS X Server and "core Apple technologies" such as AppleTalk and the HFS+ file system. An Apple press release has more info on this whole surprising development.

Seeing any large computer manufacturer embrace the open source ideal is sort of a shock; seeing Apple pull such a move is downright spooky. Given how closely Apple has protected its control over its products in the past, we have to say, we're more than a little surprised. Even when Apple has tried to be a little more embracing of "open systems" ideas, they've been loath to relinquish a sort of panic button veto power. Take, for example, that disastrous foray into cloning-- which probably failed at least in part due to the dictatorial requirement that all clone models had to be approved by Apple as a condition of the manufacturer's license. Some of those control issues show through in Darwin, as not all of Mac OS X Server's source code will be available, but several industry bigwigs have examined the Darwin open source license and proclaim it to be the real deal; Apple's posted quotes from several of these people. Will the Darwin project perhaps temper the "iron-fisted technocrat" reputation of Steve Jobs? Sure, he killed the clones, but now he's championing the open source initiative by making Apple the first large computer company to open up at least part of their operating system. The man is a conundrum, to be sure.

In fact, all this hubbub has got us thinking: what if AtAT were to become the first "open source" soap opera? Faithful viewers from around the globe could freely download each episode's script, make any changes and improvements they wanted, and re-upload the modified scripts for all to share. Heck, if Apple can do it, we figure anyone can. It's something we'll definitely think about as we continue to put together AtAT 2.0...