In the history of information appliances, be it telephony, computation, television, or radio standards have made possible competition and industry advancement. In the early days of any sector, corporations want to dominate and steer the market their way, to recover research dollars and continue royalties for their ideas. In the previous decades we had VHS vs. Beta, DVD-R vs. DVD+R, TDMA vs. GSM, and other technological rifts that in the long run hindered growth and broad rapid adoption.

In the personal computer world, it was long thought that consumers had a choice between a Microsoft Windows world or an Apple Macintosh. Now with the open source movement, operating systems like Linux, FreeBSD, and even Solaris are free, if you have supporting hardware. The Mac OS, based on open source Darwin joins the open source realm, and many of its core technologies have the open source heritage. In the week when Microsoft has withdrawn browser support for the Mac OS X platform, the open source project based on KHTML, Apple Safari, will take over where Internet Explorer failed to go.

In the next generation Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, look for additional open source development in both the client and server edition. Apple has built its platform with the help of others in the standards based community like OpenGL, Bluetooth, USB, MPEG-4, and other technologies.

Mac OS X Open Technologies:
WebCore
K Desktop Environment (Safari Browser)
Perl Compatible Regular Expressions
World Wide Web Consortium
Apache

Darwin (Mac OS X Core)
Open Darwin
Mach 3.0
FreeBSD

Open Directory
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
Zero Configuration Networking (Rendezvous)

Apple Computer Trade Association Memberships:
Internet Streaming Media Alliance
MPEG-4 Industry Forum
International Color Consortium (ColorSync)
OpenGL
Unicode
Bluetooth Wireless
Universal Serial Bus
FireWire
HyperTransport Consortium

Other Trade Associations:
InfiniBand
StarFabric
RapidIO