OStatic

At the last conference of developers using open source tools I attended, I noticed two things: everyone had a laptop, and the overwhelming majority of those laptops were made by Apple. This situation is hardly unusual: MacBooks are endemic in many corners of the open source community.

But why? Surely developers using open source tools would be better served by running on open source from the ground up, rather than paying for a proprietary operating system.

Speaking as a Mac-toting Rails-using developer myself, I can offer you a variety of reasons for this state of affairs. For example, you can virtualize Windows on to a Mac, but you can't put OS X on the average white-box PC, so OS X is a better platform if you need to do acceptance testing across a variety of browsers. But rather than run down this list of narrow technical reasons (some of which I think are just red herrings to disguise our real reasons), let me bring out the three reasons why I think the Mac does so well, at least in my corner of the development community.

1. It's not from Microsoft. Whether you believe Apple is a friend or foe of the open source community (Roughly Drafted has a good look on what open source gets back from Apple, even in the absence of full source code), one thing is undeniable: Microsoft has been far, far worse for open source than Apple. No other company has worked so hard to instill an atmosphere of FUD around open source, or blustered so often about suing everyone in sight. Moving to OS X is a way to tell Microsoft, one developer at a time, that we're mad as hell and not going to take it any more.

2. It is Open Enough. OS X is not 100% open source, even though you can download big chunks of its code. But thanks to its BSD underpinnings, it plays really well with most open source projects out there. I almost never run into a chunk of code that I need for Rails development that I can't run immediately on OS X. The same was not at all true when I was wrestling with the stack on Windows, even with the help of tools like Cygwin. Some things just don't cross the operating system divide well.

3. It Just Works. No (Mac fanboys to the contrary), OS X doesn't have a perfect uptime record; I crashed my own dev box just last night. But on the whole, it works orders of magnitude better than Windows - and it doesn't require me to spend nearly as much time futzing to keep everything in order as my Linux boxes do. Particularly for people who are used to software with polished user interfaces, OS X steers an appropriate middle course between the instability of Windows and the tedium of Linux.

Now, I'm sure there are readers who will condemn me for being too stupid to switch to Linux as my main OS (never mind that I have more Linux boxes than Macs running in the house right now), and others who will denounce my hypocrisy in basing a career on open source software while simultaneously supporting un-free software with my wallet. But for me, the practical considerations of getting my work done efficiently outweigh the purist politics of those who want all software to be free. And I suspect the same goes for many of my peers, judging by the conference laptop census figures.

What do you use for open source development?

• mac
• osx