Personally, I'd love to see Apple becoming part of the FOSS community...

This article in infoworld.com, about the pros and cons that Apple face about open sourcing its new Swift programing language got me thinking that I'd love to see Apple coming to the FOSS community completely.

I know there are many people at the FOSS community at large that, to say the least, hate Apple with a passion. And for the looks of it, Apple feels quite the same way about FOSS. But if Apple came to embrace the FOSS movement completely, the benefits for itself and the FOSS movement at large would be many and to good to ignore.

For Apple, some advantages would be having access to a wider set of developers to work with them to make their software better. It would have more developers looking to make their software better in more ways than any one could think about now. Not only that, it could take advantage of developments that are being put forward at places outside itself a lot easier and faster that if does now.

Developers would have a proven platform that is known to be solid. Like or not, Apple produces some great software that people want to use. My main problem with it, is not the quality of Apple's products, but all the restrictions that are imposed on both developers and users so that Apple can keep control over the software it creates. Those restrictions are way to heavy on users, since they restricts our freedoms to use the software so it fits our needs the best way we see fit.

Yes, since they coded the software to begin with they get a say on the development, to set the parameters and set the goals they want to get to. In a way, every GNU/Linux distro does this but they don't restrict their developers to take the distro and take another road with it.

Lastly, users could benefit by having Apple's way of making it's software as user friendly as it can. There are already some GNU/Linux distros that do a good job on the user experience. My top two are Linux Mint and Ubuntu, while Chrome OS seems to be doing a good job at to give a good user experience too. Yet, there seems to be some rough edges that might keep the average user away.

This is where Apple's design team excels at, and where GNU/Linux could really use their expertise to give users a better experience.

I know that the odds of Apple changing its hearth and embracing FOSS doesn't have that many chances of ever happening. Yet, dreaming doesn't cost a thing...