Some people just don’t get it.

Unless Steve Jobs leaves Apple, and Apple ends up re-enacting the 1990’s, there’s no way Mac OS X is ever going to be available for random configurations of hardware built on top of the x86 platform. There’s absolutely no business or financial advantage to having to support such a mish-mash of devices, and it is completely inimical to Apple’s main source of revenue: hardware.

Apple is hardware company. Software is just a side effect.

The focus often then shifts to the idea that, since Apple makes hardware, and not software, why not just release Mac OS X under an open source license? The argument is that this would allow Apple to obtain that oft-misunderstood holy grail: market share.

The reasoning appears to be that Microsoft is such a successful company precisely because they’ve got a lock-down on market share when it comes to OSes.

But that’s all fine and dandy. After all, Microsoft is a software company, and not really a hardware company, despite the fact that they make mice and gaming consoles. But in their case, the business model is exactly the opposite of Apple’s. Why deal with actually making machines when you can sell the software and let the computer manufacturer worry about the hardware details?

You’ve got to remember that making hardware is expensive and if it doesn’t do well, you’re going to lose a ton of money. I think of Ford’s Edsel, or Sony’s Betamax (a situation eerily recapitulated almost exactly by the HD-DVD debacle.)

I don’t suppose anyone remembers the Commodore Plus/4, but here was successful computer company (the Commodore 64 is still the best selling computer of all time) who blew it.

Apple itself has had a lot of expensive failures on their hands as well: the Apple III, the Lisa, the Newton, and the Cube. (Interestingly, Apple seems to have salvaged the concepts of the last two products and reworked them into commercial successes. You can think of the iPhone as the successor to the Newton, and the Mac Mini seems to be another incarnation of the Cube.)

Why deal with the possibility of investing so much money in a hardware project only to have it fail?

So Microsoft’s profits soared, and they took over the world in terms of market share. Sure, Microsoft makes tons of money, despite being taken down by the U.S. Department of Justice and by the E.U., and despite its poor PR image. But it must be emphasized: market share does not equal profitability.

Case in point: both the Sony PS3 and the XBox 360 are loss leaders, marketed with the hope that the developer’s licenses and royalties from released games will eventually net their respective companies some profits. Despite the fact that each console commands a significant percentage of market share, they don’t make money directly. If Sony and Microsoft weren’t multinational juggernauts with vast resources rivalling some industrialized nations, there’s no way they could stay in business with this kind of strategy.

This is in stark contrast to Apple’s strategy of making a very nice margin for every piece of hardware they sell. Despite having only 8% of the market share for personal computers, they made a profit of $1.58 billion this last financial quarter (total revenue was $9.6 billion.) When you’re making that much dough, do you really care if you only have 8% of the market?

I mean, seriously, it’s not like BMW is hurting despite their single-digit percentage in market share. (As an exercise in basic arithmetic, let’s calculate what that market share is, based on the number of BMWs sold in the U.S. as a proportion of all the cars sold in the U.S. According to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the number of cars sold in a year has been between 7.5 to 8.1 million a year from 2002 to 2005. We’ll assume that this number hasn’t significantly changed for 2007. According to an article from the Associated Press, BMW sold 335,840 cars in 2007. This means that BMW’s market share in the U.S. is between 4.1-4.4%. Nevertheless, BMW’s total revenues added up to $82.7 billion dollars.)

Add this to the fact that Apple’s real competitors are Dell and HP (with 29.1% and 25.7% market share, respectively, according to an article about FY 2007 Q3 personal computer sales.) Dell had $15.7 billion in total revenue last quarter, but only made a profit of $766 million. HP’s 2007 Q4 performance was more respectable, with revenues of $28.3 billion and net income of $2.1 billion. Even still, you can see that market share is nowhere near proportional to profits made. Dell has more than 4 times the market share, but only had 1.5 times more revenue than Apple, and their profit was only half of Apple’s. HP has more than 3 times the market share and made more than 3 times the revenue that Apple did, but HP’s profit was only 1.3 times bigger than Apple’s. In other words, chasing market share does not translate into making more money. Last I heard, Apple was a company interested in making money, and not so much in winning popularity contests.

The counter-argument is that Sun Microsystems is also a hardware company, and they therefore should have similar interests with Apple, and yet they’ve released their OS as open source. Ignoring the fact that their target demographic has very little overlap (although I suppose Mac OS X Server running on an XServe does compete directly with Sun’s hardware), this argument doesn’t do a good job with separating the different connotations of free/open source software.

Sure, Solaris 10 is free, but you have to pay for support, and as far as I can tell, you don’t get the source code. The default GUI is not open source (CDE). The alternative GUI (JDS) is apparently built on top of GNOME but it doesn’t look like you’d be able to get the source code for the Sun-specific bits, and most of the useful applications that you need a Solaris system for probably aren’t open source either. (Not to mention the fact that it seems like most Solaris apps only run on Sparc and x86-64 CPUs, not so much on x86-32 CPUs.)

So what about OpenSolaris? Apparently OpenSolaris only refers to the kernel core and some basic utilities to go with it. Sure, the source code is open, but you’d still need to install a GUI and some apps. You need Solaris Express Community Edition or Developer Edition, and it doesn’t look like you get all the source code for those, either. Of course, there’s Nexenta, but then why not just install a Linux distro?

Or OpenDarwin + GNU-Darwin, for that matter? (OK, so OpenDarwin is dead, but you can still get the source code for Darwin from Apple, although I don’t think you can actually get it to compile.)

In other words, Sun’s model is almost exactly like Apple’s model: the base systems are open source (OpenSolaris vs. xnu + the BSD subsystem) but the GUI is proprietary (CDE vs. Aqua.) The only difference is that you can legally download the full version of Solaris for free.

Ultimately, what you’re paying for is support. If you need help with OpenSolaris, you can do what old-time Linux users had to do, and RTFM, scour the source, or desperately Google for answers. The alternative is to pay Sun to help you out (just like you would pay RedHat.)

If you look at it that way, the way Apple does it is not bad. You buy any one of their products, and you’ve basically got free face-to-face tech support (in the form of the Genius Bar) until your piece of Apple equipment erupts in a fiery ball of flame. Add to that that they’ll repair or replace your hardware free of charge for a year under warranty (which was responsible for my upgrade from an iBook G3 to an iBook G4) and the price you pay for an Apple system doesn’t seem like such a dear premium if you ask me.

But I predict that Apple will release the source code of Aqua the day that Microsoft releases the source code of Vista and the day that Sun releases the source code of the proprietary bits of Solaris. So don’t hold your breath.