Apple Officially Releases Rendezvous As "Open Source"

by , 4:15 PM EDT, September 25th, 2002

Apple has announced that it will officially release Rendezvous as Open Source, effectively allowing anyone to employ the technology in their products. Earlier this month, Apple announced that five large corporations had adopted Rendezvous for their product lines, but today's announcement means that Microsoft, Linux developers, and all manner of manufacturers will be able to incorporate the technology into their products. MacCentral broke the news that Apple was planning to release Rendezvous to the Open Source community in late August, and today's press release from the company confirms that. From Apple:

Apple® today announced it is "open sourcing" the code for its innovative new Rendezvous(TM) networking technology. Rendezvous, based on open Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Standard Protocols such as IP, ARP and DNS, uses industry standard networking protocols and zero configuration technology to automatically discover and connect devices over any IP network, such as Ethernet or 802.11-based wireless networks like Apple's Airport®. Major developers such as Canon, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, Lexmark, Philips, Sybase, World Book and Xerox have announced support for Rendezvous in a broad range of products spanning network printers, consumer electronics, enterprise database management and educational applications.

"Rendezvous is a major innovation in IP networking that creates dynamic networks of computers, devices and software applications with zero user configuration," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "By supporting an open standards process and providing open source software that is available today, Apple is encouraging the rapid adoption of Rendezvous technology."

By making the source code freely available, Apple is making it easy for developers to use Rendezvous technology in their network-enabled devices or software applications. The Rendezvous source code includes software to support UNIX, Linux, and Windows-based systems and devices. Rendezvous support is built into Mac® OS X version 10.2 "Jaguar" and is used by Apple's innovative new iChat application. Apple is working closely with the IETF Zeroconf Working Group to help develop zero configuration IP networking technology and is submitting Rendezvous as an open standard as part of the ongoing IETF standardization process.

Starting today, developers can download Rendezvous as open source under the Apple Public Source License from http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/rendezvous . Rendezvous is part of a broader open source release today from Apple at http://developer.apple.com/Darwin which includes the Darwin 6.0.1 operating system and additional Open Directory plug-ins. Together, these underscore Apple's commitment to making core protocols freely available as open standards and open source.

You can find more information on rendezvous at the above links.

The Mac Observer Spin:

This is a win-win situation for Apple, and the computing world as well. The only folks who stand to lose are those who make their living managing networks. Rendezvous, if implemented universally, would mean a near-revolutionary change in the way devices interact with each other, and their users interact with their computers.

It will be interesting to see if Microsoft adopts Rendezvous, and whether the company employs its usual embrace and extend strategy for outside technologies.