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To answer the side question, I think so for two reasons. 1. He certainly could have had his hand in the pot but Pixar is under the control of Disney/Catmull &
by Moto7451 14y ago
To answer the side question, I think so for two reasons.
1. He certainly could have had his hand in the pot but Pixar is under the control of Disney/Catmull & Lasseter. Jobs/His family are the largest single individual share holder in Disney but its not like he had/has majority say. If they needed to do this to keep making quality films, even if he was in a particularly bad mood towards OSS (say, Linus decided to say something cheery about OS X), they could tell him to go run his own company.
2. Apple, where Steve was clearly king, would open source or give away software at times, likely when it made business sense and not for the sake of brotherly FOSS love. For example: Contributions to KHTML (Webkit) and Clang, and wholly contributed things like libdispatch, Apple Lossless codec, etc[1].
I'm pretty sure Pixar's move here would be considered a good business move.
1: http://www.macosforge.org http://www.macosforge.org