A lot has been said of late concerning the way Apple slipped in a brand-new Safari installer into the Apple Software Update used by many hundreds of thousands of iPod-wielding Windows users. Let me offer a new perspective, from the open source point of view - why what Apple did was bad, and why open source developers wouldn’t do it.

Christopher Blizzard thinks Apple's new demos, "entirely miss the point of the web, interoperability, standards and html5." Apple recently released an HTML5 showcase intended to highlight the company's commitment to open Web standards.

Despite being one of the most tightly controlled technology companies on the market, Apple has a surprisingly complicated relationship with open source. Both of Apple’s flagship operating systems, OS X and iOS are based on Darwin, which is in turn based on FreeBSD.

"Moments ago Apple announced that Windows users can now download and run their popular Safari web browser. That's right, more Apple software on Windows boxes. Safari is a pretty cool browser, and I do use it on my MacBook Pro. But where's my Safari for Linux? Why wasn't today's announcement about open sourcing Safari?"

The top feature of Apple's Safari 5 is that it incorporates technology from the open source Readability project. Since it is open source users of other browsers can use the Apache 2 licensed bookmarklet too

Yesterday, Apple computer released Safari for windows, proving that the company does have the desire to expand their enterprise and myriad programs to other platforms. However, they so far have neglected the Linux user. Will apple release iTunes for Linux? Not anytime soon. So what solutions does the open source community have?

Ubuntu is open source, right?

For companies like Microsoft and Mozilla, Safari coming to Windows means that one more competitor will be thrown into the Windows browser battlefield. While neither company has expressed dismay with Apple's decision to put Safari on Windows, on Monday executives from both Microsoft and Mozilla expressed a lack of concern for their new (Windows) foe.

Apple's launch of Safari on Windows has already managed to irk a competitor. However, Mozilla's John Lilly isn't upset that there's a new browser in town; what bugs him is how that new browser was introduced. One of the pie charts Steve Jobs used to illustrate browser market share showed only Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Safari, with no mention of Firefox or any other browser.