SALON Daily Clicks: Newsreal

What's NeXT for Apple?
Even with Steve Jobs in the deal,
NeXT's system may not be
the ideal match for the Macintosh.

By DAN SHAFER

To paraphrase a cliché, if Apple's acquisition of NeXT Software Inc. was the answer, it must have been a stupid question.

Apple's surprise announcement that it would buy NeXT for $400 million ended months of speculation about what the troubled computer company would do to shore up its flagging and all-but-abandoned effort to create a modern operating system for its Macintosh computer line. There was also considerable excitement at the prospect of Apple's co-founder and wunderkind, Steve Jobs, returning to the company, if only in an advisory capacity.

But for all the technical assets NeXT brings to Apple — and the morale-boosting presence of Steve Jobs — many close Apple watchers and Macintosh developers were left scratching their heads over the deal.

Prior to Friday, Apple had been in closely watched talks with Be Inc. about acquiring that company's core operating system technology. Reports indicated that Apple and Be were far apart on price, with Apple offering under $200 million and Be asking for between $400 and $500 million. Informed Apple sources had told me that if the price were in the $250 to $300 million range, a deal would likely be struck.

It turns out that Apple CEO Gilbert Amelio and research and development vice president Ellen Hancock were pursuing a completely different second course of action, apparently instituted by some folks at NeXT who saw Apple's problems as an opportunity for them.

The BeOS was widely perceived as a strong candidate to rescue Apple from the operating system morass in which it had been mired for the last two years as it fumbled, floundered and finally all but canceled its internal efforts to build a successor to its long-in-the-tooth System 7. The BeOS, put together under former Apple product development executive Jean-Louis Gassée, was everything the new-generation Apple OS had to be. It had the added advantage that it already ran on the central processing unit (CPU) at the heart of all modern Macintoshes, the PowerPC.

OpenStep — the operating system in the NeXT universe which is often confused with NeXTStep, the elegant user interface on the NeXT screens — is not without technical merit. It supports true multi-tasking (allowing users to do more than one thing at a time) and memory protection (preventing one program's failure from bringing the entire system to its knees), both of which are missing in the current Macintosh OS. And aficionados of such things find the OpenStep design to be elegant and clean. It is, however, old by comparison with the work done by Be.

OpenStep has been touted for the ease with which programs can be written for it. However, OpenStep does not work on the PowerPC chip at the heart of all Mac systems today, and analysts suggest it will be at least a year before a new Mac OS built around OpenStep can be ready for widespread testing. It isn't clear whether Apple, whose financial base has been corroded in the past 18 months, can weather the storm for another year in the face of Microsoft's Windows NT 4.0 operating system and Mac clone-maker Power Computing's adoption of the BeOS as an alternative on their rapidly growing product line.

While OpenStep is highly regarded by developers who have used it, it is not terribly new or particularly innovative. It is built on a speedy version of UNIX, which is about as far from the heart of Apple as one is likely to get, despite NeXT's highly graphical interface. It is "open" and object-oriented, which makes it easier for developers to build programs because they don't have to start from scratch, but its tool environment requires programmers to learn Objective C rather than supporting the far more widely used and supported, though technologically inferior, C++.

Not all developers will be delighted at the prospect of revising or rewriting their applications to work on Macintoshes sporting the NeXT OS. One of the exceptions is Adobe Systems, which has already ported several of its programs to the NeXT OS. The abandoned NeXT hardware platform used Display Postscript, another Adobe invention, for its screen graphics, so there was always a close working relationship between NeXT and Adobe.

Many of the Macintosh developers with whom I spoke were skeptical. Tim Lundeen of Lundeen Associates, a long-time and widely respected Mac developer (he produces the software Salon uses for Table Talk), characterized the move as "one of the stupidest things I've ever seen Apple do. They needed a fast, reliable, lightweight OS, and they got Unix. They needed something up and running, and they got a long-lead-time solution."

Dave Winer, a veteran Mac developer and, until recently, a confirmed Macintosh fanatic, also questioned the arrangement. "Apple gets to start all over. The developers may start over too. Will they? It seems unlikely. With many developers, I believe NeXTStep will suffer the same fate as OpenDoc. A decent idea at a technical level, floated by a company that very few want to follow," Winer said in his DaveNet newsletter.

If Winer is correct and an Apple/NeXT OS fails to win developer support, then Apple is in the same place it started. It is difficult to convince software designers and programmers to create products for a hardware platform with a shrinking share of the market.

San Jose Mercury-News Computing Editor Dan Gillmor, a self-described Macintosh supporter, said in Sunday's edition that he is now placing his decision to buy a new Mac on indefinite hold while he waits to see if the computer is going to survive and what will happen to its ability to run current Macintosh software.

In short, the Apple acquisition of NeXT raises far more questions than it answers, if indeed it answers any questions at all.

So what do you think of Apple's decision to acquire NeXT rather than license the BeOS? Join the discussion in free speech. That suggestsTable Talk.

Throw them to the lions
Around the world, persecuted Christians are becoming "the Jews of the 21st century."

WASHINGTON —
Michael Horowitz, a professorial Jew, is a man on an unlikely mission: publicizing the plight of persecuted Christians around the world and getting the Clinton administration to do something about it.

The 62-year-old former Reagan administration official says Christians are being scapegoated, tortured and killed on a "widescale and systematic basis" in China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and several other Muslim countries.

Modeling his strategy on the campaign to rescue Soviet Jewry, Horowitz is starting to make inroads in Washington. Some commentators say the issue could become a major foreign policy and human rights concern during President Clinton's second term.

"In many parts of the world, the Christians are the Jews of the 21st century," says Horowitz. Christian minorities, he says, are often regarded with fear as symbols of modernization and democracy by tyrannical, non-Christian governments. And because the Christian communities in these countries stand out, "they are the perfect scapegoat of choice for today's thuggish regimes."

Freedom House, a Washington-based human rights organization, has compiled a catalogue of evidence supporting Horowitz's allegations of persecution against Christians. Among its findings, corroborated by other human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch:

Horowitz became involved when Getaneh M. Getaneh, an Ethiopian immigrant working for him in suburban Washington, described his experiences as a Christian pastor under that country's former communist government and its current Islamic regime. "The communists threw me in jail and hung me upside down from the ceiling for hours on end. Periodically, guards would pour hot oil on the soles of my feet and then whip the soles with metal cables," Getaneh said.

Getaneh escaped and came to the United States, returning to Ethiopia after the fall of the communist regime there. The Islamic authorities jailed Getaneh for spreading Christianity, and he escaped again to the United States, where he went to work for Horowitz as a cook. "I went to an immigration lawyer to see if this man could get political asylum in the United States, based on a well-founded fear of persecution in his country if he were to return," Horowitz recalls.

"The lawyer asked me what were the grounds of the persecution, and I said he's a Christian. 'Those are his grounds? He's persecuted as a Christian?' the lawyer asked me. Trying to get asylum in the United States on these grounds is like trying to fit through the eye of a needle," Horowitz continued. "For a country founded on the freedom from religious persecution, that's just wrong. And as a Jew, I know all too well what happens when the world is silent in the face of religious persecution."

For the past year, Horowitz, now a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, has been urging Christian groups to pressure Congress and President Clinton to put the issue of persecuted Christians on their human rights agenda. Initially, though many Christian groups took part in the campaign to free Soviet Jewry, they were reluctant to speak out this time. "There was a nervousness about pushing for their own, a fear that if they sounded the trumpet, no one would respond, and that would be a signal to these oppressive regimes that they could really move in hard," says Horowitz.

Horowitz pressed on, writing op-ed pieces that challenged the churches' silence on the issue. Then he began working with local Christian groups, fostering a sense of grassroots outrage that their denominational leaders could no longer ignore.

Winning endorsements from the Episcopal and Presbyterian churches, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Campus Crusade for Christ, the National Association of Evangelicals and a battalion of prominent Christian leaders, Horowitz convinced them to carry their convictions another step forward: The groups issued a "statement of conscience" that called on the Clinton administration to "take appropriate action to combat the intolerable religious persecution now victimizing fellow believers." At the end of September, Horowitz organized an "International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church," in which some 40,000 churches took part.

A growing number of critics have since joined Horowitz in charging the Clinton administration with placing commercial and other considerations ahead of human rights concerns. Testifying earlier this year before a congressional hearing on human rights abuses, David Forte, a law professor at Cleveland State University, said: "American foreign policy has been an ineffective friend, if a friend at all, to these persecuted Christians and other religious minorities."

Last month, Horowitz's effort began to bear fruit when President Clinton appointed a blue-ribbon panel on religious persecution, chaired by John Shattuck, the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy and Human Rights.

But Horowitz is far from satisfied. Charging the president's commission has no teeth, he wants Clinton to speak out publicly on the issue of Christian persecution. He is also demanding the appointment of a special adviser who will conduct a top-to-bottom review of policy, including immigration and asylum regulations for persecuted religions. Horowitz also wants the State Department to include religious persecution in its annual human rights report, as well as tough new legislation in Congress that would deny trade benefits to countries that persecute their Christian population.

This is the same strategy used in the 1980s by Jewish and human rights organizations that resulted in a law curtailing trade with the Soviet Union and ultimately forcing Moscow to allow Jewish immigration to Israel. "That campaign showed that the Soviets could be stopped," Horowitz says. "And in stopping the Soviets from persecuting the Jews, we also stopped them when it came to other political dissidents."

Many Christian publications, delighted with the novel spectacle of a Jew fighting to save Christians, have given his crusade widespread publicity. Horowitz now has a number of influential legislators on his side. He so far has avoided involvement with the Christian Coalition for fear his campaign would be blurred by the abortion controversy and other domestic issues. Still, he has a pledge of support from Ralph Reed should his help be required.

With the Cold War over and apartheid ended, some of the steam has gone out of the traditional human rights movement. Horowitz views the plight of persecuted Christians as one global issue with the potential to energize a large human rights constituency.

"There are a lot of divisions yet to be summoned," Horowitz says. ""We're going to make the administration choose between the people who are suffering and the Saudi lobbyists and their allies in the Chamber of Commerce. We're not going away."

Jonathan Broder is a regular contributor to Salon.