Apple's Tiger: 'It's out, it's not finished and it will be copied'

Apple's forthcoming fifth version of its OS, Tiger, is banking on its open-source heritage to spare it from the security woes that have dogged Microsoft.

The operating system, due to debut in the first half of 2005, is based on the Unix platform and Apple execs reckon it's the open-source nature of the product that means it's inherently more secure than certain proprietary offerings.

Bertrand Serlet, senior VP of software at Apple, said having a greater number of people keeping an eye on source code leads to better software security. "A lot of security problems derive from the core," he said. With open-source code, "thousands of people look at the critical portions of source code and... check those portions are right. It's a major advantage to have open-source code."

Whether the new OS will be the target of malware merchants is yet to be seen. The Mac OS has certainly had its flaws in the past but has yet to be plagued with the number of security scares as rival operating systems such as Windows.

Early versions of the OS are already doing the rounds and some techies have had a chance to play with one potential release which Cupertino handed out at the Apple developer conference in June "so they could get a head start in building apps", according to Ken Bereskin, senior director of Mac OS 10.

Although Bereskin called the developers' version "a solid copy" of Tiger, there's still a lot of work to be done on the OS, Serlet said. For instance, the final arrangement of standard 'widgets' (favourite accessories, like a clock, notepad and dictionary, which a user can bring down over the desktop in one click in a semi-transparent layer) the company will offer with Tiger hasn't been finalised.

Nevertheless, Apple execs are confident - "very confident", according to Bereskin - they won't have the same deadline-meeting grief as the folk over at Redmond.

Apple hasn't exactly made a secret of how it thinks Microsoft has been 'borrowing' ideas from its previous OSes. When CEO Steve Jobs gave Tiger its premiere in late June, the conference building was emblazoned with posters bearing the legend "Redmond, start your photocopiers".

With Microsoft, Bereskin said: "It's good to see they're studying us closely." Do they expect to see Longhorn come fully equipped with MS Widget? "We innovate in user features and we get copied a lot."