If you want to attract hackers to write software that will sell your hardware, you have to make it something that they themselves use. It’s not enough to make it “open.” It has to be open and good.

And open and good is what Macs are again, finally. The intervening years have created a situation that is, as far as I know, without precedent: Apple is popular at the low end and the high end, but not in the middle. My seventy year old mother has a Mac laptop. My friends with PhDs in computer science have Mac laptops. [2] And yet Apple’s overall market share is still small.

I subscribe to Apple’s .Mac service. I do so for exactly one feature: the .Mac screensaver. This feature works thusly: I designate an album in iPhoto, hit “.Mac slides”, upload the photos, go to my screensaver in Mac OS X, designate my .Mac member ID, and voila, screensaver of the photos with complete Ken Burns Effect. Anybody with Mac OS X can subscribe to this screensaver if they know my member ID. Like the Grandmas.

[…]

If you write a program to do this, I will pay you $100 (what .Mac cost me this past year) to be able to use it. Make it freeware, make it shareware, make it open source, I don’t care. Just give me a working copy and I will send you $100.