Apple: Rendezvous Will Be Open Source

Apple told MacCentral in an interview yesterday it intends to make Rendezvous open source early next month. The standards-based technology makes it possible to set up ad-hoc networks without a server handling IP addresses. Apple’s hope is to see this integrated into new hardware, says MacCentral, with Epson, HP, and Lexmark already backing the technology. Macworld attendees will recall the compelling demonstration of Rendezvous allowing iChat to find available chat buddies just by seeing what Jaguar-running Macs were on the LAN or Airport network. This would be the first complete working implementation of the open source ZeroConf standard to be available to the open source community.