PowerPC rambling (was: Re: [PLUG] <compumike:#plug> dude debian rocks!)

[gabriel rosenkoetter <gr@eclipsed.net>]

On Thu, Jan 03, 2002 at 03:56:17PM -0500, Mike Leone wrote:
>  In order for it to be an Apple (the reasoning went "So with Apple using BSD
> and free software and at the same time all of the Linux apps compiled to run
> on BSD makes for an excellent system free from a standard controled by a
> single entity"), you've gotta buy the system FROM Apple; otherwise, you just
> have a generic PowerPC-based system; not an Apple.

You said "the main hardware (and accompanying firmware, I believe)
can only be built by/purchased from Apple". That is patently false,
and all I was disagreeing with. (Sorry that my quoting didn't make
that more apparent.)

You'd have a hard time running Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware, but
only because they've purposely coded such limitations into the OS.
You can run Darwin on anything for which it's got hardware support.
I'm sure I'd be forgetting some details if I said that the only
proprietary parts of a PowerMac are the case and the motherboard,
but it isn't too far from the truth.  (Can you buy non-Apple
motherboards to hold PowerPC chips? Yes. From Japan. Market pressures
in the states have nothing to do with the openness of the standard.)

I made, and intend to make, no defense of Mac OS X as either Free or
open source software. Darwin, I'll defend as being open and
modifiable. I really don't care about the political issues, so I
don't know what Apple's stance on redistribution is this week.
(And, if I were trying to sell something, I wouldn't be basing it
off of Darwin anyhow.)

Oh, and any software for which source is provided is by definition
modifiable. Any license that tries to change that can't hold up in
court. It's the redistribution that bites you. (Cf, Darren Reed.)

> Substitute "Dell" for "Apple", and "Intel-based" for "PowerPC-based"; you
> wouldn't call a system built from generic Intel-based parts a Dell machine,
> would you? Aren't ALL PCs based on pretty much open standards such as PCI,
> USB, etc? The BIOS may not be, however.

IA32 is most definitely NOT an open standard. It happens to be
pretty well cloned, though, to the extent that binaries built on
my AMD Athlon Thunderbird system work just fine on this old Pentium
133 laptop. (AMD still must reverse engineer new Intel chips in
order to mimic their functionality, last I heard.)

PowerPC most definitely IS an open standard. Last time I checked,
if you have the chip fabrication facilities, you are welcome to
press your own. (And both IBM and Motorola have.) If you want to
sell them, of course, you may need to give various corporations some
money.

> >Remember CHRP?
> Nope; what's that?

The Common Hardware Reference Platform, on which modern PowerPC
systems are loosely based. It was where things were going when Apple
(in one of its few clued moves this decade) was situating itself as
a software, rather than hardware, vendor, by allowing clones. The
standard was developed jointly by Apple, IBM, and Motorola. Then
Apple got Steve "It's not your" Jobs back (lucky them) and the
support for both Mac clones and CHRP dried up.

There were some true CHRP systems released (BeOS runs very nicely on
them), mostly in Japan. Japanese companies are still selling PowerPC
systems to the embedded market at quite a clip. I'll dig references
out of my archives of the port-macppc@netbsd.org list, if you like,
but I'm pretty sure all of the companies' web pages are in Japanese.

-- 
gabriel rosenkoetter
gr@eclipsed.net

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