christophe barbe on Fri, 7 Feb 2003 11:35:12 -0500


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Re: [PLUG] Without OS X


On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 04:20:37PM -0500, Christian Hedemark wrote:
> Because most of us are happy with the Apple OS and don't care to blow it
> away.  Many of us *intend* to put Linux on there, or maybe even *do*
> make it dual boot, but if you ask around I think you'll find most end up
> running OS X 95%+ of the time anyway.

That's something I don't really understand. I own a TiBook and only boot
linux on it. I use mol[1] to boot OS-X on it mainly for listening radio
using a proprietary (and technically inferior) streaming solution and to
check the result of my work on Mac.

I see nothing in OS-X that would lead me to give up on my freedom. You
can find the GUI nice but I find it very limited for a power user. But I
do understand why this GUI is appealing for normal desktop users 
(and prefer to see them on Mac-OS rather than on Windows).

The only problems I have is with unsupported hardware features on linux
because of undisclosed hardware specification (the most problematic
being the suspend/resume feature which is not supported on TiBook3
because of the ATI M7 chip). Anyway this is not enough to give up my
freedom.

For those who believe that Apple is now a model of free software
friendly company, they should look closer[2]. For me the bigger
contribution Apple is making to the Free Software is by relying on it
for major part of its OS (BSD core, Apache, Samba) and not by
contributing to KDE via Safari. 

Anyway they are doing good hardware and they are not licensing it to
other vendors so they don't have to use dishonest practices to sell the
hardware and the software together. So I agree to pay the later to get
the former and don't feel like paying a tax (unlike M$ windows on PC). 

Christophe

[1]: http://maconlinux.org
[2]: http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/03/01/28/2044225.shtml?tid=107

-- 
Christophe Barbé <christophe.barbe@ufies.org>
GnuPG FingerPrint: E0F6 FADF 2A5C F072 6AF8  F67A 8F45 2F1E D72C B41E

Imagination is more important than knowledge.
   Albert Einstein, On Science
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