Chris Hedemark on Fri, 7 Feb 2003 14:54:19 -0500


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Re: [PLUG] Without OS X


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On Friday, February 7, 2003, at 11:34 AM, christophe barbe wrote:

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.

Looking back further in the thread, you will find I've already enumerated several such frustrations with OS X.


For those who believe that Apple is now a model of free software
friendly company, they should look closer[2].

For the record, I see them as more of a consumer of free software than a contributor (though they *do* contribute to some extent)


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.

There are a lot of other projects that they are contributing to. It's worth mentioning their Rendezvous stuff which appears to be unencumbered by patents (AFAIK) and is a well documented protocol. This is something that Linux and *BSD distributions can get up to speed on quickly as documentation is readily available.


Right now OS X sort of fills a niche that Linux hasn't quite grown into yet. The freedom of Linux does have its downsides, including the lack of any meaningful integration of software components or software with hardware. I *can* do many of the same things in Linux that I can do in OS X but in Linux it is sometimes made a lot more convoluted than it needs to be. The three words you will hear a lot from OS X users is "it just works".

Chris Hedemark
PGP/GnuPG Public Key at http://yonderway.com/chris/hedemark.gpg
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