Re: [PLUG] Without OS X

[gabriel rosenkoetter <gr@eclipsed.net>]

On Tue, Feb 11, 2003 at 11:55:06AM -0500, Fred K Ollinger wrote:
> I don't want to belabor this point b/c the job is long over, but the
> according to the company's website (epson), the driver did work in Mac OS
> X, but not w/ the jaguar upgrade.

Then they're missing the point.

Do they provide a PPD? That's all you need for CUPS to use the
printer!

> I was excited about OS X. However, I found out that unlike macos 7.5 and
> below, one could not get a free download eventhough apple claimed to have
> used a lot of free software in it.

And you can download all of the Free software they use. It's called
Darwin. You can't download the internally developed code based on
NeXT Computer's internally developed code. So? Why *should* you be
able to?

Yes, you can download up to Mac OS 7.5... that's an EOLed product!
Apple won't sell it to you if you ask them to, so they're doing you
a *favor* by letting you download it as opposed to killing it
completely (and a good thing to; there's certainly both hardware and
software that needs older versions of Mac OS, back when we called it
System X.Y). Why would they let you download a product for free that
they're trying to sell you?

The argument that Linux distributers like Red Hat and SuSE do this
doesn't hold water: their product isn't the operating system, nor
is it even the packaging, it's the *support* of the operating
system.

The argument that, if Apple actually wants to be a hardware company,
they should sell just the hardware and let you have the OS for free
is somewhat reasonable, but giving upgrades out for free costs Apple
money (in development time) and doesn't sell new hardware. But I
can think of some other operating systems that charge you a
significant amount for an upgrade.

> Worse, I found out that eventhough it
> supposedly has a lot of *BSD in it, it would not run on old ppc which
> could at least run NetBSD.

Because that hardware is also end-of-lifed. NetBSD works on that
machine because someone donated their time to *make* it work. Apple has
to *pay* people to make Mac OS X work. Also, NetBSD is far from the
polished product that Mac OS X is. If something doesn't work right
under NetBSD, our attitude is "Yup, that sucks. Wanna help fix it?"
That would NOT go over if you'd just *paid* for the operating
system. So Apple has to QA everything that's part of the OS.
Artificially (and it is artificial, and yes there are ways to trick
it) limiting Mac OS X's useability to G3 and above processors means
that Apple can run cheaper and still produce a good product. Try
using WindowsXP on a PC that came out the same year as that 7600 you
want Mac OS X to work on.

> I find that OS X is a lot like cygwin under windows. Yes, windows can run
> X and all that other unixy stuff, but it's much more work than a decent
> linux or bsd distro.

I think, perhaps, you've missed the goal of Mac OS X, at least on
the workstation side. Apple expects you to use their interface, just
like Microsoft expects you to use their's. Apple is providing an OS
whose *core* is more reliable, easier to develop for, and in many
ways more powerful. That does mean that Joe Briefcase is supposed to
see an interact with it, nor does it mean that intermediate users
who would be content with Linux won't be confused by the ways in
which things are hidden from Joe Briefcase.

The point is that software written to the POSIX standard will
compile and run under Mac OS X, but I don't have to wrangle with
Unix internals on my laptop.

Mac OS X is far from the perfect OS (in which both simple and hard
things are simple), and I don't agree with some of the interface
decisions (I've said plenty on that in the past), but most simple
things ARE simple, and some hard things aren't too bad.

> so it's probably possible, but I'm sure it's not as easy as "apt-get
> install icewm".

Actually, it is. Fink == apt.

-- 
gabriel rosenkoetter
gr@eclipsed.net

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