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The Cathedral And The Bizarre
Euro writes: "Jeff Lewis has written
an interesting article for
macopinion.com that discusses why Open Source hasn't taken off that well among the Mac enthusiasts. Interesting reading, as well as some excellent commentary on why the Bazaar development model isn't always a great idea." (timothy butts in: You might also want to revisit the recent Ask Slashdot about promoting Open Source on the Mac.)
heh
As for OS X, it is Apple's last chance to impress me. I must admit I still have a tiny bit of sentiment for Apple as a company, so I truly, truly hope that OS X lives up to the hype.
I don't mean that Apple will fail if OS X bombs; this only applies to my personal interest in Apple as a tech company.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
I think this is missing the point, though. The important factor, in the end, is not necessarily how a given program works, but how well it matches other programs. I'm a long-time Mac user, but I've got quite a bit of experience with other platforms (including doing Windows phone support, ick.) The reason I keep coming back to MacOS is speed. I can learn new programs faster, and operate quicker in old ones, than I can on other OSes. Every time I try customization tools, I usually end up going back.
It's little nuances of the GUI that add up--always having the menu bar in the same place, so you don't have to look for it, having consistant file and edit menus--that seem to enable this speed. I know Apple's UI (or 'user experience,' these days...) guidelines seem neurotic--"space elements thirteen pixels apart," etc.--but in the end, consistency is just as important as quality. (Contrast this with M$, who radically alter the interface of their programs with every revision.) Continual change is not always a sign of improvement, but rather of the need for it. Example: Microsoft has attempted to "improve" text selection using a mouse. Instead, it prevents me from selecting partial words, or phrases without their end punctuation, etc. The old system worked well, but in the name of 'better interface,' it's been ruined.
'Complex, configurable' interfaces place an unreasonable burden on the user. It's the developer who should have to worry about making the UI efficient--not the user. This is the standard we hold non-computer products to. We don't expect auto makers to let us replace the steering wheel with a joystick--using one would be another skill we'd have to master, when we could simply be driving. Another example--kitchen appliances. The 16 speed blenders of 25 years ago have predominantly given way to models which turn on and off. Why? Because the added complexity--in the name of configurability--was unneccesary, useless, and in the end, unwelcome.
I realize that power users will always want to change little things in their OSes. Nevertheless, I maintain that the most meaningful changes aren't ones that configurable operating systems allow you to make; they're usually corrections for programs which were improperly designed in the first place. Design a program once well, and your users won't need to customize it.
"It is absurd to divide people into good or bad. People are either charming or tedious." --Oscar Wilde
Keep in mind that alot of /.ers took part in the whole Mac/Windows in there M$ days. For many of us alot of this information is new. Unfortunatly the mac posts on /. reflect their ignorance.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
I think that you're missing my point. There have been alternatives to the "Clippit" personality all the way back from its original incarnation, including a cat which appeared to be assembled from pieces of scrap paper, and "Power Pup," a superhero dog. I didn't mean to suggest that there was a lack of choice in the office assistant department, but rather that the whole office assistant concept is a bad idea. I base this on three key supporting facts
Clippit bore the brunt of my ire primarily because it is the default assistant, and because it is, in fact, incredibly annoying. Especially in its default behavior. I apologize profusely to you, Microsoft, Clippit, and the general public if I was unduly harsh to that twisted, hateful, useless fucking piece of scrap metal.
Applescript has been a part of MacOS since 1994.
Have a look at its command console here.
P.S. If you're interested, there is a parallel discussion thread to this topic over on Junebug. But then again, I'm not sure that I want you mucking up my server.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
>shut on every Mac.
Surely you don't mean that it's PHYSICALLY harder to get into a Mac than a pc?
I'm on about my fiftenth computer now, everything from a couple Apple II series boxen to C64 to Sinclair ZX81 to a number of wintel boxen to an IBM Thinkpad.
I'm back to Apple now. And my Mac is the EASIEST thing to get into since the Apple II+ ! Just lift the latch, and the whole side of the case becomes a door which folds down, giving freakishly easy access to the inside of the thing. Upgrading the RAM (first thing I did when I got it) took all of two minutes.
Compare that to the HP tower I had before... I needed two different screwdrivers to get into the sucker. Just to get to the motherboard for a ram upgrade, I had to unscrew practically the whole back of the machine, pop off two side panels and the front panel, unscrew and remove the power supply with a DIFFERENT screw driver. dig through the nest of wires to get to the simms sockets, hold them out of the way with one hand, FINALLY add the memory (one handed) with the other, then reverse the entire disassembley procedure to get the thing back together. Total time was just over half an hour.
My next purchase will be a Powerbook. It's not quite so simple as a Powermac to get into, but, from playing with the demo units in the store (pop keyboard up, remove RF shield, pop ram into socket), it sure seems like it'll be a fair sight easier than it was to add ram to the Thinkpad I have now (another half hour long procedure involving a number of tiny (but, of course, different sized) screws).
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
So when will we see "Hypocritical" and "Child-like" added to the list of descriptive terms moderators have access to?
I am, therefore you think.
Eric Raymond's comments at MacHack were wonderfully telling in several ways. He criticised Mac programmers for being too focussed on user interface and criticised MacOS for intertwining the UI with system functionality, making it harder for new programmers to get on board writing MacOS apps.
Well, maybe that is why there aren't that many devlopers for MAC. Maybe that is why there is such a small base of software for the MAC.
Linux has been around for five or six years.
Really, try to do some homework when writing articles.
Linux, on the other hand, pops up around 1995 after the GUI market had twelve years of development
That's right folk, the very first version of linux (version 1.1.76) was released in 1995.
The other serious mistake the author makes is somehow equating Linux as a GUI, then the GUI is xfree86. Ironically, X Windows is one of the oldest GUI's in existance, and the author is trying to make the point that it is too "new" to be mature and compete.
Perl itself is a testimony to the OpenSource mindset - it's a gruesome mishmash of inconsistent syntax and function calls - definitely a product designed by committee - but one wherein each member clearly wasn't listening to anyone else.
And yet it's one of the most popular OSS programs today. Not a very good example of OSS failing is it?
Raymond touts the stability of Linux as proof of the OpenSource concept, but that's a bit misleading. The core of Linux was written by one person - Linus Torvalds.
As if we needed more evidence that the author did no research in writing this article. Alan Cox and dozens of others would take exception to this insane statement.
If you check into each successful OpenSource project, you see the same thing: a small group of referees who filter the input and weed out the bad ideas. The bazaar has cops. The chaos is contained.
This truely is misleading, anyone can take a project and branch off of it is they feel the maintainer is not doing a good job.
See, when commercial developers create a product, they start by trying to solve a problem that customers need solved. The focus is always on the customer.
Really, who was the one who asked AOL to put piracy protection into Winamp? The customer? Did MS's customers ask that each version of Word contain an different and incompatible file format?
Sorry, but the focus is not on the customer, that is for the marketers to worry about. The focus is on making the company money, and that sometimes forgoing customer wishes in order to leverage market share.
See, when commercial developers create a product, they start by trying to solve a problem that customers need solved.
Like that pesky bug we call "compatibility". Microsoft has been trying to fix that one for years.
Apple has taken the fruit of the OpenSource movement - BSD Unix
Don't get me wrong, I love *BSD, but what qualifies it as the fruit of OSS? I would put Apache or Linux in that slot, hell Perl has more of a claim to that title.
This same 'elitism' is what pulled us into a GUI based world of computing.
I believe Xerox was the one who did that. You "elitism" is showing simply by insuating that Apple invented the GUI.
This guy really seems to have some deep anger towards OSS and the success of Linux, and while he makes one or two good points, they are overshadowed by his inaccurate claims.
Finkployd
Linux is modelled after Unix which was designed for the "developers" of the 1970's. So I guess Linux is okay if you like using development methods that are now 30 years old.
Before you get your feathers all ruffled up, one should really look at what he is saying.
The MacOpinion writer mentions that there are "priests ove the bazaar," which you disagree with. The idea of a "priest" is not necessarily a bad thing. If a religion has no priests the religion would be choatic and without form, by having priest a religion can dictate a more standard form for said religion.
The same goes for the operators in RMS choosing what to add and what they shouldn't add. They bring structure to what would be formless, they standardize and help select what they believe would be best for the masses. Their ability to choose what is best depends on other higher "priests" who dictate something more fundemental, perhaps something like the standard libraries. Eventually this reaches the heads of this "religion" who deal with the most fundemental aspects, in the case of Linux it is the kernel development.
Structure can be a good thing, especially when the bazaar becomes to big and choatic. One difference between that of Linux and other "religions" is that due to the openness of the structure, the "religion" forms to the peoples desires rather than dictating what the people desire. In essence those who are in charge of certain projects are the priests of that project.
Another aspect of religion that enters into the open source model, to an extent, is interpretation. Even after everything has gone through the different levels of the religion the person who believes must interpret what they have been told. Same sort of thing for Linux, if one believes that a certain application needs something then they can add it, and if someone wants to take it literally then that option is also available.
As for the GUI issues, I agee that GNOME and KDE are decent designs but the MacOpinion writer does have some teeth in his bite. There is more than just GNOME and KDE to choose, if one looks at the selection of window managers out there one might understand what he is talking about. FVWM, Enlightenment, Sawfish, Afterstep, WindowMaker, Blackbox... there are at least a half dozen major players in the window manager field, all of which act differently. Even the GNUStep brothers, Afterstep and WindowMaker, react differently enough to confuse the average user. Some of these window managers are GNOME complient, some KDE complient, others are complient with both, on top of which Enlightenment is planning on adding its own application manager to compete with GNOME and KDE. As for Eazel, it isn't even out there yet, and when it does finally show 1.0 it won't fix the problem of too many window managers. As for elder GUI's being crappy, if you are talking about the Mac GUI, it may be old but it is still probably the most user friendly GUI on the planet, user being the average joe.
Linux may be a secure, stable, powerful OS, which is why I use it, but it too crashes. Linux is not perfect, it is still a fledgling compared to the major UNICES.
The writer has some good points that we should not ignore because we don't like what he says. One of Linux's strong points is to listen and fix. Even the most skewd infomation like mindcraft is useful.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
The crux of this is that do we really want linux to be mainstream? I don't really think that people are working to make linux mainstream - sure, the installers are getting better. Sure, we have gnome, kde, berlin - but these are still made for and by developers and the hard-core, just those that want it to look prettier. People are working to make linux better, and that's what makes it great.
.. of which Open Source software is not a part.
This is the exact same type of elitism that the author rails against. "Linux is by programmers and for programmers!" What a load of crap!. If you don't think that companies and individuals aren't trying to make Linux mainstream, open your eyes a bit wider. There's this hugely popular company. Maybe you've heard of it, Redhat? It sells Linux. It's not selling Linux to programmers, but to end users, on the aisles of Best Buy and Office Depot. There are other companies, too, pushing this OS into the hands of the typical consumer, not the hands of the programmer. You know what the images look like on the back of these boxes? They look like Windows. Why would a programmer buy a product that looks like Windows? Companies are actively basing their entire profit plan on bringing Linux to the masses, not to programmers, but to Grandma and Uncle Bob. Groups are actively doing the same. Check out HelixCode sometime. Their goal is not the make the friendliest interface for programmers and developers. It's the bring the simplicity of the Mac GUI philosophy to Linux. And guess what, Linux, the OS, sucks for doing things like that.
You've basically just completely backed up the author's main points. Open source isn't meant for the consumer. OSS advocates tend to be elitists. And yet, the OS movement still tries to tell everyone, not just programmers, that it's the best model. It just isn't true. Stallman and Raymond and Linus and whoever else is pushing Linux on to store aisles needs to turn around and ask themselves, "If I don't want Linux to be mainstream, why am I doing this?" It's ideological, and ideological battles are pointless and in the end, alienate people.
Closed-source software is good for the some things, and the author's stand (which I agree with), is that it's good for consumer-driven markets
[Disclaimer: I am a Mac user and programmer]
I would hazard a guess that the majority of Mac users have never compiled a program.
I would put this figure more around 90%. People buy Macs to do things, not to crack them open and play around with them. Why do you think the Mac dominates the graphics/publishing industry and is hated by "true" geeks elsewhere?
The Mac and *nix customer bases have totally different priorities. Linux people are willing to explore something to learn it, and are willing to put effort into making the program do what they want, not caring about how much time this will take. Mac users want the program to do exactly what they want from the get-go (which is why a non-configurable interface is a good thing: Apple forcing all programs to look and act the same way means that "generic Mac skills" can be applied to virtually every program out there), they see time tuning the program as time taken away from more imporant tasks they could be using the program to do.
I see a lot of comments around here to the effect of "if you can't do something, take the time to learn it, it's good for you." This philosophy will never make it with the vast majority of users.
The FSF boycott is an excellent point. I'd completely forgotten about it. I remember looking for free programming tools for the mac several years ago (before MPW became free). I figured that there would be something along the lines of DJGPP for DOS, but there were essentially no free C/C++ compilers available. Very disappointing, as it kept me from exploring mac programming. I, of course, probably wouldn't have produced anything useful, but it would have been open source :).
So it seems to me that the lack of good, free compilers did a great deal to slow free software development on macs. And, as cwis pointed out, the FSF boycott certainly curtailed a port of GCC, which might have made a big difference. It may just be that history, and not philosophy, has held back open source development on the mac.
Matt
I mean, really, the Mac only has one (annoying!) widget toolkit, it doesn't know what a "console" is; if you want a shell, you have to get some third-party GUI app! And if something goes wrong... uh-oh, it's a cute little bomb, and you didn't restart your mac properly, did you? Silly user, it's all your fault.
You make his point very well.
Mac users DO NOT WANT a console: They want to get work done
Multiple widget toolkit's have increased usability how?
For the most part- why do you care how the machine crashed if you aren't going/are unable to do anything about it (ie- a musician is unlikly to scour source code... a crash is a pain the rear in any operating system, and please don't tell me linux doesn't EVER crash.)
Gavin Fischer
I disagree, have you seen the latest G4s? Talk about beauty in design. To open, you have to simply lift up one latch and the whole side opens up to you. I'd kill to have such elegantly designed cases in the PoS PC tower cases that I routinely want to get in to.
As for older Macs - I never met a Mac I couldn't hack, inside and out. Although it wasn't easy to add memory to that first Fat-Mac. Anyway, the important point is that I believe the author is referring to the "new" Apple, which has an Open Source core in OS X, and seems to be getting more developer friendly in that area. Though I still think it's safe to say that the developer to technically-unsavvy user ratio on Macs is completely different than that for Linux (or even Windows).
"(In defense of Linus Torvalds, he wasn't trying to build a consumer OS, he was trying to create a freely available Unix-like kernel in the spirit....)"
Well, hello!
A whole heck of a lot of people have been critiqueing (sp?) Linux as though it set out from the start intending to become a world-dominant, Micro$oft killer OS.
And then they slam Linux 'cause they think it's doing a poor job of it.
But nothing of the sort is even faintly true.
Read this -- if you've read it before, read it again; if you've never read it, read it and then spend some time thinking about what it means in terms of the underlying core (kernel?) of Linux.
Linux came from a place entirely different than that which most recent supporters and critics of Linux think it did: it's only relatively recently, and as a complete digression to the original purpose, that "world domination" (even if Linus himself uses the phrase..) and IPO's and all the recent shit that's been going down have been artifically overlayed atop the real soul of Linux as an OS. Most of the recent shit that's been going down is utterly irrelevant to the way most of us use Linux, I'd bet...
So: Lewis.
He's a Mac fanatic.
Fine. I have no problem with that.
But he's comparing apples and oranges.
"Interestingly, the number one problems with Linux, from a consumer perspective, are that it doesn't have a standardised UI; its tools are simply too difficult to use and configure, and it requires far too much upfront learning to get up to speed.
Who ever said it was going to have a standardized UI? Many would say that that's exactly contrary to what the concept is: you don't have to take what comes out of the box.
"The last is the most telling: the Linux model moves the cost of learning from the developer to the user."
Again, Hello! Earth to Lewis! That's the way it's really been all along! You have to be willing to learn something, and to think, to use Linux.
And no matter what the marketing droids do, that will continue to be Linux's greatest strength.
t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
What I always find so incredibly odd is that whenever you see some mac guy say something about how he prefers MacOS and that it is better from his point of view, or in this case where a mac guy responds to ESR or the like a bunch of upward moderated trolls/flamebait/ignorant BS appears. perhaps it is just me, but somehow I think not. By the way before I continue I have used MacOS X. Has anyone else?
.dlls everywhere which some programs replace seemingly at whim (yes I know what they are and what they do, and why AOL can cause machines to be unstable even if AOL is not running), a registry that every app you install gets to change yet is a pretty major requirement of stable operation, etc.
Now I use Windows/Linux/BSD/MacOS on a somewhat regular basis (well the BSD box is currently down) but the point is that I have used about 10 different OSes in 20 years. I don't claim guru status on any. However I am familiar with most of them. OSes require certain concepts to be learned to be usable. MacOS was the first truly objective(concept) OS I ever used that really expressed that paradym. You can grab (hold the mouse button down for you morons out there) something and put it where you want it, and double click to open. And you could do this in 1990 almost as well as you can today in any OS. This includes files, text in an open program, whatever. Once you have this concept everything is pretty damn simple to use on a mac. You can move text/graphics/etc from one app to another by highlighting, grabbing, and dropping onto the other open apps window. It's nice, it's fast, and used for it's intended purpose my grandmother could be chugging along quite quickly in a week. If there is trouble there is a menu that is nearly always at the top of the screen that says "help". As far as compatibility, I have a PC Voodoo 3 2000 in my mac, as well as a pretty standard ethernet card, and BTW in case you didn't know PCI 2.1 is pretty standard as well. Also since when is PC 100 not standard? How about USB, is that not standard because Apple pushed it into popularity, or was the timing of that just coincidence? As far as coding for it, I agree that sucks. Running it as a network server sucks.
Now windows in my opinion is a poor copy, and BTW I used windows first. I switched from Windows to MacOS/Linux due to annoyance with Windows. The thing I find the most insulting out of any computer product I have ever used is the way MS porducts always attempt to second guess what I want to the point that it makes it hard for me to actually do what I want to do and not what IT thinks I want to do. Every copy of word I am forced to use, I have to go in and turn off all of those annoying "features". Ever attempt to select the first half of a word and a space before that word in MSIE? It auto-selects all of the spaces before the word, puctuation before that, and the entire word as well. To make it work you have to "somehow" know to hold the shift key while left clicking. How nice. Too many things like that. Too much time trying to tell other people how to do things. However what windows does have going for it is a bunch of games, which is why I have an install of it at all. Or how about all those users that just delete files leaving registry entries strewn about? If you ask me windows is a mess, full of
And *nix based OSes those 300 in 1 kits reborn as software, which by the way rocked. I am a big fan of the *nix based OSes, esp. Linux and BSD. I am more familiar with Linux but my last install of FreeBSD (which no longer boots, due to compaq mobo) really impressed me. I love ripping the thing apart and making it mine, much the same way I used a tool called ResEdit to do some minor editing on MacOS. I like the mutiple window managers. However my wife, most of my friends who even touch *nix, etc use KDE. They are somewhat confused by Enlightenment on my system (no Gnome). I can imagine that standard users would be terrified to go from something like KDE which is incredibly windows-like to E. So as far as MacOS-X and Win2k coming with a standard-looking interface is not just unsurprising, it is the only way 95% of the population would even touch a machine and not freak. Windows confuses the hell out of 50% of its users if not more. What effect do you think E/Afterstep/etc would have? And command line, my god, I can see a ton of trashed systems resulting. Now as much as I love our network server (Slack 7, Intel), I can simply not imagine it being useable to the public in a large fashion in a desktop. Most people whether the Slashdot community likes it or not know NOTHING about computers. And no matter how much I rant about MS breaking up standards, they make arguments like MS is a standard. Now I see people on here making the same kind of arguement about hardware... What happened to the Open Source Community likes diversity, aparently only when it does not apply to Apple hardware. It's truly amazing. What is even more amazing is that there seems to be more anti-Apple sentiment about being non-standard than there is at compaq Intel(bleah), or compaq Alpha, or IBM, etc. Let me tell you, PC hardware standards are not followed as closely as MS and Intel would have you believe.
Apple makes a system my grandmother can use and I can teach my mom to troubleshoot with ease. They decide that BSD rocks. They based config files in their new OS on fairly standard BSD config files and easily edited XML. They allow people to download the source to the core of their new OS. They work on making an velocity enabled version of gcc and provide it for free download. The Open Source Community says "Apple Sucks, they are too proprietary, they aren't providing source to everything, I'd rather use MS, there is no software, whatever. Nice message there guys. Way to tell the man what we think of large companies trying to see what Open Source can offer.
Performa 6300 series maybe? I never could figure out how to get one of those damn things open. One of my users had one and the hard drive died. I sheepishly told him (after about two hours) that I could not figure out how to open the case.
I called Apple and they refused to tell me how to open the box! They wanted me to bring it to an authorized repair facility to plug in an IDE drive.
Even before that, I used to keep in my desk drawer the 10 inch T-8 torx screwdriver and mechanical case spreader you had to use to open an SE or SE/30. It was a pain to open them up, but worth it to see the developers' signatures molded into the inside of the case.
Since then, Apple has become quite a bit more forthcoming about their hardware.
...Happily typing this on my Wall Street II powerbook running LinuxPPC.
> Linux is modelled after Unix which was designed for the "developers" of the 1970's.
> So I guess Linux is okay if you like using development methods that are now 30 years old.
And win2000 is modelled after NT which was modelled after VMS which is about the same vintage. And MacOS derives from PARC experiments, way back when. And the Dodge Viper is just a really advanced Ford Model T.... So what you're saying is it's wrong to stick with proven concepts?
Best new white rapper since Pimp Daddy Welfare... Pimp-T!
Since Apple products are the monolithic beasts they are, I think they actually inspire more curiosity. Ever since ResEdit and MacsBug were written, neophites have been introducing themselves to the wonderful world of OS hacking. One early example that comes to mind is the classic shareware game, "Spaceward, Ho!". It lacked a few keyboard shortcuts that some people wanted... a quick edit of the resource fork, and viola! Command-T suddenly advances the turn. The new keystroke even shows up on the right side of the menu option, just like in all other MacOS keystroke options. Make one minor change like this to one program and you get sucked in.
Hardware is also tinkered with. The original iMac had a "Mezzanene" slot on the mobo (left over from when that board was meant to become a thin client). A clever German company saw it as a potential unsupported PDS slot to make up for the lack of PCI expansion. They made a combo card of video-out and SCSI.
Mac hacking is possible, you just need to know the platform. Since most hackers cut their eyeteeth on x86 boxes, a lot of the Apple world seems strange and impenetrable, but it's not so bad once you learn it. For example, the LinuxPPC group had an iMac port within weeks of the release, USB support and all.
Okay, okay... enough cheerleading. I'll stop now.
The story was interesting, and almost as one-sided as ESR's speech. It would be cool to get JL and ESR on a debate panel together. (After they each make a quick pass through a metal detector. No need for bloodshed.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The truth about Linux sysadmining on your own machine is that you don't have as much control as you think.
For the people 'playing' sysadmin with their home computers, you are right. However that is also how they learn.
For those who are responsible for servers and clusters, you are way off. The strength to these people is that they have both the knowhow, and the tools to completly customize their system to their needs. Linux is NOT just a hobby, it's used in production enviorments everywhere.
Finkployd
Huh? That's not a shell, it's a scripting language with a 'Play' button.
That's like if I told you that the "Command Prompt" interface for Windows was accessible by opening Word, choosing Record Macro, scripting some actions, pressing play...
If you want to actually have a directory tree and some rudimentary shell commands on a Mac, you have to find a third-party shell application. And they generally suck, because the Mac "naming conventions" and whatnot are not shell-friendly.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Because, in terms of openness, Mac is to Windows as Windows is to Linux.
No really--the hood is almost literally welded shut on every Mac. This style of computer doesn't breed much curiosity in the user, so Open Source is unlikely to interest them. That doesn't mean they couldn't benefit from it, it just means that the two groups don't have much overlap.
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Commercial software is typically designed for the simple purpose of making money
Exactly. But the author claims that commercial software is created to solve a problem that the customers have. That's nonsense. If it solves a problem, great. But if it causes problems, that's even better from a commercial perspective, because then the company can sell a fix to the problem.
Imagine my surprise, as an Apple II, II+, and IIe user, when I first looked at a Mac. "How do you open this (*&$ thing?" It was the single most disappointing thing that I'd ever seen in the world of computers.
That is, until I tried to figure out how to program for them, and found out that
1. There was no command line.
2. You had to buy additional software, as far as I could tell, just to program the damn things.
3. Apple didn't want you developing for the Mac unless you werre a commercial licenser.
4. Hardware upgrades? Pshaw!
5. There were 15 books you had to read in their damn developer's guide.
In fact, Apple put up so many barriers to entry, relative to the Apple II line, that I'm surprised that anyone ended up programming for their sealed-box, crappy-spec'ed, proprietary bull&(*t.
It was shortly thereafter I switched to x86, and so far, I have no regrets whatsoever. As far as I'm concerned, Apple is basically the antithesis of everything the Open Source philosophy represents.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
There's something strange about writing Open Source software on a platform when the development tools are Closed Source. It's kind of hard to write Open Source in Microsoft Visual C++, and it's also kind of hard to do it in Metrowerks Codewarrior. Why? You obviously paid for those tools - and so you don't necessarily want to give it away for free. With MacOSX, the development tools are now free, both as in beer an in speech. It makes it much easier to develop Open source applications.
Secondly, there just wasn't enough Open Source software to leverage on the MacOS environment. Most free software on Linux is built around free libraries, and couldn't exist without them. On MacOS (pre-X), there weren't enough free software libraries available. On MacOSX, the BSD subsystem garuntees easy ports of libraries like guile and glib, upon which many applications depends.
It's quite probable that when MacOS X arrives, there'll be an outpouring of Open Source software just for those reasons. Once some of the GNU libraries are ported, people will start to use them - and Open Source what they create.
For good info on individual models, including some of their weird cases, I would start at Low End Mac, and if you can't find it there, follow their link to MacFixIt.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
It's called division of labor and it is the reason that you have the wealth and the spare time to post to Slashdot rather than churning your own butter.
with humpy love,
with humpy love,
humpmonkey
Of course it isn't.
Emacs is! :)
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Zardoz has spoken!
Oper on the Nightstar
Is it so hard for you to fucking understand that Macs are manufacturered by Apple and can have any fucking "Made by Apple" logos they want on them? You need to realize that without mass production you wouldn't have a computer to spew your ill-conceived notions from. By installing Linux on an IBM-PC you're not making a stand against some horrible evil empire, you're making a consumer choice. The anti-trust case against Microsoft is and was never about striking a blow for any cause. It was and is about preventing a single company to hedge all consumer choice in a market. If Microsoft built the computers its OS was installed on, there would be nothing anyone could say about it. They however only product software. They have been unfairly affecting other companies by threatening them with licensing changes and the like. You're not fighting for anyone's freedom here.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
That attitude is a lot like a car mechanic saying you are stupid for not being able to change your own timing belt.
Most car owners know how to drive, put gas in, and maybe change their own oil, points, and plugs, but could not tell a fuel injection system from a leaf spring. They are not stupid, they just expect their car to work, and rely on professionals when it doesn't. This gives them time to focus on areas where their actual talents lie (be it programming, waitressing, or whatever).
The same goes with Joe Average computer user, or at least it should. In the early days of the automobile, cars were for serious hobbyists only, who could field strip their entire engine, and most of them belonged to automotive clubs that resemble the User Groups of the 70's, 80's and 90's. It remained like this right up through the 1920's.
Over the last ten or fifteen years, the computer industry has slowly begun to creep out of that stage. In the future, there will still be "hot rodders" and professionals, but most computer users will be just that... users.
No musician or playwright or stockbroker or whatever should ever be expected to know how to "fix" a computer that has crashed. They should be able to do their jobs without knowing how to modify a kernel or even how to configure a DSL router. It's just a tool! You should not need to know how it works just to use it, any more than you need to know how to build a small gas motor just to mow your lawn!
It is a failure of the entire tech industry that we are still not at that point, and Apple has done more than any single company to try to get us there.
(Wow... That is the first time I have ever been worked up enough about anything to actually post in bold. Blood-pressure check time, I think.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
No one is paying licensing fees for Linux Distros. They get their money by selling installation and system support for their products. If you indeed are literate, read the handbook of your local Linux distro. By buying it in a store you're entitled to X amount of customer service support. In many cases they outsource their customer service to a company that specializes in telephone support or they pay a few techs to do it. They are making alot more from support than they are spending. These companies also have large stock valuations and have a good deal of money backing them. Redhat didn't make a billion dollars last year, they sold a billion dollars worth of stock to investors.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
No one is really carrying the Darwin mirrors, Apple isn't threatening mirrors of an open codebase with legal issues. Too many programmers see Apple as passe and are reluctant to put it up on their file servers. Darwin was opened with the intent of developers getting better intrinsic knowlege of the new operating system and to foster non-Mac developers to get into the act. Windows 2000 development is moving rather slowly because in many ways its core is radically different than 98, people used to working with 98 need to relearn all their performance tricks. This is the same as the difference between OS 9 and X, you've got a radically different structure but instead of printing a plethora of reference books to teach people about the new core they are letting developers actually see and play with the core in order to see where it can go and what it can do.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
That makes sense from an end-user point of view, and that is fine, but as far as i'm concerned, end-users can go nibble a knob-end.
You could not have made his point any better than this.
Gavin Fischer
I couldn't agree more about the apps using common system libraries. That's one of the things that makes X so configurable. But that sort of hacking is just the kind of thing that Apple is going to discourage, because it breaks the consistency of the user interface. Not for you (all of your widgets have the "click, there it is" hack and you are expecting it) but the next person to sit down at your machine is going to be confused by it. Apple really isn't interested in any reconfiguration of the GUI; their look-n-feel is supposed to be sacred.
Hopefully Mac OS X can help Apple get away from this, by storing each user's configuration separately. This doesn't help if someone else needs to use your machine while you are still logged in, but it might be a fair compromise.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Heh heh... and maybe I should follow a few links about how to remember to close your HTML tags... like the /. preview button, perhaps.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Yea, and I know an old wisened electronics tech (c) who has destroyed a Unix partition.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
Will you PLEASE stop posting on macintosh-related subjects until you have actually USED A MACINTOSH or at least become aquainted with the community? And i don't mean "use" as in "i looked at a website on the imac kiosk at the mall, and there were some LC2s with At Ease in my high school"-- i mean become familiar to some degree with the mac and the culture behind it. Note I'm not saying you should actually do this and be a mac user-- i'm just saying you shouldn't post on things unless you know something about the subject other than predjudices and things you've inferred from commercials.
:P
This is nothing less than the most ignorant post i have ever seen on slashdot. Shame on you, and shame on the moderators.
The hood is not welded shut on the mac. If your anology would be that the hood can open but there are no user-servicable parts underneath it, you would be closer, but still wrong.
(The original one-piece macs were welded shut, but not anymore. Apple has been getting better and better over time about this. The G4, which i am typing on, is the easiest case i have ever seen to get into. My previous mac, a 7200, was a far more "open" case than most of the heavy-metal screw-infested PC tower cases i've seen. NOTE TO PEOPLE WHO WILL TAKE ANY EXCUSE TO FLAME: i realize this parenthesis is not in ANY WAY RELEVANT and that the "welded shut" case was an anology. Please do not take my mention of computer cases to imply that i believe the post being replied to was talking about computer cases.)
Go to http://www.apple.com/developer/, read through it, and tell me the mac os is closed up. There are PDFs there describing how to do more or less anything you could possibly want to do, as well as all the free developer tools you need. Yes, that includes a compiler. Want to know how to change the behavior of menus in the mac os, or to make a subtle change in some appearance feature, or write a program that does something low-level and dodgy involving TCP/IP? Use those PDFs. They're free. Want to know how to do it in windows? Well, you will have to pay microsoft an awful lot of money first for those MSDN cds..
Do you know what an extention is, or what it can do, or how it works? Do you know what opendoc was, until market forces killed it? I have seen an unbelievable amount of just sheerly wierd hacking, of just low-level playing around, on the macintosh that is in no way parallelled in windows, is probably not possible in windows, and apple almost always gives some mechanism for doing that-- and if not, someone will find one. There have been cases where apple has not been flexible, and the mac users have simply flowed around it in a way that does not fit with your statement about mac users being naturally non-curious. If something enters into the mac os, someone will try to get it to work in a nonstandard way. I'm not going to give any examples, but i could. I just don't feel like spending time going and trying to locate old URLs and shareware apps just because someone posted a stupid comment on slashdot and got a score:5. But they are there, they are very much there,and whether you want to believe this is true or not, the mechanisms for allowing flexibility and an infinite degree of user control were provided by apple.
Is apple perfect? No. Does apple put as much emphasis on openness and flexibility as they should? No. Is any apple product near the openness and flexibility of linux? Of course not. But there is no way you can compare them to microsoft unless you know literally nothing more than the fact that they are the only people who sell their hardware platform.
They don't give the LinuxPPC people as much guidance as they should. They refused to go and take on the huge task of documenting everything about how to write an OS for their hardware for free just so Be wouldn't have to figure it out themselves. Steve Jobs is not a terribly likable person. This does not make them closed in anywhere near the sense most of the posts in this article take for granted. They aren't always as helpful as they could be; not all the mac os parts are particularly servicable.
But the processor is on a little daughtercard that comes right out, and the rest is relatively standard and replacable. You can upgrade these things, believe it or not. The first linux to run on a mac was created in a project funded by apple (mklinux). There is a free, open-source OS written by apple which uses most of the bsd code base but contains all of the low levels of Mac OS X. I'm pretty certain it will be possible and legal to pull out the darwin core of Mac OS X and replace it with your own, which is pretty damn open even if there's a propeitary window manager and APIs on top of it. Apple may not facilitate or make easier this action, but still it will be possible and i'm going to do it, dammit
And how the hell can you claim apple has "closed hardware", or tries to prevent anyone from figuring out its hardware, when they make publicly available the source code to the hardware compatibility layer on their flagship product?? Even if you don't trust the APSL enough to use any code under it, there is no law i am aware of to prevent you from doing some simple clean-rooming and writing your own specs on How To Write An OS For Apple Hardware.
From all reports, Mac OS X contains the same theme architecture as the current mac os, so it seems that people will be still able to micromanage their interface. (keep in mind apple is the most unpredictable force on earth, and this could obviously change, and they could obviosuly do all kinds of evil things that we don't forsee.) Yes, aqua looks pretty welded shut, but that doesn't matter; if you think that all of us are going to actually put up with aqua, you know even less than i had assumed. It will _not_ be long after OSX's release before a way to completely dismantle aqua is found without harming Quartz, even if that way isn't sanctioned by apple. The current theme architecture, by the way, which is far more powerful than any other theming or skinning scheme ever made, is completely undocumented. This seems like a pretty closed-minded and irritating thing for apple to do, and it is. But before you go and claim this proves your point, keep in mind that there is nothing whatsoever keeping apple from removing or disabling the themes; there's no reason for the os to still allow you to change themes except for the fact apple secretly doesn't mind. This is the way pretty much everything apple does goes; they don't fling open the doors and welcome you in and _help_ you, but they still leave the back window unlocked; apple never acts to make these things impossible, even when they don't act to make them easier. And if you do attempt to go around them and do something you don't want to do, they don't smack you down or anything. The two big instances of apple closing up something and making it inflexible are sherlock 2 and quicktime 4, which are nasty. But do you have _any_ idea how many interface hacks exist for those two, or any idea how many people had downloaded the sherlock 2 interface-fixing hacks within a day of OS 9 being out?
You'll make a lot of noise about apple killing clone makers, but the fact is apple simply had no choice: they couldn't financially survive with a bunch of people out there selling the same product as them, only better because they could spend the money apple spends on R&D on improving their products. Apple's market share wasn't big enough to do this.
But before you say the PPC platform is closed, remember this: there is literally nothing stopping you from getting a loan and starting a small business and creating and selling a PPC motherboard, or even putting it in a case with a hard drive and a power supply and some other nice things and installing a homebrew linuxppc on it. And once you have it working, i'm sure that it would not be THAT difficult to hack some compatibility layer together to make mac os 9 boot on it. OS X should be even easier, just swap out your mach. But that doesn't matter since you don't want to run the mac OS anyway, do you?
Yes, apple is the only company selling PPC computers. How is this apple's fault any more than it is your fault for not making them yourself? Apple's not welcoming anyone to PPC, but they aren't driving them off either, and the crucial "not driving off" distinction is what makes any references to antitrust law stupid. [Not that that stops slashdot posters, though.]
I am always surprised by the degree to which what little rational content slashdot has disappears completely whenever apple gets invlved, but the discussion in this article is just.. rather extreme.
Believe it or not, there are people who use Macintoshes and/or the Mac OS because it is the best tool for the job, or because the interface is efficient enough it's a fair trade-off with the stability of a *n?x. Just because apple sells computers with colored cases does not mean that everyone, or even the majority of the people, who buy apples are people who base their computer decision on the color of the case. I realize that by implying the previous sentance to be possible, i am going against many firmly held beliefs of many slashdotters, but this thread has me so disgusted i don't care anymore.
I apologize if this post is a bit incendentiary; i realize i will look as if i am overreacting, and i probably am. I'm pretty sure i'm going to regret posting this, but i suspect someone, somewhere, will listen. Understand the parent post is not the only post i'm replying to here, and this one, as are a lot of others, are just as much what this long, unfocused sprawl of a post are directed at. I'm afraid you'll take my lack of conflicting evidence to conclude i'm being a one-sided zealot. I'm sorry. Apple has their bad side, there are bad parts i'm not going into. But those bad parts are inseconsequential in the end in my opinion, and i'm too tired to go into them, and there's no more room for them anyway.
I would like to request anyone reading this post try to actually look at what i'm saying in order to see if there's any truth in it, and try to understand it, not decide after the first couple lines that i'm wrong and then look for ways to use the fact this post is disproportionately long and most of it can be easily interpreted as fanatical pro-mac posturing to attack me. Or else take one small passage which is off-base or badly written and conclude that invalidates everything. Or complain about my run-on sentances, or something.
Ehh, whatever. I hate slashdot..
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
BZZZT! Sorry, wrong answer. Do hope you have better luck next time. Look up MPW, it's on Apple's developer site somewhere.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
All I can say is, better to let Linux have The One Ring than Apple. :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Actually priests of the bazaar is true. If Alan or Linus doesn't like a patch, it is not going in. They are preserving the orthodoxy of the kernel.
The fact that there are multiple GUI systems just proves his point. There is no unified user interface on Linux.
So, Ok, I'm going to stop bothering to argue with this article, because I see that the viewpoint from which it was written is so different and foreign to me that there's no point in it.
Actually, that IS the point. The viewpoint is very different. Many open-source advocates don't realize that their philosophy isn't appropriate everywhere, all the time.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
The ultimate goal of any software developer should be to put themselves out of business. Ideally, a program should do what it set out to do, be as fast & small as it can be, and be bug-free. Once this is done you are out of business, that program is done and you move on. In reality there will always be some sort of maintenance work: a new bug, a new port, some small new feature - but substantially the program is done. I'd say vi is substantially done - and I love vi.
This is the same goal I have for medical doctors - stamp out disease and your pretty much out of business (except for broken bones, car accidents, etc.) This is a good thing. This is ideal.
Free software programmers are this way (I think). Create a program. Do it well. Move on. The commercial programmer, however, is a different beast. He doesn't want to be *done* with a program. He doesn't want to be out of business. He want to add some new features and sell me an upgrade (and change the file format so I have to buy it). He's the type that would withhold the cure for the flu to protect the inoculation business. He is the Mac programmer described in the MacOpinion article. Is he making it *easier* for the user by adding features and changing things around? I don't think he is doing his customers a service at all.
(In fairness to both Apple and Microsoft, Linux GUIs are pretty awkward in comparison to both, though the latest version of GNOME has come a long damn way.)
Personally, I think interface consistency is overrated. Some common elements -- mostly editing keystrokes and window management features -- are highly desirable, but beyond that, who cares? No matter how weird a program is, you'll get used to it pretty quickly if you use it much, and if you don't use it much, it's going to be awkward and unfamiliar anyway. UI consistency issues mostly touch on superficial functionality, anyway -- how much common functionality is there between Adobe Illustrator and Microsoft Excel? Not much. And would I really want to use Adobe's swiss-army-knife color picker in Excel?
The real promise of Linux GUIs -- as opposed to the one-size-fits-all approach favored by Apple and Microsoft -- is that we will eventually have a common default interface that we can customize the holy living crap out of. And that's my biggest complaint with Apple's philosophy, which is that all users shall conform to the same UI, rather than having the UI conform to individual users.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Wow... i need to pour this beer on my monitor so it doesn't combust from displaying this thread!
Nothing like a good flame war...
"There is a diminishing return on caution."
Then why don't they say that they'll release any source code after (say) 3-6 years. That's 3-6 years where they can be proprietary all they want and by the time they release it, it'll be obsolete and nearly worthless commercially.
That would be a hedge against abandonware and worth a LOT in the public-relations standpoint.
I don't mind closed source proprietary software as much as I dislike closed source proprietary software that will remain that way in perpetuity.
How many people would like to look at the origional PACMAN source? Or at the DR-DOS source? Or at a game AI algorithm. (I once spent several afternoons trying to figure out 'how they did that'. Hard with no source.)
Hell, what wouldn't I do to see the source code for Future Crew's Unreal2 demo!!
That's what makes me sad is that companies hold on to everything, no matter how commercially worthless it might be and never want to give it up. If Apple truly wanted to support the free software/open source community, then why not offer to release their code GPL in 4 or 5 years? Releasing it GPL will keep most of the sharks at bay. Microsoft (for example) won't want to glob chunks of it because they'd be forced to release their software too.
Perhaps you were completely ignoring the one about the APIs, then. Yes, it's true. The "Inside Macintosh" series has kept ALL Mac OS APIs documented for nearly 15 years. Just because you can't read the source code doesn't mean that it's a closed system. At least you know what all the functional interfaces are and what they do is well documented. God forbid you actually have to use MSDN to figure out how to do something in Windows.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The ability of the open sourced desktops and such things that live on top of X to compete with Windows has little to do with the quality of the development model and more to due with the fact that Windows spent a good portion of their GUI development period experiementing. Not only does Microsoft have the interface to worry about they have the entire graphics system to work on along with the kernel and underlying programs and code. Not only does Microsoft have more to do but the people writing GNOME and KDE have been living in the GUI world for years and have had the fortune to have learned from the mistakes of other GUI developers. You're dangerously short sighted and bordering on ignorance. Open or closed source, if programmers only have to worry about a small section of the overall product, they will produce a bit better of a product than people that don't have the luxury of focus. You also compare graphics libraries to overal ease of use. Widgets and text rendering have shit to do with the ease of a system. When someone can plug in a bit of hardware and run an installation program and have the OS see the hardware, it is then easy to use. When someone buys hardware and has to figure out which kernel module to load or how exactly to configure their product, then your system is not easy to use.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Maybe modelled after was too strong a word. But I'd be surprised to hear they chose Cutler to head the project just because he was a snappy dresser.
Best new white rapper since Pimp Daddy Welfare... Pimp-T!
Ever replace a library on accident or have the wrong permissions on a directory or file? Linux is quite easy to break. The kernel may still run and you might be able to log in remotely but most people don't have or don't know how to use such an ability. Windows can and is as stable as Linux as long as you properly manage it. If you are dumb enough to install libraries that break apps then you deserve the pain it causes. The registry can be your friend if you don't go and break it yourself. The stability of the system is up to the people programming the software you run, Microsoft isn't responsible for some idiot installing old easily broken DLLs.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
How hard is that to figure out? Don't you think if I wanted to call you a troll, I would have replied directly to your message? Think a little.
I was talking about TWR, the troll who posted an inflamatory comment, then flamed everybody who replied to him for a while. First he totally refuted what you said, claiming that hypercard is better than anything available for Apple ][ or other systems at the time, then he flamed someone who disagreed, refuting himself and claiming that hypercard is only good for toys. What else do you call a person like that?
I looked at his user account, and he barely had any comments. I've seen a lot of this lately: brand new user accounts trolling, then getting moderated up.
What I've said is true: the trolls are organized with their own discussion groups, they are getting moderated up more than they used to, and many moderators are abandoning the system because there's a bunch of trolls meta-modding stuff "unfair" by default (which costs karma, which means eventually ending up posting at -1). That they are conspiring to fill slashdot discussions with garbage is unquestionable. I think the possibility that a conspiracy exists to acquire a large number of moderator-level accounts, with which to promote trolls to the same level as the best serious posts, must be taken seriously.
They already have the capability to flood discussions at low scores so it's a total waste of time to read low-score posts, do you want them to be able to flood with high-score posts and totally destroy slashdot?
The author states: "Perl itself is a testimony to the OpenSource mindset - it's a gruesome mishmash of inconsistent syntax and function calls - definitely a product designed by committee - but one wherein each member clearly wasn't listening to anyone else." This is completely off the mark for at least two reasons: 1) Lots of Open Source advocates (myself included) don't even like or use perl, preferring cleaner languages like python to do the same tasks. The author seems to think that if you advocate Open Source software, you must necessarily like baroque, confusing tools. There is that subset of the OS community, but it doesn't represent all of us, and IMO that subset is becoming smaller. 2) I see no evidence that perl was ever "designed by committee" unless the existence of perl newsgroups which Larry Wall reads and whose opinion is considered before changing the language counts as a committee. The author makes some good points, but he should check his facts first.
That's fantastic. I knew that Borland released older versions of their DOS C compiler (it's a really nice compiler, too, IMHO), but I wasn't aware that Symantec had followed suit for the Mac.
-Waldo
I think he misses the strength of his own argument (or, rather, the strength of the premise of his argument): a company which makes software and makes money by selling service (customer support and the like) for that software implicitly agrees that the software is not easy enough to use that a manual is sufficient -- or sufficiently well built that it expensive support contracts are unnecessary. (Without that implicit agreement, the company has no business model at all.)
Some people will say this is true of all software, but I don't believe it. I think it's true of all software developed with the current, horrible development practices of pretty much every software menufacturer in the world. But it certainly doesn't have to be that bad.
I wasn't just bitching -- I really am glad that you mentioned it. I've already downloaded it, and I'll start playing with it. I'm spoiled by gcc, but what the hell, why not? :)
-Waldo
Did I hit some buttons, or something? Maybe you don't work with enough people, or something, but all the non-geeks I introduce to linux, even the ones that want to learn, get blown away by the difference. Right now, linux isn't for everyone. To say otherwise is WOEFULLY ignorant.
Bringing linux to the masses as we know it isn't going to happen. Redhat is way to hard for for the average schmuck to keep running. SURE there are exceptions, but in my personal experience, when I try to get people using it, they get put off by the command line, sure you don't need it for everything, but linux just isn't there yet for the average joe, and I have no desire in making it more friendly for the average joe. I develop to make my life as a programmer and unix user easier.
"If I don't want Linux to be mainstream, why am I doing this?"
Did you even read my post? I am doing this because I am sick of an operating system that is unstable and fundamentially is no longer meant for myself as a market target. (Specifically, windows. DOS was a good OS!)
I don't tell everyone it's the best model. Hell, I pay my bills and stay off the street developing embedded propietrary code for a telecommunications company. In short, I do what is good for my target market - ME - technically oriented programmers.
RE Helixcode, Grandma can't even handle the windows update web page. Don't fool yourself. Linux will be ready for the mainstream eventually, but it won't be the linux I use, because to make a mainstream version you need to remove the power I have over the machine - the power to fubar it beyond repair.
..don't panic
BTW, for your 'detailed description', read this Windows2000 Magazine article.
Best new white rapper since Pimp Daddy Welfare... Pimp-T!
Sure, not everyone is submitting patches, but they have that option. I think what the original poster meant was that Linux came about because of a desire to learn; it was not intended to be an OS for grandma. That doesn't mean it can't be, though.
I think this just gets back to something that Mac/Windows users can never seem to comprehend: Unix is very minimalist; it doesn't hold your hand. It gives you the ability to do things and you are expected to be able to do them yourself.
Interface is quite important when you are in the business of selling software. You reduce your number of potential customers if people are confused by your product. Linus, the kernel developers and the FSF aren't selling anything.
The OP has no misconception at all. It's that too many people are shouting that Linux is some kind of cure-all OS. It's not.
--
I hate to post a 'me too' reply, but... me too.
I've never understood the love for the Mac that one sees in some parts of the Open Source community. Apple is everything Open Source isn't: expensive, closed-standard, proprietary, treat-the-user-like-an-idiot, and against choice. Windows at least runs on top of open hardware standards. Apple is less successful than Microsoft in part because they are even more greedy, controlling, and closed than MS.
I bailed on Apple when the Mac came out with its one-true-wayism that eschewed the hacker and the hobbyist. Nothing has changed since Apple's big comeback -- unless your idea of "innovation" is case design and a new UI skin. I can't say I'm interested in OS X, either -- why would I want a pseudo-open Unix crippled by Apple's inflexible GUI and proprietary hardware dependencies when there are not just one but several genuinely open free Unices that run on dozens of hardware platforms.
If I ever get an itch to buy an overpriced proprietary hardware platform for myself, I'll at least get a Sun.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
So it seems that the bottom line is that the open source advocates/evangelists are taking it a bit too seriously. Selling this open source model by appealing to logic appears to be on shaky ground. How about a slick marketing camgaign instead, with lots of slo-mo, leather, and hypnotic music.
Two clips on the front bezel need to be pushed up with a flat screwdriver, then the plastics can be removed. Then just a single screw holds the hd tray in.
Easy...when you know how...
ftp ://ftp.apple.com/developer/Tool_Chest/Core_Mac_OS_ Tools/MPW_etc./MPW-GM/MPW/
Looks like it's only good for 68K, and is overall pretty weak. (See Gavin Haines' 10/99 post to Info-Mac.) But it is, in fact, a free compiler.
-Waldo
>vintage PowerMac
No I haven't. I've only returned to Apple hardware since '99 (Yosimite G3). But pc's (that hp I had, and the Thinkpad I still have), of that vintage are equally difficult as you describe. And they haven't gotten much better since (this dell I use at work took 'bout 20 min for the IT guy to add ram).
I simply don't hold Steve Jobs, and the current Apple administration, responsible for the idiotic blunderings of gil amelio.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
If I'm not mistaken, your first two examples (NewsWatcher and NCSA Telnet) were only open-sourced after the authors found themselves no longer able (or willing) to update the software. This is in marked contrast to what is more commonly thought of as "Open Source", where the code is typically open right from the get-go (or very shortly thereafter).
This, I think, is the fundamental difference between Open Source on the Mac and everywhere else -- source release usually only happens when the original author "gives up." Look at Apple's GameSprockets -- they gave up on them, and opened them up. Ditto on the above packages, and some others that I recall from my Mac days.
Wherever there's a will, there's a motorway.
Except for the part where practically every app you install overwrites some DLL that came with Windows or another app - whether it's a newer version or not. With Linux, you have versioned libraries, so you can have different versions of the same library around to accomodate older apps. Also, Unix/Linux definitely assumes more knowledge on the part of the user, but you get an infinitely more flexible system. Macintosh is pretty much designed for dummies. (I'm sorry, but it's true...) Windows is supposed to be end-user-oriented, but with all the shortcomings it has, it's certainly not as user-friendly as it's billed.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
ESR's talk at MacHack has caused a lot of discussion, but surprisingly few of the issues raised in that session are getting talked about.
One of the most interesting comments made at machack was about the motivation for good user support, and it shows the different bias of the Mac community. ESR used the "most software company phone support sucks" argument as part of the basis for showing that the retail software market should really be a service market: if people paid for phone support directly rather than through a pricetag on software, phone support would be better.
Curiously, some mac developers turned this argument on its head: the experience in the Mac community is that having good phone support which feeds back to product development makes a better product, which then drives sales. The point being that the entire organization, and not just the UI, is user-focussed.
Its just reinforcing the idea that there are different markets and different kinds of software and different kinds of users. Its no surprise that OSS fits some niches and doesn't fit others.
- Olof
...or the mistakes...
Some people, like Richard Stallman, have always tried to keep a bit of this spirit alive - admittedly, it must be like fighting uphill in an avalanche. But it wasn't until Linux that the OpenSource movement really kicked in.
So he doesn't even know that RMS doesn't think of himself as part of the 'Open source' movement...nor, apparently, that 'OpenSource' is a really cheesy-looking buzzword.
Eric Raymond's comments at MacHack were wonderfully telling in several ways. He criticised Mac programmers for being too focussed on user interface and criticised MacOS for intertwining the UI with system functionality, making it harder for new programmers to get on board writing MacOS apps.[....]Ironically, it's the focus on UI, perhaps taken to obsession, which gives MacOS its edge over... well, it has to be said this way - over all other OSes. Windows comes close, but misses simply because Windows developers really do not have that obsession to make the UI perfect. Linux and the various X-Window interfaces rarely even come close. The obsession with sticking to a standard behaviour means that MacOS users experience a consistency of behaviour that no other OS can offer (although again, Windows is getting closer - Linux is not even close).
Well, ESR is obviously right that Mackers can't tell the difference between the UI and the OS functionality because here (and elsewhere) Lewis himself keeps conflating UI and OS. The 'inconsistencies' between (not necessarily within various WMs have nothing at all to do with the underlying OS!
I've found a third-party commercial addon that will do it by dynamically messing with the kernel, but that is hardly an acceptable way of doing it
k CommSvcs/OpenTransport/opentran sport.html
e nTransport/OT2.6/Open_Tra nsport_SDK_2.6.img.bin
/dev/null /dev/null /dev/console
The *NIX admin in me shudders at the thought of this as well; however, this is not harmful in the Mac environment(if the developer is careful), and is quite common practice. Since the Mac, for better or worse, has never had unprotected memory, it's a common practice to patch the OS to make it behave differently from the way that Apple designed it. Apple built this ability into the Mac OS from the day it was first built. INITs & CDEVs (or Extensions and Control Panels as they've been known since System 7) have been available to customize your computer in multitudes of ways. Everything from patching the Disc Eject routine to play a vomiting sound when ejecting a disc, to useful things like changing the Menu names to being little Icons that didn't take up as much space, or putting a clock into your menubar.
Don't want to rely on someone else's utility to edit your MTU, why not write your own?
Here's your API Documentation:
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macos8/Networ
Here's the Open Transport (the Mac's TCP/IP stack) SDK & Example Code: ftp://ftp.apple.com/developer/Development_Kits/Op
Here's a good introduction to Mac Programming:
http://www.mactech.com/Macintosh-C/
Pesky bugs annoying you? Here are a few debuggers:
http://developer.apple.com/tools/debugg ers/
Oh, and here's your free (Gratis) Compiler:
http://developer.apple.com/tools/mpw-to ols/
It can be done.
flames >
"mac suck" >
Intelligent content >
Some people have said that Darwin shows Apple is committed to opensource and that the APSL is an opensource license. My question is if Darwin is so open where are the mirror ftp sites of the Darwin source code. One time I thought I might play with Darwin a bit, but first the Apple site required a bunch of registration hoops. Then when I got through that I found downloading was incredibly slow from the Apple site. That is no suprise since it is the only place Darwin can be downloaded. I looked around and found that while and found mainly broken or no longer maintained mirrors of Darwin. I have read the APSL and it doesn't seem to restrict mirroring the source. Now the question is are there no mirrors because of a lack of interest of the opensource community in Darwin, or is Apple forcing mirrors down with legal threats, which would seem to be baseless? There are those that would complain about mozilla's lack of outside developers and therefore not really a community project, but I would say the whole Darwin situation is much worse and much run in a much less open manner. Even Beos is mirrored all over and it isn't even open source. There are a couple of things I would love to see happen.
1) A Darwin based distro for PPC and X86 with XFree and Gnome/KDE, mirrored all over and available from places like Cheapbytes.
2) PPC G3 and/or G4 based systems built on IBM's reference motherboard loaded with Linux or the Darwin based distro.
I know the second one is less likely to happen at least in a consumer price range, but the first could happen if developers take an interest and if Apple doesn't make life diffcult by arguing about restrictions to Darwin's distribution which just aren't there in the APSL.
His first mistake is taking the harshest zealotry and attributing it to the entire open source world. He seems to think that the open source movement wants all software to be open source (OS) and free and that there is no room in the OS philosophy for proprietary software. I think that the more moderate advocates will agree that there is a place for both OS software and proprietary software.
Aside from that, I think he makes some very good points. Software should take the users needs into account and user interface should be a major concern. UI is one of the things (maybe the only thing) that the macs do right(I use a mac, but with MkLinux). I think he is wrong to say that since the decisions about proprietary software are controlled by the market that they are more in tune with what the user wants. If that were true, Windows and Macintosh systems wouldn't crash every time an application went down. We also would not have the horrendous planned obolesence upgrade cycle we've got. Proprietary software is made to make money, which doesn't necessarily mean that the consumer is getting what he wants.
Check out AbiWord.
Whoops, submitted too early.
Raymond touts the stability of Linux as proof of the OpenSource concept, but that's a bit misleading. The core of Linux was written by one person - Linus Torvalds. Moreover, there is a small group who shepherds the contributions to the kernel to keep it stable and clean. In other words, there's a priesthood at the top of the bazaar. If you check into each successful OpenSource project, you see the same thing: a small group of referees who filter the input and weed out the bad ideas. The bazaar has cops. The chaos is contained.
ESR certainly does NOT fail to mention this, as tC&tB readers will remember. As a matter of fact, he makes a very clear point that someone who throws a too-incomplete project into the bazaar will not raise any developer interest to speak of. I am getting the feeling that Lewis has heard of tC&tB as ESR's paean to the OSS movement. But I don't think he's actually read it.
When you get a company the size of Apple or Microsoft, you have thousands of developers who do peer review of code. You have the referees who determine what goes in to a product and what doesn't... but they have one thing that the OpenSource method doesn't: they have markets to answer to. [...]See, when commercial developers create a product, they start by trying to solve a problem that customers need solved. The focus is always on the customer. What do they need? What do they want (which isn't always the same thing :)?[...]
Again: he hasn't read ESR's paper. If he had he would know that the OSS core 'market' is developers, both as developers, but also as users. What's more, plain ol' users are more and more being taken into account, AbiWord being an oft-cited but worthy example (hey, it saved my bacon once).
While Raymond cites Doom as an example of a product which revived itself by going OpenSource, he conveniently forgets that Doom was a very successful commercial product for a long time - both as shareware and commercialware.
No he didn't forget that. He spent like a 'graph and a half explaining that DOOM 'revived' itself as OSS after losing its... [wait for it..] long-lived commercial success!Ironically, when commercial developers release applications which are clearly not 100%, we accuse them of forcing the customer to be beta testers, but in a sense, OpenSource assumes you're not only going to be a tester; you're going to be a programmer and fix the bug!
No. Both commercial and OSS projects, to some extent, use users as beta testers. OSS projects allow those users who are also programmers to contribute to the integrity and quality of the product.
As for comparing bug counts - at least Microsoft has a bug count. If Raymond had bothered to check the number, he'd have found that a rather large proportion of the 63,000 bugs are cosmetic - and none were considered 'showstoppers'. We don't even have a way to determine the real bug count for Linux since there's no central repository for this sort of information.
Perhaps not. There's no central Linux, tough concept for this Macker to wrap his head around. But there are distributions. Debian has a bug log, RedHat has one, I imagine the others do too
Well, that's all I care to find. YMMV. God, I hate stupid people.
Last line is great! As a programmer, I'm distressed when I hear other programmers going nuts about people who can't program.
I agree that yelling at people who don't know how to program is a bad thing, but I can understand the root of that frustration that causes those people to yell. The fact that there is this expectation for people to be stupid and to cater to that expectation is sickening.
The fact of the matter is that people just don't seem to care all that much about giving up their creative birthright--they want to live their lives out seated on a couch in front of the TV, being told what to think and what to believe. These are the kind of people that Microsoft and Apple are catering to under the guise of 'making computers easy to use.' Personally, I think that computers are too difficult to use. And I know that the solution to that problem isn't going to come from any entity whose bottom line is to make money. Creativity and innovation will never come from that, except by accident.
I also agree with the idea that, "this is working for me now." Even as a programmer, OS programming doesn't interest me that much. I don't want to spend a lot of time monkeying with my OS if I don't have to. I want to pull it out of a box, install it and forget about it.
Good luck doing that with any Microsoft OS. Or MacOS for that matter. One of the reasons that linux exists at all is precisely because you can't pull a modern OS out of a box, install it, and forget about it.
One of the interesting "pluses" about Linux and BSD is that it admits the programmers and developers are flawed. It allows for the end-user, if sufficiently skilled and motivated, to fix their own problem. However, this "plus" comes at a cost. It is achieved by allowing nearly anyone to come up with a "solution" to a problem, and those "solutions" are included in the distributions based on the fact that they reliably solve the problem -- and not on any other real criteria. This results in a total system that lacks consistency and eligance. While each component may be exceedingly well crafted (and in my experience this is not the case - there's a ton of cruft and outright crap in most ditriubtions!) the total system is neither. It is a huge conglomeration of kludges, patches and work-arounds. That it can be made to appear "stable" is an amazing testimony to the skill of the administrators who run it, and the programmers and developers who have produced all those necessary "temporary" fixes. It is also a huge indictment of the various platforms that compete for the server and desktop market. However, it is NOT a characteristic of a good design. A computer is a tool. An OS is a central and critical element of that tool. It determines if the tool will be able to be used successfully and by whom it will be used. Imagine if you could buy a hammer but it didn't come with a handle - you had to craft your own! That is the current "state of the art" Linux desktop. Here's all the components you need to make a computer that will be usable - now get busy and build an interface for your users!! Even in "server land" there are "users" to satisfy and most of them are not technical people. IS managers, product managers, etc., all need to be able to look at information about the system, but are precluded from doing so in a conistent, coherent manner. Linux is a great system, from the point of view of it is UNIX taken to its highest level. But sadly, UNIX is not a great system. Lots of great systems ideas are there, but it is not well designed and well integrated. There are shining examples of good total systems out there -- in the mainframe world, MACs, to some extent BeOS . . . and the hacker culture dispises them for all the reasons hackers hate those sorts of things . . .their hard to program, their closed, it's hard to break . . . But guess what folks -- the USERS want a system that is hard to break! Users don't want a system that requires every new product addition has to be carefully considered in case it breaks existing stuff -- they want to run their software, get their information, and get on with their lives. Right now UNIX rules the roost because there isn't a well designed system out there that has tackled the complexity of inter-networked computing and tried to build a solid orthogonal system aimed at that market. Moreover, the cost of doing that task correctly is going to be huge. Until some company or government does that, the network world will be ruled by UNIX because that is the platform that allows the lowest level access to produce kludges to problems that shouldn't exist on a well designed totoal SYSTEM to begin with. That UNIX is great at that tasks is something to cheer about, but we shouldnt' forget that it is a necessary evil. and we shouldn't be confussed into thinking it is a good thing (tm).
Mac users catch as much flak as they do not because they aren't usually programmers, but because of the smarmy Apple ueber alles attitude that Guy Kawasaki and his ilk have engendered. Amiga users had the same attitude problem, and it was so extreme that I suspect that it was at least a contributory factor in the demise of the Amiga.
(And yes, I realize that there is a contingent of Linux users who do the same damn thing. And the prospect that they might kill Linux by associating it with asinine script kiddies scares the hell out of me.)
I'm okay with people using Macs as long as they don't bug me endlessly about how I should switch platforms. Linux is "working for me now", which is something Macs can't possibly do for me in much the same way that Linux is not (at least not yet) ready to work out of the box for the average musician or designer.
Real progress would be for the vast majority of all users on all platforms to support their platforms by dumping all their rancor on their particular platform's obnoxious advocates. Strident Mac advocates are the worst enemies of the Mac, and the same applies to other platform bigots. You play with your toys, and I'll play with mine.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Codewarrior became pervasive as a development tool for building serious applications, and with that, the death of open source for the Mac.
The bottom line is that it is just too damned hard to port most stuff to the MacOS, simply because there is no infrastructure for porting (and then maintaining the port). For example, the most recent port of GCC to MacOS is ancient, and from that comes obstacles to maintain anything else in the OSS community.
The lack of a solid command line environment is only partially an explanation -- MPW is free (at least now it is), and could have been a springboard for free development. But we just never had the technogeeks interested enough in these fundamental infrastructure tools to move forward.
Absent a compiler, makesystem and uniform libraries to use other code, there never was the critical mass to do serious builds of serious software. The absent of the serious stuff meant the benefit of OSS was never felt or perceived by MacTech community -- including those of us who live to breathe in U*ix on other platforms.
There needed to be a core of beautiful tools before a core of beautiful applications could be found. Build that (on any platform) and they will come.
MacOS X has this basis built-in. Perhaps things will change soon. Time will tell.
Some of the trolls have their own chat lines and such, where they discuss how to lower the signal-to-noise ratio.
I wonder how many of them, moderating each other up, and meta-moderating away all the decent moderators, it would take to ruin the system entirely.
--
-Elendale (However, first the programmers out there need to be interested...)
IANAT (I Am Not A Troll)
Need to get a 6X00 open? (6400, 6500 models)
while some have pointed out, its quite easy to take out the motherboard, there is a door on the back being held by 3 screws, which allow you to remove the motherboard, slides right out.
need to replace one of the drives?
No prob.
in the front of the comp, at the bottom, there are 2 tabs, which you can push in/up. it will loosen the front panel.
Depending on wether the cover has been removed previously, it will either pop right off, or it will still be kind of stuck.
If stuck, you can take a flathead crewdriver, and gently hold it against the side of the front bezel, about 4 or 5 inches up.
do that to both sides, and the bexel will pop right off, revealing the HD (mounted sideways to the left) the CD-ROM drive, and the floppy drive, and free bay for optional zip drive (standard 5 1/4 bay, just need the right bezel for a cd or any other device).
the only problem with that model case, comes if you somehow fuck up your IDE/SCSI/Floppy cables, then you are in some trouble..
to get to the housing assembly for the cables, you HAVE to completely disassemble the ENTIRE case and chassis, as the entire machine is built around that one part.
Hope this helps
-Joel
Stop over-analyzing your analizations
I think the author has given this issue some thught but I would like to add my two cents. Free software(the phrase "open source" has this sensitivity training feeling to me) may have little reason to improve it's products, but it miraculously has. Most prominent free software projects have dramatically improved. One reason may be WE ACUTALLY USE THIS STUFF. A lot of people use computers when they MUST, at work they type away, they learn what they have to to do their jobs. Where MAC and *NIX users are alike is that many of them like to use computers. Most Mac users I know have many more customizations than most of the Windows users I know. Some people seem to feel that Mac users are the least computer savvy users out there but I think on average they know the Mac far better than the average Windows user knows their computer. Linux users almost ALL have highly customized systems, and they know their computer FAR better than most Windows users. I agree that the user culture has much more influence over the direction of the platform than developer cultures but in the free software arena the two groups have more overlap. Mac programs and free software projects, at least in part, get better because the users care about and think about what they are doing, it isn't just a tool, it is a tool they depend on to do what they want, they will learn how to use it if that is the cost, but they want to use THAT tool. They are working on that platform because they chose it, not because it was on the desk when they got that job.
Insert pithy comment here.
> That attitude is a lot like a car mechanic saying you are stupid for not being able to change your own timing belt.
No, more like a car mechanic saying that you are stupid for not caring what a timing belt is, how much one costs, how long it takes to replace, what might cause it to break or etc. It's like saying that if you don't care enough to make the slightest effort to learn what you need to know in order to protect yourself, you deserve whatever you get.
The auto mechanic's trade has been under fire before in the mainstream for lying about the work done on cars, but nobody knows or even cares about the parallels in PC repair.
I'm currently having loads of fun with Objective-C. It is far easier to mess with than C++, but fundamentally more powerful at the same time.
Yep. Objective-C is much more powerful, and much-better designed, than C++.
There is no good reason why $_, @_, $@, etc. should be legal variable names in any language. They're pure nonsense. Why couldn't they be given more descriptive names? It wouldn't kill the power of the language, only reduce the ability to write incomprehensible statements. This is, of course, only a simple example.
And this is one of my biggest problems with the Mac, and MS-Windows, &c. There are good reasons for those variable names. There are also common aliases that are more descriptive. Perl is a great language for exactly this reason: there are simple, verbose ways of doing things; and there are terse, arcane ways of doing things. This is the difference between "See Dick Run" and "Cryptonomicon." Sure, you can start off simple; but the further you get, the more beautiful the language becomes. Perl can't help that there are poor programmers, anymore than the English language can help that there are poor writers.
Don't blame the language for the fault of the programmers.
The philosophy of the Mac (and of Apple in the post-Wozniak days) is to remove complexity and replace it with simplicity. Fine, except that complexity can be beautiful, and useful. An automatic transmission is simple to use, but I prefer a standard-- it's much more fun.
Both Gnome and KDE proscribe common keys for all actions, and provide a framework for doing the most common things. But programmers are not forced to follow them. Just as in Perl, the programmer is not forced to follow good programming practices. And just as Apple has thrown away their own programming style guide (for Quicktime 4.0, as one example), Gnome or KDE authors are free to ignore their respective style guides.
No, there is not a formula for calculating the simplicity to power ratio, but in my book, flexibility is directly proportional to power. And often, flexibility in design often requires flexibility of mind.
Just my tupence.
- Tony
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Exactly the opposite, actually. If all programs work the same way and use the same system-level APIs to do things, then, if that doesn't work for you as a user, you can find a hack that traps those standard system-level APIs and replaces them with something a little more to your liking. If each application does things their own way, then you, as a user, are up a creek if you want to make any system-wide changes.
A great example of this: say I'm working in a word processor and I want to import a graphic file to be included in my document. I find an option for "Insert Picture From File" or something similar, and it presents me with a listing of files. Now, I can see the folder the file is in in the background off to the side, but in order to get to it in the file I want in the dialog box, I'd have to navigate through an obnoxious directory hierarchy on a mounted network server (because that happens to be where I put the file). So I get a hack called "Click, there it is!" and now, while the dialog box is in front of me, just click the window in the background, and it does exactly what I want. And guess what? Because everything is standard, it works for all Open File dialog boxes, in all applications on the system!
Ugh, pressed for time, sorry this is rushed.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Yes, I know, no hard feelings. I was just fed up with seeing all these "no free compilers" and other clueless Apple-bashing sessions, and responded hotly to your post. And you, through no fault of your own, didn't know what I was referring to and found some obsolete version instead of the real thing. Sigh.
I haven't used MPW much, but I think you'll find it to be pretty similar to gcc. It even uses a Makefile-like syntax for complex programs.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Amelio probably deserves more credit than he's generally given, although probably not as much as he'd want to claim. He accomplished a lot of the turniquet stop-the-bleeding moves needed bring Apple from the brink. I'd say it's a fair assessement that Steve Jobs benefited considerably from the hard decisions that Amelio made before he left the company.
I believe there's a public beta version that fixes that error, and is otherwise stable. It should be available from the same place as the GM version.
I don't see any reason to even try MPW under DP4. DP4 comes with regular ol' unix shells and gcc, as well as Apple's MacOS X development tools.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
I see three kinds of responses:
1) "I agree"--no comment needed.
2) "The Mac case is easy to open". Ummm...yeah, that's relevant.
3) "The Mac breeds MORE curiosity". No, the Mac breeds more a more intense feeling of curiosity because you become determined to figure it out against all odds. But inevitably some things remain hidden from you, no matter how hard you search. This means that the curious and non-masochistic go somewhere else.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
It at least Newswatcher's case, you're severely mistaken. There were variants long before development on Newswatcher itself ceased. One of them, MT-Newswatcher added multi-threading.
Comparing the open source environment between Linux/BSD and the Mac (or Windows,Amiga etc.) is strongly in the apples/oranges style of idiocy. On the one hand you have an OS that for most of it's life was simply handed around and remained usable for only the brave and technically well-healed.
On the other you had shrinkwrapped consumer releases which evolved with conventional business strategies. Indeed one of the main source of tension within the Linux movements today is the conflict between the hardcore anarchistic crowd and the up and coming IPO's who are going to have to show serious profit RSN.
There's also the fact that these two communities developed very much in isolation. Eric Raymond is probably among many Linux advocates who've remained unaware of the existence of the Mac breed of hackers. The significance of the reception of his speech at MacHack 2000 proves that both groups can and do need to learn from each other.
Agreed. Linux is already a complete and total success for me, i.e., it lets me do what I want to do with a computer: tinker, write programs, pursue bizarre experiments of little interest to anyone else, etc. And it freed me from the tyranny of Richmond, which ever since Win95 had made me dislike my computer.
;-P
Commercial success for Linux would be nice, since that tends to attract developers, some of whom will write new free software, but hardly essential. The domination of the low-to-mid-range server market that we're approaching may be enough for that. But it's hardly necessary.
Will the day come when the current Mac crowd switches to Linux? I rather doubt it, and I don't care. Why should I? I've got what I always wanted right now.
Except adequate documentation. I'm not holding my breath on that one, though.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
On http://www.apple.com/developer or anywhere else. I've found a third-party commercial addon that will do it by dynamically messing with the kernel, but that is hardly an acceptable way of doing it. I have a Mac, I need the MTU changed and AFAIK _it_can't_be_done_.
OS 9 has the start of this. Multiple Users allows desktop customisations for each user as well as a shadow extension of the preferences folders for each one. Applications which support this like Internet Explorer will have unique preferences for each user.
MacOS (and Windows), however, has been a consumer-oriented system from the start. I know I complain about how closed MacOS is all the time. However, by hiding the insides, it is much easier for the non-computer people to use. And, the software is designed for this market.
So, in the end, I would believe that's why open source is such a bigger hit on *nix based systems - unlike the MacOS users, it is full of people who would love to innovate the software. I hardly believe the mIRC users on the christian chat would be as likely to innovate the SMB protocol, when they can barely get ICQ and Hotmail working. (and don't care at all.) =^)
-legolas
i've looked at love from both sides now. from win and lose, and still somehow...
Harrumph. Mac this, Mac that...if God had meant us to use Macs, we would have born with...uh...a love of snuggly, colorful case exteriors and a preference for not doing things the hard way!
--Everybody wants a rock to tie a piece of string around.--
"Because the MacOS was so well designed by Apple, [genuflects to Steve Jobs] it doesn't need any more software! YAY"
Some of my mac using friends sound like this.
Ok, ok, you're right. I should have posted a link.
Go to http://www.apple.com/developer, click on "tools" in the middle bottom of the page, then click "Macintosh Programmer's Workshop." That gets you to http://developer.apple.com/tools/mpw-to ols/.
MPW may not have a pretty integrated environment like CodeWarrior, but it gets the job done. It works on PowerPCs, it works under the latest OS releases, it can be used to build top-quality software. It also has a pretty decent command-line shell for those of you who like that sort of thing. (It's actually mandatory that you use it.) The free MrC and MrCpp compilers, which run under MPW, are considered by many to be the best optimizing PowerPC compilers in existance.
So, there you have it.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
An opinion from a Mac guy:
Most of the Mac people I know are artists, musicians and designers. In other words, not programmers. This is Apple's main market, and these folks probably couldn't care less about whether or not their programs have source code because they wouldn't know what to do with it even if it was available.
Me? I'm in with them: an HTML and graphics guy. I'm not a programmer by trade, but am enthusiastic about the Open Source movement as a whole. I have PHP3 installed on my server and will eventually figure it out because I want to make better Web pages. I'm also really looking forward to OS X to see what things like Apache will do for me.
I've used my share of OSes and platforms, and the current MacOS does what I want to right now. In the future, this may change, but I like what I have.
The general rancour I've seen from the so-called 'Open Source' community against people who aren't programmers will hardly lead the masses to the cause.
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
The usability issues of Linux originate from its unix heritage, not its free software development process. All of the usability argument made in the article apply equially well to Solaris, SCO, and other proprietary unixes. In comparison, the free software community, is well along the path of implementing and deploying the most real solutions for these issues in the history of unix-like systems, the most visible components of which are gnome, nautilus, and a number of X window managers.
Some people, like Richard Stallman, have always tried to keep a bit of this spirit alive - admittedly, it must be like fighting uphill in an avalanche.
what's with the verb tense? Stallman can be nothing but pleased at the linux revolution (yeah, yeah, I know Gnu...) and the way it has taken on a life of its own: linux is not an uphill fight. Linux is the avalanche.
So why hasn't it caught on on the Mac? Open source developers want to work on open source systems. With Linux and BSD (and running on Mac hardware too) why write code for the Mac? Damn things are needlessly more expensive anyway.
But this doesn't mean there will never be opensource on the Mac. Opensource has strong positive network externalities, and if it ever establishes a critical mass of code and coders on the Mac, it would prove to be a highly tenacious subculture that would begin to sweep aside commercial software just the way it's doing in the x86 world.
Twenty bucks says that you had a machine based on the Quadra 800 case. (e.g. Power Mac 8100, 9500, etc.) Man did that thing suck. But you should take a look at the current minitowers.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Actually, only Steve and his NeXT cronies ever really said that. Possibly because Gil let them take over the company that bought _them_ out.
Gil wasn't as bad as say, Spindler (who was not bad AFAIK in Europe but wasn't at all right for the big chair) but he wasn't stupid. He did good work beginning the turnaround. The Newt really took off under him, and he developed the prototypes of the current machines. An all in one translucent low-end machine and easy to open (nearly translucent - it was dropped at the last minute) minitowers.
I think my favorite was Mike Scott. Steve isn't the person I'd want to hold the keys either.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Have you ever seen the tools to open and old mac? In the words of one person, "it looks like you're about to perform open heart surgery." The insides of old macs are dangerous places. I know a bearded unix guru (tm) who was blown across a room by the picture tube in one. I recently broke the seal on my mac classic picture tube during a routine hard disk removal. Bummer. The point is that no programmers want a computer that they can't tinker with. The os is the same as the hardware.
I'm saying that just because a technique is proven doesn't make it good. The technique of chopping down a tree with a handmade copper axe probably got people by for 1000 years, so why invent a chainsaw?
Now, sit down and think about this sentence for a while: open source programmers make user interfaces for other programmers. Look at X and the bazillion of different toolkits, skins, themes and general crap. Compare that to the simple elegancy of MacOS where every app behaves the same way. Just throwing in Emacs or another similar application to a Mac user is likely to give a hurl of dislike, since it doesn't follow any Mac user interface guidelines at all.
Making Mac users enjoy open source software is therefore easy: make a user interface that is aimed at the user, not the underlying program model. That is - make applications that don't suck.
War is one of the most horrible things a human can be exposed to. And one of the worlds largest industries.
We can and We can cheaper. While some people may have the programming talent and free time to write an alternative to "expensive" software, the true motivation for open source is people being cheap. You're not interested in developing better software than what is commercially available, you're looking to develop and adequate replacement that is free.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
While I agree with alot of what was said in this article, the idea that there is no competition in the open source model is incorrect from my perspective. Each feature and each version of each feature is in constant competition with its peers.
Yes all the good and the bad are swept along for the ride, but from the perspective of the end-user (me) only the good are made easy to access, and given sufficient documentation. The bad are in there somewhere, but you have to know what you're looking for to find them.
This process isn't perfect: some of the bad is well documented and vice versa, but it is definitely a form of competition.
First jumps to mind, the Linux core kernel was /not/ written by one person (Linux), if one looks at current development, there are many, many developers that have contributed parts to the core. Rik van Riel and Andrea Arcangeli (plus John Quintela and many others) work on the VM subsystem. Alan Cox works on almost everything :) The statement that Linus wrote the whole core is total BS - there have been many many contributors.
...and never heard of Eazel.
That's not what he's saying. He's saying that Linux has 1-3 central decision makers who have all say over what goes into the system. You can liken Linus to the Pope of the Church of Linux with people like Viro and Cox being Archbishops. The fact is that unless you get the approval of a small number of individuals, your patch doesn't go in in a successful Open Source project. This is to prevent crappy code from getting in. This is identical to the way it works in commercial companies. In fact, from what I've read, this makes Linux far more cathedral-like than Microsoft. Read the link provided by this old Slashdot story for more on that. Maybe that explains the creeping featuritis in MS software.
Now, the GUI issues. Apparently, he has never used GNOME or KDE....
Maybe he has. At least, I've used GNOME extensively, though I've never touched KDE. If it's anything like CDE, though I have serious issues with it.
The standard GNOME configuration provided with Red Hat gives you all sorts of chances to customize yourself into a corner, but does extremely little to address the key GUI needs of improving workflow and providing usability guidance to the user. The help program provided is of little practical use in learning how to move around, and the extreme level of customizability means that you will very rarely have any level of consistency in the behavior of mouse-focus and clickable actions from machine to machine.
The latter means that a user must relearn how to navigate the system each time they sit down at a differently configured machine. In Human-Computer Interface classes, they teach you that this is bad. Linux tries real hard to improve Ease of Use, which is important for frequent power-users, but they do it at the expense of Ease of Learning, which is important for inexpert users.
The high level of customizability means that every user is an inexpert the first time they sit down at someone else's configuration. Most GNOME setups don't provide good tooltips or other forms of help to let you learn this new system. Due to a lack of standards in application design, what one user learns from learning to use one application rarely applies to another application. This is also known as Bad HCI.
Pick a few simple tasks. How do you set a background in Red Hat's GNOME setup? Do you do it in the GNOME Control Panel, or do you do it in Enlightenment's configuration? If you do it in both, which has precedence? This is redundant and confusing functionality. This is what results from having no overseeing architect for all areas of design.
How do you launch an application? Ah, ah. No cheating and using the command line. Do it with the GUI. Now launch an application that is not part of the standard setup in the GNOME start menu clone. Was that honestly intuitive the first time you tried to figure out how to do it?
Open a file someone gave you. Can you do it without having to know what application to load first?
These are simple, common tasks that GNOME does inadequately because of no central overseer in the design of the system.
Oh, you mean vaporware. Sure... That's an example of a working, consistent GUI for Linux users today.
Not only that, but he fails to remember the overall crappiness of elder GUI's.
Like what? Smalltalk-80? Windows 1.0-3.11? Hmmmm... X11?
Mac OS 9 is the leader in modern GUIs. Find me something superior. Honestly. The closest competitor is the BeOS. Nothing in the Unix world comes even close.
He fails to see the original purpose of Linux (just a toy??)
Yes. Just a toy. Linus was a grad student who created a hobby project to better familiarize himself with the 386 archetecture and to provide himself with a hobbyist Unix for his PC. That it grew into something greater is a happy accident. The desire for security, stability, and networking came from the desire to make it a better clone of Unix, a commercial system which had figured out these issues first.
This is the only right way to design a system...
This is not the only correct way to design a system. You must first understand your users, a task that many Linux projects, often started by young, inexperienced college students, fail at. The Mac OS was designed for ground up with a different goal. Usability. This kind of hubris that "my needs are everyone's needs" is one of the core problems with Linux getting a good UI.
To be honest, most of the Mac OS's current instability came from the introduction of extensions into the archetecture. This was an attempt to give developers more access to and control of the system. Well, that and some bad code that seemed to get introduced in System 7. Mac OS 8 and 9 have a far more solid core than many give credit for. There are some lingering design limitations that came from trying to cram functionality into 128K of memory. They are paying the price today for being too clever back then. Unix has had 30 years to straighten itself out in a variety of backwards compatibility shattering ways. (I don't even want to get into what AIX alone has done to drive developers to dementia.)
The problem is that Apple isn't willing to risk insecure and buggy code like Microsoft was. They might be able to make all of the current Carbon codebase modern while leaving the older function in place in the same manner that Win32 does with Win16 and DOS calls. They aren't going to do that, though.
Of course, our talented (ahem) writer fails to point out that there is a good reason that MacOS X is being built on top of a BSD kernel.
He assumes that it's known. However, do you think that Linux as whole could shift to running the monolithic kernel over a capabilities-based microkernel for improved security reasons? No. Apple can afford to make this radical change precisely because of the Cathedral style of development.
That completely doesn't diminish his point. The weakness of OSS is HCI, which is the Mac's strong point. The fact that RMS had the utter gall to tell developers that focusing on UI was wrong shows how little the Open Source and Free Software movements seem to understand the user base.
Nothing gets my goat more than someone telling me that a flaw in a piece of GPL'ed software is nothing bad because I could always fix it myself. That kind of condenscending attitude towards the user is what hurts OSS the most.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
This means Apple has found no interest in putting a command line in MacOS, this means Apple found that the user interface should be similar between applications (from all the Inside Macintosh series of book -- the developer books which describe how the OS works --, the only book which has been translated in nearly as many countries as Apple has developers in is "Interface Guidelines", which teachs developers how to write a good interface, how to spell the item, where to place buttons in dialogs, aso).
All that put together, quite no OpenSource developer was feeling the *need* to write OpenSource software on MacOS. Now, things may be changing with MacOS X, as the article suggest. Let's hope it will be the case, this is good for the entire community.
cwis, who ported BitchX to MacOS
>How is MacOS a good "total" system? The >hardware's generally fair to good, but the OS is >still in the stone age in many areas. It's got a >pretty UI, but coding for it is not as fun as >using it. Also, it's QUITE easy to break. Why? >No process-to-process protection - any process >can scribble all over another process's memory, >even the OS's memory. It uses cooperative >multitasking for apps - one app can take over >the CPU and never let it go, causing CPU >starvation. It still bears traces of its roots, >all the way back to the original System versions.
A good total system (like MacOS) is a system in that any program or piece of code can be added to the system without breaking stuff that's already installed or precluding the installation of something else.
A good total system has the philosophy of "For each application, only one executable, only one configuration file, and absolutely no shared code". You delete an application configuration file on a mac, a default configuration file is instantly regenerated the next time the program is run. You drag an entire application to the trash and delete it, nothing else gets messed up and the user doesn't get any "I'm sorry, it can't be done because some other program relies on this" (ala RPM). No "I'm sorry, you can't install the program because it conflicts with another program already installed" messages (again, ala RPM). Cooperative multitasking might be bad for a server OS, but for a consumer OS dynamic linked anything smacks of inferior design. Most end users are more afraid of something not working at all than something crashing. You have to code an OS for your target user and make engineering tradeoffs that will benefit the target user the most. In the case of average joe computer user, by statically linking everything, you make the engineering tradeoff of greater overhead/resource usage for added robustness of installation. Much like in the situation of coding a server OS, where tradeoff of greater overhead for robust memory management is understandable.
I think that unix community has constantly made the mistake of assuming that the only type of robustness that matters is runtime/stability robustness. There are many different types of strength.
One of the reasons linux is insanely popular with it's users is that it is an operating system developed for, and by, the developer mindset. I love linux because I can do absolutely whatever I want with it, to it, and for it, without anyone telling me "no you can't". Mac and Windows are operating systems for "Everyone" and their dog.. so of course, they're not designed for the hard-core segment of the market that founded this industry - the geeks!
The crux of this is that do we really want linux to be mainstream? I don't really think that people are working to make linux mainstream - sure, the installers are getting better. Sure, we have gnome, kde, berlin - but these are still made for and by developers and the hard-core, just those that want it to look prettier. People are working to make linux better, and that's what makes it great.
This article misses that very key point that in many cases, the users are the programmers. There's no great divide between the two like in the Mac world - I would hazard a guess that the majority of Mac users have never compiled a program. I would hazard a guess that the majority of linux users HAVE compiled a program before, and in many cases, I'd guess they've even compiled the kernel - the OS itself!
Windows is fine for some people, it's not fine for me. I don't develop in Linux for the windows sheep. I use linux because I want a powerful OS that lets me do what I want. There just happen to be a lot more people like that than Bill Gates things, and because a lot of those people are developers, the end result is a whole shebang of software and "nifty stuff".
The french have it right: To each their own. Those that want linux, will come. I don't plan on ramming linux down anyone's throat (although it might be fun to ram up another orfice of one or two CEOs.. *grin*)
..don't panic
One problem of bazaar-style open source on the Mac ist the lack of tools to support it. Yes, there are two decent CVS implementations. Both do not support SSH accesses to remote repositories. There is one (commercial) SSH client for the Mac that allows connection forwarding. That works if you can SSH into the machine that holds the CVS repository - does not work with SourceForge.
Another problem is that Mac projects usually contain binary files that change quite often (resources). CVS is great for merging text, not-so-great for binary files. Files with resources are a special problem, since they need to be flattened as MacBinary or BinHex files before CVS can manage them.
Generally, open source tools are to Un*x-centric; or the Mac development model is too different. I'm really looking forward to MacOS X, which should bring the two together nicely.
I know it's kinda late, but I just had to reply to this one...
As a former Mac fanatic and one who currently works on a Mac, I've got to say that this is the biggest load of crap that Steve Jobs ever threw at us. A computer can be beautiful, and it can be elegant, but that is not its purpose! Macs are pretty but they are an absolute pain in the butt sometimes, as are the users.
I bought in to the whole "rebellious individual" myth that Jobs loved to spew when hocking the Mac, but when you look at it just how much of an individual are you? An individual is defined by his uniqueness, and while you may have a bondi-blue chassis, you all have the same stupid software with the same crappy options on the inside. Example: Simpletext can't open big text files ("This document is too large to be opened by simpletext.") Why does it have this limit? Does simpletext really need some stupid dinky file size limit? Not really, but they built it in and you can't change anything there. So you use another text editor, but getting it to open it automatically requires altering each and every text file's creator code for the new app. That requires ResEdit (or a nifty droplet if you're so inclined) but there goes your user friendliness out the window simply because they hid a bunch of stuff.
Sure, the command line is ugly (although I think the look of the transparent terms alone got me to switch from Mac) it's damned effective. And if you want to put yourself up on a pedestal because you bought a new iMac and paid exorbant amounts of money for it, then be my guest. But that doesn't make you any more avante-garde than any of the other "legions of Mac Faithful" that all choose to use the same default OS theme and give up complete control of the machine to someone else.
If Mac users who want to really be "artistic rebels" then they can go and make their own rebellion by working on software that they actually want. If they are such a wonderfully avante-garde community with all this rebellious artistic insight, then perhaps they can take control of their own experience rather than let Steve Jobs and his iCronies hand the experience to them. True rebellion takes action. True art takes work. By stunting the user experience for the sake of simplicity, the Mac retards opportunity for both.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards." - Marcin
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
RMS isn't arguing that "the Open Source model isn't necessarily the best development model all of the time". RMS argues that free software is just *right*, and prohibiting sharing is, well, wrong. When people argue about these issues as if they are to be judged solely on their efficacy at producing software which doesn't suck, I understand better why RMS rejects the term "Open Source" altogether.
--
Xenu loves you!
First, let me ask you a question: if you make your living by selling service on software, what's the motivation to make the software as easy to operate and maintain as possible? The answer? Well - not much. And so we have Linux. Very powerful. Very flexible. Very hard for average computer users to configure and maintain.
Motivation to make software easy to use? How about "Nobody will use my software if it's too hard to operate?"
I was hoping for some genuine insights into views of Open Source from a Mac vantage, but I don't think it's a terribly insightful (or even realistic) view of the situation...
Macs, on the other hand, have not seen the fight we have. Their system has been handed down to them from Apple since it's inception. Mac users actually relied on their Momma company, to help protect them from the Microsofts of the world. They idly sat by and waited for new OS versions to come about, much as we did in the DOS days. The truth is, Mac is the long term result of a Microsoft monopoly. Users become so attached to the OS and hardware that they end up depending on them for future advances in the technology. When Microsoft had the chance, they took it, trying to get a foot in the door with Apple simply because Apple is what Microsoft wants to be.
The only way open source can be effectively acheieved on the Mac is for the Mac developers to come together and write, from scratch, a new OS. On the inverse, however, the result of doing so actually harms the company that supplies the hardware, so not many would want to do that either. So they are stuck in an endless cycle. They don't want to hurt the hand that feeds them hardware-wise, so they patiently sit and await the newest version of the OS.
Now, some might suggest that simply releasing source code makes something "open source". True, but on the Mac side, what benefit is there? On the Linux side, we all work for the common goal of developing a free computing world. This is a big goal - but it *is* working. If the Mac world were free, the company would go bankrupt, and there goes your next hardware upgrade.
The author seems to be assuming that every OS is targeted to the same market segment. With that line of rational, if Linux is trying to hit the same people as Mac, then yeah, it's doing pretty poor. But Mac is a near-total flop for a person who wants to tinker, build, destroy, and improve without shelling out for proprietary courses. I think that is the big issue right now with Linux, and its one that gets dodged in this article. Where is the platform headed? Is is to remain in the domain of servers and cool projects for tech hobbyists? Is there even that much interest in the community in targeting slapping a Linux box on every grandma's desktop on the planet? Mac does great at the market it has already picked out for itself. MS does the same, by and large (yeah, the irritate the hell out of me sometimes, and fall on their face, but so does everything else, once in a while). Linux is unique among these in that it has not clearly defined where it is going to sit in the OS world. A lot of people want to keep it as a hobbyists machine; lots of power, lots of experimentation, and more work for the end user. Some elements (especially the commercial distibutors) would like to see it become more of a business player, or a Joe & Jane home-user desktop product. No one knows right now. The criticisms in this article definately have some substance to them. I just wonder if some of them are based on the wrong criteria- like saying that a 12-gauge shot gun is a poor tool for making caserole.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
I've heard this point made before. "People just want to be able to use a computer, without having to read 10 thousand page manuals or go through 6 months of training - it's just a tool to them!" Yes, it's a tool, but the problem is the traditional "tool" perspective doesn't work with a computer.
If you have a knife, or a screwdriver, hammer, etc., it has a SIMPLE purpose. It's designed to do one specific thing and do it well. (You can probably substitute one tool for another in certain circumstances, but that's not necessarily a good idea.) I'm sure the medical prototype device you were referring to, also, had a pretty specific purpose. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)
A general-purpose computer can't be thought of in the same way, however, due to its nature. It's a multifaceted beast - it can do a myriad of things, but to get it to do any of them well, you have to have some mastery of the machine. You need to know how to tell it, specifically, what it is you want it to do, and how you want it done. Yes, with little or no training and a pretty GUI to guide, a user can probably do some tasks, using the computer, and do them decently. But they'll never be able to do them well, without being able to actively engage the computer and understand how it works well enough to communicate to it what you want.
Just MHO, but that's simply my take on why you HAVE to be willing to learn to use a computer, and why the "just a tool" mentality is all wrong.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
The other day I took a hammer to the thing for shits and giggles and could barely get the case to open.
Uh, I believe the point of these discussions was to illustrate why the Mac has had a small open source community. Comparing them in "the apples/oranges style of idiocy," as you put it, is merely a way of showing how far apart the camps are.
As an aside, I saw mentioned in other places many different variations on NewsWatcher and other open-sourced programs -- Mac open source seems to want to fork before it wants to integrate. Why have all these separate versions, each of which has some added functionality? Why not integrate them into a "official" release? There is either a lack of organization, or a lack of cooperation amongst the authors...
I don't see what your point was comparing the distribution strategies -- clarify, if you can. I agree that both groups do have things to share and need to learn from each other. And indeed, the two groups have, for the most part, evolved separately, but I don't see that as the main reason behind the Mac's small open source community.
(And, BTW, I sense an implication that I am somehow a Linux zealot. Please don't try that -- I develop software for Windows, use Linux as a hobby, and used to write Mac software in academia. I'd like to think that I am, if not totally unbiased, then at least somewhat informed about all three.)
Wherever there's a will, there's a motorway.
But they'll never be able to do them well, without being able to actively engage the computer and understand how it works well enough to communicate to it what you want.
Even Macintosh people don't deny this.
However, there are two questions which begs to be asked. First, by redesigning the application around some simple (and consistant) user interface guidelines, how much functionality can be bring out to the casual user? Second, how can we design the application so that when a user decides to actively engage the software to better use it and understand how it works, can we provide a better roadmap and a better experience without frustraiting the user?
These two questions have nothing to do with having a pretty graphical user interface. What they have to do with is having a good human/computer interface, where the human is in direct control, and where the computer does not frustrate the user either by attempting to take control from what the programmer thought was a Luser (that cursed Microsoft paperclip comes to mind), or where the computer leaves the user hanging with some obscure "?SN#31192@coref3.c: operation cannot be completed" error message.
In order to make a user's experience better, programmers have to remember a few things. Casually dismissing these points runs the risk of making your software difficult to use--and as any Macintosh programmer will tell you, making your software difficult to use because you're too lazy to consider the users (NOT "lusers") is not elitism--it's just plain laziness.
1) The human is in charge. Don't grab the mouse pointer from him/her, or interrupt the input process with "helpful hints" or otherwise assume the user is trying to do something.
This means no "modes"--that is, don't force the human to walk through some sort of "maze" of program states which seem obvious to the (lazy) programmer but which is counterintuitive to the user. (In fact, if the only "mode" your program has is a modal dialog box saying "I'm broken--sorry", that's best.)
And this means providing some form of "undo" to the user who was just playing around with your program.
2) Make the often used features "obvious". Setting a font in a word processor should not be accomplished by hitting "Control+Alt+F3", which is "clearly documented" on page 172 of the manual, as a side note marked "unimportant."
This also means don't make the interface of your program inconsistant with other programs on the same platform. For example, setting the font on the Macintosh should be accomplished by having a "font" menu--this is part of the UI guidelines, and every other application on the Macintosh that makes setting the font a major feature (like word processors) do the same thing.
And this means eliminating unnecessary clutter--which is just a great way of hiding stuff in the open. Keep the design clean, though permit the user to dive down into the complexity if the user chooses. (That is, if part of your application permits the user to drop into an editor to edit the underlying perl scripts that drive your application, great! But don't force them to edit a perl script if they don't need to.)
These two rules are not rocket science. They're just good rules of thumb. Unfortunately, most Linux programmers and many Windows programmers seem to share two opinions which are contrary to these rather simple rules of thumb.
First, many programmers confuse power with obfustication.
And second, many programmers view users as "lusers," only worthy of their contempt and not worthy of their time or effort.
These two attitudes do not fly well in the Macintosh developer community.
Also, he keeps talking about "customers". Hey, the developers *are* the customers.
I think you're missing the point that he's making. Developers aren't the only customers. RMS's little tidbits about how the Mac community has a problem because they focus too much on the end-user is what angered a number of Mac developers for whom the end-user is all important. Coding for developers encourages you to take the lazy mindset, "It was hard for me to code, and it should be hard for you to use."
Lack of competition in Open Source?
Again with the missing of the point. He was saying that OSS doesn't really have live-or-die competition. If you have enough of a devoted niche following, your little program can live forever without a need for usability improvements to attract new users. Your followers are experts from the early days and don't need such "candy-coating." Even if you give it up, they could let it continue. This is a weakness as well as a major strength.
You can pry the shell from my cold dead fingers!
I'll just mention that the shell will still be available for Unix diehards. You can use it in the same way you currently seem to be using it, in a big, resource-hogging GUI session. I just hope it doesn't encourage lazy programmers to force normal users to drop down to it like UNIX commonly does.
Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds! I like my crazy Enlightenment UI with custom flaming chrome skulls with eyes that light up when you move the mouse over them instead of a little "x" to close a window! I don't want any boring Mac UI that some UI drone dreamed up! But then I'm a unix guy, not a Mac guy.
Consistency is necessary for quick workflow and ease of learning. When you make someone a newbie everytime they sit down at or new machine or make them waste time fiddling with controls until it becomes useable for them, you have stolen productivity from them. Your emphasis on the chrome of your system shows how much you focus on the style and not the substance of good HCI. Of course, you're a UNIX guy, not a Mac guy.
A good UI should let the user carry their knowledge of one app over to another. This is why consistency is a good and necessary thing. The obsession with "theming" in modern Linux apps shows how little the developers understand about getting the HCI right the first time. Spray painting a rotting chocolate cake brown doesn't make it fresh and edible. If the core functionality is screwed up, no amount of tying bows and ribbons around it is going to make it good.
Ok, I'm going to stop bothering to argue with this article, because I see that the viewpoint from which it was written is so different and foreign to me that there's no point in it.
Now we're back at the original author's point. The idea that the Open Source model applies to everything is false. A system founded on principles of good HCI can't really work with a hundred conflicting egos ignoring one another and breaking all consistency. Good HCI requires good centralized software engineering. Since most OSS projects started out as hacks, there has been little recognition of the value of good software engineering in the OSS world. Mac developers recognize it and don't want to be told to give it up.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The article got me thinking about a few points:
1) how many people actually look at and suggest improvements for the Linux kernel (honest question, I have no idea) who are _qualified_ to make informed suggestions (by this I mean just not counting the crap that must get mixed into the list)? How does that compare to the number of personell at microsoft plus all their serious beta testers. I would guess it would be larger, but by how much?
2)As far as putting customers first, I think Linux has come a long way in this regard. I purchased the distro I did because it was already set up with the features and add ons that _I_ wanted. In fact, Linux users have an advantage here (at least, the moderately educated ones do) in that different distributions seem to be geared toward different user types, rather than the windows one-size-fits-all (ok, two sizes - secure and unsecure, workstaion and server, ok 4 sizes *grin*) model
The author lost me in the middle somewhere, where apple specifically got dropped from the discussion somewhere, but it seems that Apple (once the mac came) was always a different kind of company in that they made _everything_ proprietary, down to the fonts on the keyboard. They didn't distinguish between hardware and software at all in their marketing, at least when the macs started.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. Mac has been successful being closed in a niche market, but it seems to be shrinking as other machines can now do the publishing and imaging that only macs could do.
Of course I use Microsoft. Setting up a stable unix network is no challenge
good point
The MacOS system and attitude feels to me like a marketing concept, a billboard...a tool to provide Apple Computer with revenue.
Well, isn't that basically what it is? The OS is made simply to complement their hardware. Apple is, after all, a hardware company. They're definitely not making THAT much money from the OS...
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Well, this article, though appearing smart from the outside, is yet another grossly uninformed peice of semiFUD. /not/ written by one person (Linux), if one looks at current development, there are many, many developers that have contributed parts to the core. Rik van Riel and Andrea Arcangeli (plus John Quintela and many others) work on the VM subsystem. Alan Cox works on almost everything :) The statement that Linus wrote the whole core is total BS - there have been many many contributors.
First jumps to mind, the Linux core kernel was
Secondly, the "priests over the bazaar" statement is BS as well. RMS never suggested that there should be no control over the development process by project leaders, etc... And this would not be priests - these would be individual operators standing at their tables, and choosing which suggestions and contributions to take. Total bull.
Now, the GUI issues. Apparently, he has never used GNOME or KDE, and never heard of Eazel. Not only that, but he fails to remember the overall crappiness of elder GUI's.
He fails to see the original purpose of Linux (just a toy??) and does not point out that it has it's priorities straight : a rock-hard core built for security, stability, and networking, and GUI's, etc... on top of that. This is the only right way to design a system - what good is a GUI that crashes a lot (i.e. MacOS 8? MacOS 7? MacOS 9?)
Of course, our talented (ahem) writer fails to point out that there is a good reason that MacOS X is being built on top of a BSD kernel. Why? For the same reasons that I stated above - MacOS 7-8-9, etc... did not have a solid core.
Probably because, as someone else noted, to Mac users the application is completely engendered in the GUI. If it doesn't have a pretty GUI, it's probably not worth using, in their estimation. Whereas Linux users (I for one) don't necessarily care as much about a pretty GUI - the app's value is in if it fulfills a need. If it has a GUI, it should be functional, and looking decent is a nice side benefit. To us, a command-line is very useful because that's the kind of system we want - it allows us to use apps and utilities as components to accomplish something. (Whatever that may be.) Whereas with most Mac users, it has to be simple. A command-line is ugly, and it has no pictures. It's not simple, so it's simply not worth doing.
It's all in the mentality of the user, man.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
What a stupid piece of FUD.
The author claims that Open Source projects get their stability from their minimalism--and constantly uses Perl as an example of what is wrong with Open Source projects.
In the meantime, the Mac has to be the most minimal, sparse, stupid, unusable machine. It can be as friendly as a frickin' perky Walmart greeter--that doesn't help you when the only buttons you have to choose from are "Ok" and "Less Options"!
I mean, really, the Mac only has one (annoying!) widget toolkit, it doesn't know what a "console" is; if you want a shell, you have to get some third-party GUI app! And if something goes wrong... uh-oh, it's a cute little bomb, and you didn't restart your mac properly, did you? Silly user, it's all your fault.
Now I admit, a lot has probably changed on the Mac in the few years since I've been avoiding it, but I'm sure that whatever the Mac people come up with next, it will annoy me just as much; except possibly MacOS X. Since they were doomed to reinvent UNIX anyhow, at least they cribbed some notes.
Now, the other side. The strengths and weaknesses of Perl are that it tries to be all things to all people. Perl can be programmed in many different styles, and none of them are "right", because TMTOWTDI. You can program it in an object-oriented, C++ looking fashion, you can make it look like C, or shell script, or even in Scheme if you squint at it a bit. (car, cdr and cons are trivial to impelement; always use references to get closures; always use references and closures to implement functions...) It has native support for the C libraries, native implementations of many handy shell commands, and an enormous number of add-ons.
So does it have a consistent, clean syntax? Well, yeah, if you're used to C, shell, C++, Scheme, and Java. Rather, say that it has a rich history, and it isn't designed for minimalists. However, if they use a little self-discipline, I'm sure that Mac people could write their Perl just like C, or maybe Pascal, with a few little hacks. They wouldn't get the power of Perl, but they can feel superior in their artificially clean syntax.
I don't really see the point to it, though; it all compiles to the same code at the end, and you should be able to write it however you want. Why should a company force you to do it just one way if you don't want to? You are the customer, after all. Could there perhaps be a big button on the Mac that says "More Options", or even better, "Don't treat me like a frickin' moron"? I'd rather write my own code than make my living selling condescension.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
The article states that in big companies there are thousands of developers who peer review each others code. Am I the only one who finds this absurd? When I was at Motorola we had reviews and inspections (of design docs and code and testplans), but it was in a group of 3 to 5 who sat in a meeting.
There may have been thousdands of people doing similar things but no more than 5 people ever looked at what I was doing.
Of course we weren't developing for the consumer but I doubt that things are too much different elsewhere. Am I wrong?
Wow.
/. community) want everything to be open, RMS (and another huge group of /.ers) want everything to be Free. The real world is far more nuanced than that, for better or for worse.
Finally, a lucid explanation of how the Open Source model isn't necessarily the best development model all of the time. It generally makes a lot of sense, and there are a lot of things it's well-suited to, but the points made in this article are valid and real.
Commercial software is typically designed for the simple purpose of making money. Not to make the world a better place, and not to do "something cool for the community" in order to satisfy egos. It's written to provide a useful program that pays the salaries of the people involved. Sure, there's exceptions, but that's the basic gist of it.
That said, what Apple has done is finally come up with a model by which they can exchange something with the community (Darwin), and yet maintain what they feel is their proprietary asset (the consistency of the Mac UI "experience" so they can sell more Macs and make more money for the employees and stockholders. Even though I'd like a little more from them, I'll settle for this. I have Apple stock - I don't want anybody to be able to make a Mac (which is possible when it's all open), but I do want people to be able to take advantage of some of the cool stuff Apple's done to improve other products and systems. It's a decent compromise.
Not every program benefits from Open Source, either, though many do. I love Bungie and Id's giving away old game code to help jumpstart programmers and projects, but you don't see any of them opening up their latest and greatest engines, either. That's because the latest engine is something they can earn money licensing - they leave money on the table if they give the latest stuff away. But at least they share something, if not everything. Corel Linux may be open, but Corel WordPerfect isn't, and never will be, I bet. Companies need revenue somewhere, and unless you're in the systems support business, if you give away razors you need to be able to sell blades. The only reallt open commercial office suite, for instance, is StarOffice. But Sun isn't using StarOffice to make money - they're using it to try and sell Sun equipment and they're giving it away because it may help them towards that goal and because Scott McNealy has a personal vendetta against Bill Gates (but who doesn't?). StarOffice is a razor, and Sun workstations and servers (and their little bitty SunRays) are the blades in this scenario.
I think that the Mac overall will do just fine with no more Open Source contact than they have right now - but I would like to see more. Some programs will benefit from being opened, some will not. People like ESR (and a lot of the
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
How long have you been waiting to use that title, Taco? :-)
--
>from the worst.
Are you SURE about he's held in higher regard than spindler?
It may have been just another legend to spawn from Silicon Valley, as so many are wont to do (especially legends regarding Apple), but...
I'm almost SURE that I have read SOMEWHERE, that amelio is held in such low regard, after having so totally proven his blundering incompetence at Apple, that his name has been adopted as the unit of measure on a "stupidity scale"... as in a person/thing/project is as stupid as a certian multiple of amelio's own stupidity...
for example...
"m$ bob? now that product is at LEAST two gils stupid"
or
"You actually BOUGHT bob??? jeeze, you are four gils stupid!!!"
(using bob as an example that even the most rabid microdrone can agree was a DUMB idea)
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
There ain't no free (beer) compiler for us Mac users.
-W
It does make sense that average users are going to want a consistant (read "enforced") user interface so they can instantly know how to use any given piece of software. That makes sense from an end-user point of view, and that is fine, but as far as i'm concerned, end-users can go nibble a knob-end.
I don't think non market-driven (read "not developed by big companies") open source software will be ready for those people any time soon, because those people are a pain to deal with, and programmers for the most part (at least these days) work on open source projects in their spare time, and to feed themselves and make rent they usually work for some evil corporation that writes software to please those users, and when they have to unwind at the end of the day, they write software that is relaxing and sane, and reverts to their idealistic dream of how simple it used to be back when they were first learning and had the docrtine of "Input->Processing->Output" drilled into their head, before all of this horrible "event-driven concurrent multithreaded bla bla bla..." stuff, all to support an essentially single threaded task on a single processor machine just so that some pissant user can click on stuff to vent their impatience while something happens from their last click.
That rant being said, I am happy with the idea that users can continue to pay people like Macintosh to wrap all actual functionality in a standardized UI, and programmers can continue to do things more efficiently by using their unglamourous and cryptic tools.
I also think that the GUI revolution is part of why users feel so clueless, and don't learn to program anymore. Somebody asked me to walk them through creating a hello world under windows the other day. I had to stop and think, either we go with simple C win32 thing, but to print text we have to jump through all these hoops, etc... and then the person will expect it to work like a teletype window, when actually they have to write that themselves, or aside from that, we can go use a MFC control for that, but that is it's whole other set of headaches. When i learned (c. 1987) things were _much_ simpler, and the bridge one had to cross from user to novice programmer was quite small. Nowadays, under a modern GUI-only OS, you have to pay several hundered dollars for a compiler/degger/editor suite, then you have to work your way through several textbook sized tomes just to make a simple GUI app with no functionality other than the GUI. It's a lot tougher now.
Just some thoughts.
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
Have you looked at a new Mac lately? The Powerbooks, iBooks, G3s and G4s all open elegantly - the keyboards pop out making the guts of the portables accessible and the towers have *Doors!*
We're not talking about old macs, anymore - Apple dropped support of most their old hardware for a reason: the times of Gil Amelio produced some pretty bad stuff.
The OS Is the same as the hardware, eh? Have you read *any* of the OS X/OS X Server stuff posted lately? Surely you don't believe that... remember we're not talking about the Mac or the MacOS of old, but of the new Macs and OS being produced now... OS X and a G4 are very hackable.
I may be a bit of a zealot, but I find it odd that your attack isn't on the current state of the Mac, but of the past while you try to insinuate that the current arguments elsewhere (about the current Mac) don't hold because of your experience with phased out hardware.
Really, that's just plain silly.
Mac/*nix SysAdmin
Big surprise. Mac people don't like linux all that much and think the UI sucks.
Also, he keeps talking about "customers". Hey, the developers *are* the customers. Of course linux is made for developers, of course linux isn't what the typical Mac user would like.
Also, linux didn't "pop up arouund 1995", it's a rewrite of unix. Unix has been around a lot longer than any of the OSes he mentioned.
Lack of competition in Open Source? How about KDE vs. Gnome? Look at all the linux distros out there! Look at (for example) all the ICQ clients.
I don't see a lack of competition. The example he cites as having no competition? Perl. Ok, what about Python? What about Tcl? What about good old
And here's a great one:
"They're [Apple] bringing UI consistency to the 'Wild West' and making a UI a required part of the Unix experience. Old time Unix fans will find this unpleasent and even undesirable.
"undesirable" does not begin to describe how repugnant I find this idea. You can pry the shell from my cold dead fingers! Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds! I like my crazy Enlightenment UI with custom flaming chrome skulls with eyes that light up when you move the mouse over them instead of a little "x" to close a window! I don't want any boring Mac UI that some UI drone dreamed up! But then I'm a unix guy, not a Mac guy.
So, Ok, I'm going to stop bothering to argue with this article, because I see that the viewpoint from which it was written is so different and foreign to me that there's no point in it. If most people like computers such as the Mac, then let most people buy them. Most people can also go out and buy albums by the backstreet boys. I'll stick with my old-time unix and my old-time heavy metal.
Bang the head that doesn't bang!
Just beacuse someone cannot program, does not make him or her unintelligent. I know many doctors, lawyers, and professional musicians, all of who I would call "smart" but none of them can program nor do they care....
That which does not kill you, makes you stronger.
Something to think sbout, perhaps?
I'm convinced the whole OSS movement will inevitably fail. It has its own demise built right into it..As more and more people begin to realize the somewhat disturbing truth about things (ie. people are making money off what you've done, and advancing their careers off YOUR hard work, while you get nothing) the whole system will slowly grind to a halt and fail.
By the time that happens, fortunes will have already been made, and the ones who corrupted the process by introducing greed into the equation will have already moved on to something else.
OSS only works when the primary motivation of its participants is fun. When that motivation goes from fun to *greed*, the whole process begins a slow and irreversible decay as more and more people refuse to play along. Thats my $0.02..If I didnt believe it, I wouldnt have typed it.
Fresh out of the yoke,
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
As a mac advocate, I can definatly tell you what the issue at hand is...
I'll probably get modded down for speaking out against the open source comunity, but I definately think that open source is just too obtuse. The Macintosh people are avant-garde, when it comes down to it, and it's going to be damned near impossible to break it to them that they are going to have to use clunky, ugly software! Open source programmers simply have not been able to make an intuitive, good-looking interface, and it's not going to happen anytime soon. Unless the open-source community really starts to work out their issues with making user-friendly programs, it's going to be just about impossible to ever get through to the artistic rebels that the Macintosh is going to.
Just my 2 cents
Dusty Hodges
A Macintosh user has the audacity to lecture the linux faithful on its fanaticism. Jeff Lewis may not be a zealot himself, but the Mac tribe he belongs to is legendary for its loyalty and its fanaticism. Having been a member of both the linux and Mac tribes, I can understand both forms of fanaticism, and in fact they have a lot in common. Sure, the technical details are different, but it's never really been the details that make a fanatic. It's the big picture, and in the big picture both Mac users and linux users are still on the outside looking in. I know it's oversimplifying somewhat, but in my experience it's being on the outside, on the fringe, on the margin, part of the minority that tends to drive both kinds of fanatics. The technical details may be different, but I don't see all that much difference between the fanatics of both tribes. (The merely loyal, though may be very different.)
--Jim
It's f'ing amazing to me that it's impossible to carry on lucid and thought out discussion on the relative merits of open source versus any other model.
It has become so typical to see the guys in these forums react this way such that an end-user focused OS must suck because users suck and supporting them is too much work. Apparently, the slashdot crown lives only in server closets and never venture out.
Heck, surely these self same people are annoyed that their own mothers can't send them email because computers are too hard to use.
Really, there are merits to everything. I use a Macintosh for the things that it's good at, I also heavily make use of linux/unix boxes both as servers and workhorses. I wouldn't trade either one for the other since both have strengths. The very idea that open source has brought us tools as strong as Photoshop and Illustrator and Freehand is ludicrous. If I don't have time to write a decent illustration tool then I can't have on linux. And I don't buy the idea that the GIMP even comes close to Photoshop in real utility, it's a silly comparison. (something that will no doubt get me flamed)
All that said, it's unfortunate that the open source community or more accurately based on the posts replying to this piece open source mob can't be challenged with the idea that linux can't and won't be a panacea for all computing needs. It's also sad to see commentary that is so self centered and insular that anything that you might not need is of no value.
Very sad, really.
the times of Gil Amelio produced some pretty bad stuff
Actually, most of the closed Macs came out during the John Scully or Michael Spindler eras, not the Gil Amelio era. Amelio was basically brought in as a hatchet man to trim Apple down. The bad thing under his era was that very little of anything new came out.
You might want to take a look at http://developer.apple.com/tools/. A complete development available for free download has been available for awhile and the Metrowerks compilers were playing catch up to them until just recently.
The articles misses the big driving factor for Open Source development. He states that there is none because OS is not driven by the monetary economy. While I think OS may actually be more monetarily efficient in the long run, he missed the driving factor behind Open Source.
Open Source developers are driven by pride. If you create or maintain an OS project, this is something you can take pride in. This is important because while you can make lots of money from producing a crappy product, you cannot take much pride in it when everyone can see how crappy it really is. This pride aspect actually drive OS creators to make better software more than money ever could.
He also states that OS programmers tend to write small efficient codes that do exactly what they need very well. Somehow he sees this as a disadvantage. When does bloated code become a selling point?
So far I've gotten all my Karma from telling people they are wrong... :)
Sarcasm, my friend. In the late 70's, everyone was sharing code, it was a small group of people. And along comes Bill Gates, and starts selling it. It was unprecedented, thats all.
Ham on rye, hold the mayo please.
thelocust[dot]org
His closing argument appears to be that since OS X is an improved GUI on top of BSD, it is the wave of the future.
Does anybody else remember a custom GUI, not compatible with X, that ran on top of a Unix you could not get a handle on. In fact, the machines were sold without a floppy drive.
Sound familiar? The NeXT was a very sexy machine, but it was so restrictive it was hard to use. Later on Steve Jobs had to break down and add a floppy and X-compatibility.
I would love to see the Mac turn into a new NeXT, but let's not carry on the tradition of closed systems--both software and hardware--that drove his last product into the ground.
Yeah. And I'll bet little woodland sprites come to turn back the corners of your bedcovers every morning, too.
If there's one thing that working in the computer industry has taught me, it's this: the most common problem with IT projects, whether they're web sites, custom software development, or COTS software, is not paying attention to what's going to be best for the customer.
Or, viewed the other way: the problem with most IT projects is that they're based either on what the programmer thinks would be useful in a product, or what the (potentially non-technical) customer is capable of articulating. Armed with what may be a faulty conception of the problem, a programming team is almost certainly doomed to failure. For example: I'm sure that the folks at Microsoft had the best interests of the casual user at heart when the put that goddamn "Clippy" into MS Word, but when was the last time you heard anyone say, "Thank God for Clippy, the demonic fucking paper clip?"
Of course, lots of people may disagree with me. But face it, anyone who really likes Clippy, especially in the default Word configuration, is plainly on crack. How can you trust the judgement of such a person? ;)
Incidentally: I think that this is the secret weapon of the whole Open Source raft of software. I use the phrase "direct consumer" to refer to people who must directly interact with a piece of software, as opposed to merely taking advantage of a service provided by it. A webmaster/sysadmin, for example, is a direct consumer of Apache, while web site visitors are not. The direct consumers of the most successful pieces of open source software are techies. The authors are techies. The whole thing has worked so well because if there's one group of people techies know how to design for, it's other techies. Thus, in this arena, the deck is stacked in OSS' favor right from the start.
I am unhappy with the way in which this author discusses PERL, a language that I believe is very useful and above all else, fun...
I can understand this person's annoyance with tools and computer applications that take a great deal of energy simply to learn and understand...He is obviously an end user who believes in the mythical standards of "elegance" and an authoritative notion of what is correct in terms of programming language syntax.
I find PERL to be amazingly elegant, at times very concise, and above all else, unbelievably useful. To me, it is a triumph of Open Source ideas. The MacOS system and attitude feels to me like a marketing concept, a billboard...a tool to provide Apple Computer with revenue.
The cathedral rarely gives me control over my computer, but it does often makes me sit through advertisements when i boot up!!!...
What the heck?.....BIOTECH!
Have you ever seen the tools to open and old mac?
It's called a Torx bit, size 10 or 15, IIRC. And there's a tool called a "case cracker", but you can substitute a screwdriver or knife blade.
If you do open an old Mac (128, 512, 512kE), you'll see the signatures of everyone at Apple who helped create it, embossed on the inside of the cover. I always thought that was pretty cool.
Really, you don't have to be McGuyver to open up an old Mac.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
well duh! i opened mine! :)
To me what seems to be the centerpoint of this article is how Open Source doesn't work for the end user. Macs are touted as being 'designed for' the end user who has no interest in coding/debugging etc. but simply want good software that's easy to use. Thus the commercial, closed source, model needs to be used to develop this kind of software.
Sounds to me to be very circular logic. Mac is not Open Sourced because Mac users are closed source. Mac users are closed source, because Mac is not Open Sourced.
I think both sides may be missing the real point. As ESR said in The Magic Cauldron Open Source business practices need to be service oriented. Mr Lewis is of the opinion that this will breed even less friendly software. Why? Because programmers are lazy? Because they're greedy?
Mr. Lewis is correct though--the future of software design is ease of use; something Mac has in spades. It is also service oriented, which is what Linux has in spades. Maybe OS-X will actually combine these into what I think might be the holy grail of operating systems, but I doubt it.
The Open Source movement has visionaries--Eric s. Raymond, Linus Torvalds, RMS. Now what the movement needs are some visionaries who can implement the paradigm shift in the IT industry itself, on a business level. It's coming, but if you don't 'get it' from the user's angle, you may be left behind.
Just my thoughts.
Beware the Whyte Wolf.
With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels...
Is there an organized troll program to moderate each other up so they can screw up /. more than they already do?
Well the logic board wasn't that hard to tinker with. Just look at the SE series and all the hacks made to it.
As far as shocks you should realize that anytime you open a powersupply or CRT case to be careful of stored charge.
And suprise, suprise, its possible to hack code without worrying about the hardware. The OS has two sides, the one that deals with the hardware, and the one a programmer works with.
...and took the words right out of my mouth.
One of the problems with Open-source advocacy (which I must stress is different from free-software advocacy), is that their definition of "better" is very narrow minded. "Better" to them means (more often than not - there are exceptions, to be sure) more stable, and not that a program actually helps a user to do a given task better. This fosters the attitude that the user-interface is less important to the program, than functionality.
I'm sad to say it, but Microsoft has this gauged exactly right : they release buggy products with just enough quality to hop over the bug-tolerance horizon for most of their user base and with a superior user experience. Of what use is a bug-free product, if the user who uses it is so frustrated that they stop using the product?
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
My old Mac Plus had the star headed bolts holding it shut. I found that the right sized flat head screwdriver would wedge in there and open it without damaging the screws. I've always scratched my head when people talked about how hard the old Macs were to open. Did the other "toaster" models have some more complex fastening system?
A very good article that's worth a read before you blindly attack it.
More and more it is becoming apparent that access to the source code of a program and Open Source development are two different animals. Having access to the source is a good thing, be it simply access or complete GPL or BSD freedom. Most cases of solid, commonly used programs with available source don't follow anything like ESR's bazaar development model. Linus rules the kernel with an iron fist, refusing additions simply because they add clutter or are, in his view, ill-conceived. There don't seem to be any successful projects using the herd of cats style of development. There are certainly lots of failures, though.
It is also becoming obvious that having hundreds or thousands of developers working on a project isn't leading to innovation. We've been struggling along with GNOME and KDE, both of which have the feeling of being rushed and missing the mark, and the entire goal of those projects is to mimic the Microsoft/Apple desktop environment. And they're still based on the embarrassing X Windows system. The funny thing is that if just about *any* company decided to spend the money, it could develop a sharp alternative to X in six months. It's not that big a project. Apple isn't using X for Aqua. Linux software still seems so backward, possibly because the user base is a jumble of zealots who hate people interested in usability, others who mistake advocacy with computer use, and programmers who want to hack on projects but don't know what their goals are.
The Linux kernel is a great piece of work, but we are being beaten into irrelevancy in just about every other realm.
This is really getting pathetic. Strong opinions based on almost zero knowledge. Who cares about some grab ass opinion is, if you've never programmed an app for the Mac? I think it is an interesting question why open source has not been a more important factor on the Mac yet. But most of the people offering opinions here don't even have rudimentary knowledge of the subject.
My own candidate for part of the answer is lack of good source control tools. I managed to get CVS running on a Mac running OS X but we found it easier to move the CVS server to a PPC Linux box for cross development purposes. It also took some searching to find a good CVS client. We are using one from Hong Kong which does a great job, especially over a slow communications link (it's called MacCVSClient). Without tools with this functionality you can't hope to coordinate the efforts of widely dispersed developers who may not even know each other.
We are running an open source Mac project (Mactella) at cxc, but it has only really been noticed by people who want to download the binary. There is a real learning curve since the project is built as a PowerPlant project in CodeWarrior. That means you need to be familiar with Mac toolbox and the even more complex framework, PowerPlant.
There has always been a hacker subculture in the Mac world (eg the MacHack conventions every summer in Michigan, MacTech magazine). As the tools for collaborative development spread I hope and expect open source to become a more important factor.
that discusses why Open Source hasn't taken off that well among the Mac
as i was fond of writing on many exam papers at school, the question has insufficient information/not clearly defined.
Software and Open-Source-Software are two products, imo, not variations on the one.
To the majority of the Mac community, software is what they see, what they interact with. To a programmer, software is lines of code - getting only a compiled version of a program leaves programmers feeling like they're missing the most important part of the whole thing.
what software is depends on the user's perspective. open source is irrelevant to most Mac people as source code is nothing to them.
Seriously, it seems the author's main foundation, and a crumbling one at that, is the UI. He forgets the things he says earlier. Like, "Linux, the fledgling OS started in 1995." He does good in not insulting Linus (how could you insult such a nice guy?), but he spends the rest of the time frothing at the mouth in the same fashion as RMS and ESR. The UI is constantly changing in X, and will continue to change, because EVERYONE IS NOT THE SAME. We all like different things, for different reasons, and my desktop will probably never look like your desktop. I think that is a beautiful thing, because it is NOT a company deciding how my desktop should look, and it is NOT a team of 5 programmers deciding what they like. It's what I like, and I can change the freakin thing if i want.
I am not a programmer, and I use Linux.
I am a network engineer, and there are no better network performance monitoring and control tools out there than the ones that run on *nix.
The market is not one person. It's a variety of people with a variety of tastes. Get on with it, pal.
And watch Eazel. That's gonna be cool...
"Before the wreck, I never knew how to type with my face."
A) The nerds, who want control of every aspect of whatever-it-is.
B) The worker-grunt, who just wants the !@#$%^&*() tool to do what they need it to do, without a 6 month training class.
Now most folks fall inbetween the extremes, but those are boundary points. Sure, you like to dig into the source code and twiddle this or that obscure parameter, but when you flip on your TV do you want to tune the RF and IF filters and adjust the LO level and ... or do you want the TV to light up and work.
There's 3 or 4 parameters that could be diddled on a refrigerator, outside of the "cold" control do you want to be messing with them? An artist usually wants to control saturation and hue and form, not understand how the software accomplishes that control.
I once worked at a medical electronics company where I was shown the next generation mock-up. It was designed by engineers for engineers; the front panel was filled with button, knobs, and lights. The final product, after the end users gave their feedback, had one dial and 8 soft keys, of which 4 were usually in their default meaning and 2 of which were really used. The users didn't have to look at the panel most of the time while using the machine, the simple controls, well spaced, let them watch the patient and video screen while tweaking what needed tweaking.
All the controls the engineers had put on the front panel were still around, just buried down in menus or from a service port. They were used during the earlier stages of development, and then slowing became unused. The end users had little to no need to access those control functions, although the original design engineers that they were absolute requirements.
I was away from my Mac earlier this week, so I didn't get to post in the previous discussion. Here's my $.02 :
Why is everyone saying there is no open source on the Mac?- My favorite NNTP client is a descendant of NewsWatcher, open source for Mac
- My favorite Telnet client is a descendant of NSCA Telnet, open source for Mac
- Want other examples? Try VersionTracker. And here's some more.
- Want to write your own? Apple gives you the tools.
So just what is up with these articles?Actually I was commenting on the hardware....
I am informed that the correct name of the demonic fucking paper clip is, in fact, "Clippit," and not "Clippy," as previously reported. Sammy Baby regrets the error.
First, I hate misleading information:
Linux has been around for five or six years
Okay, it doesn't say only but it does give that impression.
there is a small group who shepherds the contributions to the kernel to keep it stable and clean. In other words, there's a priesthood at the top of the bazaar. If you check into each successful OpenSource project, you see the same thing: a small group of referees who filter the input and weed out the bad ideas
Is he proposing a new Linux distro that has a world writable FTP site where everyone uploads everything they've done, someone tars and gzips it up and makes it available for download? Please, without some type of governing body, it really would be chaos!
When you get a company the size of Apple or Microsoft... ...but they have one thing that the OpenSource method doesn't: they have markets to answer to.
Any company, product, or software for that matter answers to the market. Back in the early 90s, Linux answered to the developers and University students (the main users). Just because Apple and Microsoft share markets much more with each other than with Linux, doesn't mean Linux doesn't have a market. Okay, I'm using Linux as a specific OpenSource product, but the point remains.
I won't go into the rest of the specific examples I have, I've only got a 1/2 hour lunch break!
The last point though is the important one. Software is developed for a target audience. Linux wasn't originally built to be installed on average user's machines! This is a relatively recent goal.
Now of course opinions are like..., well, you know how the saying goes. Mr. Lewis has some interesting opinions, but he seems to be saying why the OpenSource method has or will eventually fail. Okay, that's his opinion. Let's look at the facts though. (I don't know Mac/Apple so I won't go there). Microsoft has been developing they're user-friendly GUI for ~15 years. Linux, well, trying to get user-friendly, maybe 2 or 3 years tops. Look at the result. Microsoft has been doing this 5 times as long, yet Linux is starting to compete! Obviously something about this model of development is working.
The one point I did want to raise however, is to the developer community. I'm not a programmer. I do create shell scripts, PERL scripts, and the like, but I only know a little C, and have hardly touched object oriented stuff. But for those of you who take an active role in developing not only the kernal, but core components, where are we going with Linux? Are we aiming for a competitor to Windows? Is it still mostly devoted to the curious, not afraid to explore, computer people?? Or is it both? I think this is a question we need to answer.
If its both, maybe two 'versions' should be considered. Don't give all the wonderful command line tools to the non-technical user, drop some of the server.
The thing he overlooks, is that the "average" computer user has no idea what Linux is, and doesn't care.
So, the average user doesn't want to be the tester, and the programmer. If you don't like doing that, just don't. Don't use Open Source software. Don't use Linux. Nobody really cares if you do or don't, nobody has a gun to your head.
With Don Lapre's amazing money-making plan, I am now able to live in this cardboard box with no worries at all!