Slashdot Mirror
Darwin Team Answers & Develop on Darwin
Lagos writes "In July Darwin developers at Apple had a call for questions. Their answers were posted on Monday and may be found here. There is some discussion of Apple's place within the Open Source community, though most of the questions answered are more technical." Along the same Darwinian lines, this submission came in: Maktoo writes "Maccentral is reporting that SourceForge.net has added PowerMac G4 Servers running MacOS X 10.1 into their Compile Farm. Now any apps you have going on SourceForge, you can test to see if it'll run on OS X! Gotta love that BSD heritage... OS X is already going to benefit greatly from all the apps it can use in the UNIX/Linux space. This just makes life easier for developers to bring even more."
Oh, I absolutely concur! It's a magnificent strategy for Jobs! Absolutely it will boost the market share of MacOS! But will it be at the detriment of Linux? Seriously, I doubt that this will pull many Windows users away, as the majority of them are set in their ways, and it isn't MacOS doing anything new that Windows does. Instead it is MacOS seeping in to a share of the market, and in fact, potentially completely blanketing it, that is currently proudly held by BSD/Linux, when they have greater right/authority/capacity to hold that share of the market, except for the fact that they don't have a marketing department.
Why is Microsoft the big OS right now? Marketing! Is MacOS (pre-X) better than Windows? In very many ways! Is Linux better than Windows? Also in very many ways! Is Windows better than either of them? Not in very many ways at all! My brother just exceeded 400 days uptime on his home server running RedHat. On Netcraft, of the top 50 uptimes, last I checked, only ONE was Windows, and it was a machine run by Microsoft, with the express purpose of proving Windows' uptime capacity, and not a machine that was being used in a production environment. So why is this inferior OS in possession of the largest share of the desktop environment, with an inferior less stable environment that Linux, and a less intuitive, more difficult to use interface than MacOS? You better have guessed it by now (I'm such a cynic), MARKETING. MacOS is absorbing a lot of the strategic advantage of BSD/Linux, and inserting it into their marketing machine under the name MacOS.
My concern is over whether this pushes BSD/Linux out of the picture, as they are about operational quality not visual quality while OSX focuses a lot more on visual quality (which has proven to be an exceptionally marketable aspect; translucent windows and a warping docking bar, wow, way better than some boring uptime!) and leaves the operational quality to the BSD programmers, who are pouring their hearts and souls in to a project, which Apple might, in the end, turn around and stab them in the heart with.
Very loose simile: It's like the greatest swordsmiths (Open Source programmers) on earth collectively working for years to create the greatest sword ever for a king (the public, and perhaps Apple), who kills the smith with it to prevent the smith from making a better one. Your greatest source of pride might very well be your undoing in an irony that belongs in fairy tales. (This is not to imply that Apple has its goal laid out to squash BSD, indeed, BSD is proving to be a great aid to them, thus the loosness of the simile.)
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
and leaves the operational quality to the BSD programmers, who are pouring their hearts and souls in to a project, which Apple might, in the end, turn around and stab them in the heart with.
What a bunch of crap! What utter bullshit. The fact that the poster was modded up indicates to me that we have less than perfectly bright moderators out there.