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."
Many people complain about Linux not being user-friendly enough in the GUI. Whether that is true or not is irrevelant to my question. Near everyone can agree that Apple has the best GUI. We're talking about how easy it is to port *BSD/Linux apps to OS X ... how easy do you think it would be for Apple to port Aqua to *BSD/Linux?
-As beautiful as KDE is, I would drop it in a heartbeat for Aqua.
Nosce te Ipsum
I'm sorry if this is seen as flamebait, but isn't anyone else concerned that potentially all apps that run under Linux would migrate their way to another (commercial) OS with marketing power, and a desire to influence it? Couldn't this be a real threat to Linux? What if everything that ran under Linux suddenly started working under Windows? Wouldn't that reduce the marketability of Linux? If I were a corporation considering switching to a different environment, all be it a more stable one, when I only have people on staff who know the current environment, might I not be inclined to stay with the current environment given that the tools from the new one were available within the current one? Immediate costs would be reduced as there's less of a rollout, even if licensing in the long run is more expensive.
I think it's a great testament to Open Source that Apple chose to heavily base their OS on it; Apple decision makers aren't idiots, they know a good thing when they see it. But in the end, it takes a piece of the market owned wholly by *nices and allows a commercial entity to have a share of it.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Photoshop is major $$$. Why do you think so many Mac users have been interested in a GIMP port?
Well photoshop is available to students for only about $200, which is how I first bought it years ago. Anybody who isn't a student will have a job and therefor money, but even then one can still find photoshop for about $500, sometimes less if you pick up an older version and upgrade.
Add to all this the fact that the GIMP is useless for print, and if you're not doing print then you'd be better off buying Photoshop Elements for a mere $99. There are even upgrade programs to buy Photoshop Elements for as low as $70 if you have a copy of Photoshop LE (included with many scanners, and I've even seen it included free with magazines and at tradeshows!)
It should also be noted that while I've seen many Mac users interested in the GIMP (hey, everybody likes free stuff), I've run into exactly zero who were impressed by it when they finally got it running. The GIMP is a nice idea, but despite what many (ignorant) zealots preach, the GIMP does not, in any way shape or form, come close to the power of Photoshop Elements, nevermind Photoshop.
- j
I haven't actually used Photoshop Elements, but my understanding is that it doesn't support layers, has weak support for text, and comes with a pretty limited set of filters. Plus it's not native to OS X yet, and right now I'm not going to spend a dime on anything that isn't Carbon or Cocoa.
You're right that GIMP is useless for people doing professional printing. But I'm not one of those people. Just because I have a job doesn't mean I can justify $500 for Photoshop in my budget, especially since it's not something I use very often, and (as I said above) it's not native yet.
GIMP provides everything I need, and I've been using it for ~2 years so I'm used to the interface. Why change?
High quality, full featured commercial applications. Mac OS X is getting them, Linux isn't.
Pretty much all the software you can run under Linux you can run under OS X as well. The converse is not true. That's the real selling point. The pretty interface and friendly development APIs are nice too.
if you go to Versiontracker you can see many pieces of software that has been ported. XEmacs 19.14 has been ported and you can get it here.