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Freshmeat Launches Mac OS X Section
Liedra writes "After announcing Mac OS X software surreptitiously within its main section for the past several months, freshmeat has now launched a section totally devoted to the platform. Read the article by scoop and visit the section directly." Since I switched my primary laptop to OS X, I'm glad to see scoop do this. (Note, Freshmeat & Slashdot are both owned by OSDN.)
That's crazy though, they could try all they want but unless the people in charge at OSDN are brain-dead they know that Apple would never ever buy a content website/business, much less one 90% about open source. People might think /. et. al are kissing up to Apple to be bought, but in truth they're just kissing up to the general Apple fetish around here for hits. Apple doesn't buy companies often (noone does anymore) and when they do it's extremely strategic, not a matter of "aww look, some kids put apple logos all over and list OS X software after a year of ignoring it. Let's snatch them up!".
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See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
Erm, why would apple buy OSDN?
Sure, OSDN's interest in Apple is increasing, but that's only because Apple is a Unix vendor now.
I don't think OSDN is exactly a hot ticket, either.
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the strongest word is still the word "free"
All OSX really is involves an updating of NextStep (for good or ill), and a replacement of X11 with something more bulletproof using interface guidelines. Was NextStep *nix? Nobody I know disputes it. Why're you disputing OSX? Because it's proprietary? That horse has been beaten to death, and nobody hammers on SGI or Sun for proprietary OS'es. Is it because of Aqua being closed source? Okay, so compile (or download the binary for) Xdarwin and use regular X apps. Of course there you have to worry about dependencies, and libraries for GTK, window managers...
I hope more people re-engineer X11 apps with a Cocoa frontend. Or, perhaps someone ought to start a project similar to WINE, but for the Cocoa API? Just don't put the look and feel in exact, and do it for interoperability... who knows, maybe you can slip under Apple's legal radar.
Or not. Bleah.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
I think that too many people are afraid of the open source movement. And Mac OS X, while partly open source, is a good intro into what Unix/Linux is all about. I have met alot of people, who are afraid of implementing Linux, but have no problem with Mac OS X. While widly different, it is nice to have a stable version of linux on my system that all my *nix commands work with (Unlike windows where i have a hard time remembering a Display Directory is DIR and not LS) I think Mac OS X is going to open the world up to *nix because Apple has done what many people have tried to do, Put a Pretty Face (Aqua) ontop of an Ugly Operating System (BSD). This is going to help out in the long run especially if they release their I-32 version of the OS.
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I mean to say there aren't enough *good* sites where you can find out about Windows software. Both Tucows and download.com are useless compared to Freshmeat - they don't seem to carry fields like project licence or release history, don't have good project summaries or comments, and the site layout isn't nearly as crisp.
I'm more interested in free software for Windows than the latest shareware. Those two sites are more oriented towards binary-only software and towards users rather than developers. Freshmeat is pretty much perfect, at least it is better than any other site I've found, except for the small detail that it won't carry Windows software.
If anyone knows of a comparable site to Freshmeat but dealing with the Windows platform, please do post details.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
They should really add an RSS feed to that. Just for me. Like a Christmas present, you know? That would be great.
Same goes for apple.slashdot. That would be like *double* Christmas.