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Mac OS X Sessions at LinuxExpo
h0tblack writes "The latest ADC Newsletter has details of a few sessions Apple are hosting at LinuxExpo in Paris in a couple of weeks. The sessions are: Mac OS X for the Linux Community, Mac OS X in Heterogeneous Environments and Mac OS X and Developer Tools. Shame that the first session clashes with the keynote from RMS ..." Yes. Shame.
Uh, there is plenty of GPL code in Mac OS X. For example: bash, cvs, gcc, gdb, gprof, diffutils, and patchutils, just to name a few. Apple has, of course, submitted any changes to this code back to the FSF and any other applicable maintainers. They also have this thing called "Darwin" that allows you to download the open-source core of Mac OS X, which also includes lots of GPL code. However, there is also plenty of BSD code, like fileutils, top, and sysctl.
;)
Finally, there is some proprietary code which you can purchase as an add-on to Darwin. It comes with an easy-to-use installer, a nice GUI, and support for actual commercial software that people use to make money!
Of course, if you truly must have your GNU add-ons, you can just install Fink, or, if cash is your problem, give GNU-Darwin a try.
I know, I know, I Have Been Trolled
Karma: Incomprehensible (Mostly affected by posting at +5, reading at -1, and metamoderating everything unfair.)
I believe there's a distro out there that runs without any of the FSF tools (gcc etc).
As far as I know, Linux doesn't even compile without GNU binutils, GCC, GNU make and probably some others.
When I installed a "linux from scratch" system a few years ago, the number of GNU packages to install an as-basic-as-possible Linux system was on the order of 50 out of 60.
It would be an interesting intellectual exercise to make a distro without GNU tools - but otherwise it would just be stupid, even on many commercial Unix versions people install GNU tools because they're better.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
RMS.
The problem is Apple has to pay a royalty on copies of iDVD, IIRC and are onl licensed themselves to use it with their DVD writers.
"then the least he could do is try putting themes into the OS"
Interesting that even with Linux distributions you have to download and install 'themes'...
I have a theme on my OS X 'top... MaggraX by reknowned theme designer... Takashi Izawa. It's very nice! Right now there isn't a warehouse full of themes available but there are some nice ones... and templates for making more. Several free tools and some shareware tools enable painless theme installation, etc.
So stop complaining and start Gimping your way to a new freakin' theme!
'nuff said,
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Apple pays royalites to be able to encode DVDs. The money goes to various patent holders in relation to various algorithms, etc that go with a video DVD. The royalites would be distributed via one of the DVD consortiums, or something like that -- I'm not sure of their name off the top of my head.
While I agree with some of your comments, I'm not so sure about others.
1) I used to run Mac OS X 10.1 on my iMacDV quite happily - that's over three years old by now. And this was 10.1 - rather than jack up the requirements with each release, Apple have so far lowered them. This isn't a trend that's likely to continue (!) but it's a pretty nice achievemnt nonetheless. However much people complain it should have been this fast to start with, OS X did mean an enormous step up in what it was doing - full alpha compositing, etc. And the reason it was included at the time was so that OS X wouldn't change too drastically as it developed; we've been seeing a lot of changes, including API changes, but the overall technique of the OS hasn't changed and is fairly unlikely to.
I'm not saying Apple don't render old hardware obsolete, cos they do... especially some of the older graphics hardware, which still doesn't have OSX acceleration. But I wouldn't say they're always pushing up the hardware requirements; things like Quartz extreme aren't a requirement, they're an acceleration.
2) Open source-isms; Apple haven't released many totally new projects into the community, except for a few minorish things such as Rendezvous, but they have done some sterling work on some of the projects they've used. The KHTML team received an enormous amount of changes, fixes and optimisations; it's not just a one-way path, and while it may just be compliance with the licences, they're being pretty nice about it. I was working on a little app recently, wrote apple's engineers about something I was having problems with, and the guy didn't just help but sent me some of their proprietary (ie, not Darwin) code to illustrate how they had performed certain functions.
Yes, I am an Apple fan; no, I'm not an Apple zealot. For all their problems and some of their suckitude, they're also doing some rather nice things in a rather nice way.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" whilst looking for a rock
MaggraX is located here.