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Interview with Jordan Hubbard About DarwinPorts
Gentu writes "OSNews hosts an interview with Jordan Hubbard (of Apple, OpenDarwin, and FreeBSD fame) where they discuss DarwinPorts and how they compare to Fink. There is also a hint from Jordan that there might be some of the FreeBSD 5.x advancements to be found in Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) that is coming out, reportedly, this autumn."
I agree, that is a bit steep for a 1-year upgrade, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt on pricing before we start vilifying them. As for cost, I thought Mac-heads were supposed to be used to paying 2-3 times typical cost for stuff. (NO, that's NOT flamebait!)
The question is also, can you keep using 10.2 when 10.3 comes out? I suspect so. In fact, I kind of like the way this works - they release a new upgrade every year, but probably the last 3-4 years of upgrades work perfectly. This way, though, there is a *new* version of Mac OS out whenever you upgrade. That's pretty cool. So the only people who really get gouged are people who feel like they have to have an updated OS every year, which you couldn't even get from M$ if you wanted it. (Yeah, service packs don't count ;))
I've been using Macs since 1984, but I've given up now. The only reason I'm keeping my Mac is to run legacy apps.
Interesting, I wouldn't even touch the damned things until 10.2 came out...
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
It is the hardware that currently prevents me from switching.
Guess what, it's that same hardware that currently keeps Apple in business... An x86 Mac is never going to happen.
Although they no doubt keep Mac OS X running on multiple platforms internally (it makes good sense from an engineering point of view), an x86 Mac is not in Apple's interests - 2 minutes after Apple released an x86 Mac + Mac OS X for x86, someone would have the OS running on some generic non-Apple hardware. Once that happens, nobody is ever going to buy an Apple machine when they could get their own box for less money.
And there just isn't a market in selling OS software on the x86 platform - the vast majority of people either get Windows free with their hardware, or rip a copy off from a friend. The number of people who pay for their copy of Linux/Be/etc is nothing like enough to keep a company the size of Apple in business, even assuming that every non-Windows person decided to buy Mac OS X instead.
A common suggestion is that Apple could build in some kind of dongle into the system to prevent the OS being modified to run on a generic box. The point this misses is that the only system like this which would ever work is the one they already use - their dongle is the Mac.
Nae bother