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Is Apple The New Microsoft?
Varg Vikernes writes "Even if you don't count Apple's actions this week as a potential threat to first amendment rights (Apple's crackdown on Web sites that love the company), they do nothing to bolster Apple's public image. In fact the company's success of late has yielded accusations of bullying and potentially unlawful business tactics, along with complaints about the fact that songs purchased from its iTunes music service don't work with music players other than its own. According to Forbes, to some these tactics sound like something Apple's neighbor to the North might employ. They wonder aloud Is Apple the New Microsoft?
iTunes Music Store purchases can of course be burnt to CD, at which point they can play on just about anything.
There's a difference between not supporting rival products any more than you have to and actively looking for ways to smash the opposition. Has Apple got a track history of screwing over competitors as Microsoft has done with Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, DR-DOS, OS/2, etc, etc, etc?
Pullying the clones was a sensible move. Rather than expanding the marketshare of Apple's OS by attracting Windows-based users to the MacOS fold, all the clones succeeded in doing was stealing hardware sales from Apple itself, which was harming Apple's income. The clones experiment was too little too late to make any dent in the Windows juggernaut and was hurting Apple more than it was helping it, so it had to end.
Apple not making a deal with BeOS was a decision that was based on several factors. One of which was the price - neither side really wanted to budge from their view of what the OS was worth - and another was the reappearance of Steve Jobs, who clearly favoured an OS based upon NeXT's OS, whether for technical reasons or personal vanity and vindication. Be could have easily cut a deal before Jobs was back on the scene, but they played hardball a little too hard and ended up with nothing.
As for Apple's stores in the UK undercutting UK resellers, well, I've talked to a manager at one of Apple's biggest UK retail resellers (Micro Anvika) and he said business was booming, even with the Apple London Store only a mile or so away from his company's flagship stores in Tottenham Court Road, so it's hardly as if Apple's UK resellers are crying about it. If anything, Apple's new retail presence and elevated brand awareness has reinvigorated the market, and encouraged resellers to improve on their value-add, which is no bad thing from a consumer point of view.
Even so, some of the biggest competition the UK resellers face is the disparity between Apple's UK and US pricing: it's long-established fact that it's considerably cheaper to buy a round-trip ticket to New York and pick up a PowerBook there than it is to buy the same PowerBook in the UK.
Is Apple a wannabe monopolist? Probably, yes. Which company isn't? But nothing it's done so far or anything that you've mentioned in your post is evidence of any monopolistic policy on Apple's part.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
What kind of quality do you get from Jobs?
Lately, not good. The iPod bateries die within a year and are "suposed" to be relaced by an apple qualified technician for much more than its worth.
The later g3 models and most g4 models of the tower have serious QA issues w/ their mother boards. We have had 4 lock up in sleep mode and refuse to come out of it. Try replacing an Apple System Board, they are about $700.00.
We haven't had the g5's long enough to measure yet...
The standard warenty with the hardware sucks. You get 90 days of "complimentary support" and a 1 year warenty (convient considering most of their products last just over a year). Unless however, you purchase the Apple Care Plan to extend all of this to 3 years.
Apple has always been inovative in Software and the design (read look, feel, and appeal) of their hardware. However, from my experience, there QA has always lacked in the hardware department.
Don't waste time... procrastinate now!
Well, it's not.
...like a Creative Zen, which if it's anything like ones I've seen will break within a week. Which you can pair with your Napster service that you have to pay for ad infinitum if you want to keep your music.
Cause for everything Apple does you can go find an alternative elsewhere...
And don't bring up allofmp3.com, they're so unbelievably questionable in their legality I don't accept them as an argument.
So in terms of a music store, music syncing software, and the iPod, there is no competition. If there was, Apple would not have singlehandedly beaten most of their competitors. Apple is making a killing on the iPod because it is selling like crazy, even at current prices. I think it says something about their competitors when they can sell a similar device for more, and beat everyone else at the same time. That's not anti-competitive, that's competition at its finest and Apple has effectively bested everyone.
Microsoft's way is simply that. There is no other option there. Lack of innovation, buggy software, I don't see them winning public favor simply through the release of products like Apple has.
Apple is protecting it's rights here. Trade secret law is a complicated thing. Apple is entitled to protect it's corporate secrets.
Companies aren't open, companies aren't free, companies are typically closed, proprietary, and restrictive. Apparently some Apple employees blabbed and they shouldn't have. Things like this can cost companies millions in lost profit.
Is this bad PR for Apple? Yes, I think it is. Is it within Apple's rights? Certainly. Does it make Apple the next Microsoft? No, last I checked Apple only controlled a fairly modest portion of the market.
Later, GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
The only reason the PC became the defacto standard was because they didnt kill off their clones.
:)
Apple even without windows would not dominated because Apple in the 80s and early 90s was DUMB!
It is likely another company would have created a GUI system for the PC even if microsoft didnt. An example being GEOS which came out BEFORE windows for the Commdore 64. Geos was ported to the PC about the same time as Windows came out...had there been no windows it is likely GEOS would have become the defacto GUI for DOS based systems. In such an event...GEOS and either Microsoft or DRDOS would have merged.
and Voila... GEOS 95.
"However, with, for example, the iPod and iTunes store, a lot of other companies have been able to produce alternatives that are cheaper, and do the job just as well, but better. What's the Apple answer? Lower the costs? Make their products (Fairplay DRM I'm looking at you) more attractive to consumers? Nope. Instead they try to stifle the competition by making their hardware only able to purchase tracks from their own online store (which kind of feels like a car manufacturer only allowing their cars to be used with their own brand gas), and taking legal action against any competitor that tries to provide tracks that can be made to work with Apple's hardware."
I guess I am the only person who has an iPod that plays mp3's..... Yessss! Oh wait.. That breaks your gas analogy.... sorry. So when are they going to take legal action against the makers of mp3? That is, since they provided tracks that can be used on apple hardware.
FreeType is free, open source, &c, and I thought it did hinting?
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Have a look at http://freetype.sourceforge.net/patents.html/...
IntechHosting - Free domain, 2GB, PHP, £4.95/$8.95
Let's see about that page: OpenPlay is something they have themselves abandoned, and nobody uses it. Microsoft open sourced WiX too, does that mean they're suddenly supporting open source? No.
Darwin is mostly made up stuff that was already open source, and the parts that are new aren't generally useful as they're inferior to what's already available (eg compare performance of Darwin to Linux on POSIX benchmarks sometime).
The Rendezvous code they released consisted of a 350kb piece of C, the largest comment in which was attempting to justify the indentation style in use. It does not compile, out of the box, on anything apart from MacOS X due to missing code. Rather than try and reuse such an opaque file, people tend to use Howl instead. Apparently even Apple don't use it as their implementation differs from the one they released.
Finally Chess.app is open source because it's based on GNU Chess which is GPLd, ie they had no choice in the matter. Not impressive.
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/standalone /
Quicktime Standalone, still available.
OK, so hinting and anti-aliasing are different things. You can use both, or none, or one of either, it doesn't matter.
Hinting is about correctly grid fitting the pixels. It can (and should) be used at any size, but is most noticable at small sizes (which is most text on a computer screen). If you want to see text that isn't hinted, look at this.
So to say "hinting is ugly" is not correct: hinting by itself modifies glyph shapes, for the better (that's why people want it). As you can see from the picture, unhinted text is very ugly indeed - unpleasant to read in fact. What you probably mean is that some people don't like anti-aliasing. On Windows it's off by default,on Linux it's on but you can disable it globally very easily, and on MacOS X you cannot disable it without special purpose hacks that often break when you upgrade.
FreeType is capable of anti-aliasing and also using TrueType hinting, which it can do in one of two modes: automatic and by using the data embedded in the fonts. In automatic mode it tries to guess based on the shapes of the glyphs. The algorithms used are fascinating and developed specifically for FreeType, to work around the patent. However the autohinter doesn't always get it right so FreeType can also use the real hinting engine it is supposed to use, if you have a license.
"Font smoothing" is just another way of saying anti-aliasing, except in that thread you linked to where they appear to be using it to refer to what is normally known as sub-pixel anti-aliasing which exploits properties of how pixels are laid out on LCDs to make it look better. Microsoft calls this "ClearType". FreeType can do this too.
In short: hinting and anti-aliasing/smoothing are different things, which have different purposes. It's possible to have one without the other.
Shame on Apple for providing two free applications for a competing OS, without letting you install them individually that's what I say!
Now then why don't you go to the download page and notice that there is also a Quicktime Standalone download. It doesn't have iTunes. That's why it's called standalone. Dumbass.
Okay, let me rephrase my point.
Font hinting is an old technology for small displays and small fonts.
In a world where 1024x768 is the norm, font hinting is not necessary, and trying to duplicate Apple's old font engine is stifling. Let go of old technology and use modern rendering techniques: Font antialiasing. Freetype, I think, doesn't use it yet. Why not?
Font antialiasing ignores hinting; it has a different goal entirely.
Hinting is all about making it look good while constrained by greyscale and low pixel count. Accuracy isn't the point.
Antialiasing is about making it look good and accurate, because the same engine used for the printer is used for the screen. Fractional screen values are used; the simplest method is to draw a glyph 2x bigger than the screen resolution, and then scale it down to fit.
GPL Deconstructed
Unless I'm mistaken, patents are currently good for 17 years, so the first of those should expire next year, and the second in 2009.
Be a PATRIOT--because the only thing we have to fear is the lack thereof.
I won't argue your other points, but in regards to Konfabulator:
The "widgets" that Konfab uses are very similar to something that used to be part of the earlier Mac OS (called Desk Accessories). There was a calculator widget, among others. If anything, Apple is updating this idea to the modern Mac OS (I believe that folklore.org and daring fireball.net have info on this).
Along the same lines, Windows had a version of these "widgets" (probably borrowed from the Mac OS) about three years before Konfab was around called DesktopX (I think). This will (at least from what I heard) be implemented in some way in Longhorn, whenever that comes out.
So, I won't deny that Apple might "adopt" certain ideas, but this indignation from the Konfab developers is sort of unfounded. Did they do it pretty well? Yes. Is their idea original? No.
I'm tired of people saying there are no compatible mp3 players. Here's the list, straight from Apple
iPod - Apple
Nomad II - Creative Labs
Nomad II MG - Creative Labs
Nomad II c - Creative Labs
Nomad Jukebox - Creative Labs
Nomad Jukebox 20GB - Creative Labs
Nomad Jukebox C - Creative Labs
Novad MuVo - Creative Labs
Rio One - SONICBlue/S3
Rio 500 - SONICBlue/S3
Rio 600 - SONICBlue/S3
Rio 800 - SONICBlue/S3
Rio 900 - SONICBlue/S3
Rio S10 - SONICBlue/S3
Rio S11 - SONICBlue/S3
Rio S30S - SONICBlue/S3
Rio S35S - SONICBlue/S3
Rio S50 - SONICBlue/S3
Rio Chiba - SONICBlue/S3
Rio Fuse - SONICBlue/S3
Rio Cali - SONICBlue/S3
psa]play 60 - Nike
psa]play 120 - Nike
SoundSpace 2 - Nakamichi
CD MP3 Players
RioVolt SP250 - SONICBlue/S3
RioVolt SP100 - SONICBlue/S3
RioVolt SP90 - SONICBlue/S3
For what I have seen Apple have played fair with the Open Source community - all their modifications to Open Source software have been submitted back to the original projects. Their strategy is to build extremely nice looking stuff _on top_ of the Open Source software, which is then closed source.
:)
I think that Apple is very clearly demonstrating that there is a market for taking Open Source software and improving it in a fair and square fashion, and then use it to create commecial products which benefits the users.
I used to work with a Mac, and these days I work with an XP-box. I miss my Mac
--
Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen "...and...Tubular Bells!"
Quote *gl4ss*
is 1024*768 high resolution? hell no.
" Mac mini sports a full-fledged ATI Radeon 9200 with 32MB dedicated DDR SDRAM over an AGP 4x bus." is that incredible graphics? HELL NO, thats about as crappy as you can get while still using ati's or nvidia's current line(and 9200 on 4x bus really means radeon 9000).
End quote
First off, I'm posting as AC because I forgot my password and don't care to look it up. Not to the real argument: where did 1024by768 come from? Not the resolution, but the basis for your ATI9200 argument. I didn't think that was at all right, so I pulled up Apple's webpage and looked for the macmini and its specs. Guess what I found!
Quote *apple.com*
Video
* DVI video output for digital resolutions up to 1920 x 1200 pixels; supports 20-inch Apple Cinema display and 23-inch Apple Cinema HD display; supports coherent digital displays up to 154MHz; supports non-coherent digital displays up to 135MHz
* VGA video output (using included adapter) to support analog resolutions up to 1920 x 1080 pixels
End quote
As you can see, both DVI and VGA support higher resolutions than 1024by768, and I would consider 1920by1080 to be high resolution (by today's standards). So next time either cite something or get your facts straight to begin with.
http://www.apple.com/macmini/specs.html
..locally to me I can give a realistic figure. I use a local mom and pop ISP primarily, although I also have a cheap earthlink as a backup. The local has a few hundred dialup users and I am the *only* linux customer they have, I asked them to check. No macs, one linux, the rest windows. Maybe planetary wide linux has a slightly larger market share, but I doubt it's even 2% inside the US. Maybe in some college towns, or places like that, but across the board I doubt it. Either way combined mac and linux and bsd is still pitiful small, and it's primarily because only a few places sell macs, and MUCH fewer have linux preinstalled on machines, which is primarily where people get their OSes from, pre-installed. I was just at a computer store today trying to get some parts, a couple other customers in there, so being a ratchet jaw kinda guy I start talking, etc, neither of them had even HEARD of linux, they had no idea what I was talking about.
I blame two things for this, in this order-1- severe fragmentation in the linux "community", because there really isn't a "linux" nor is there a "community", there's dozens of perpetual betaware non compatabile ever changing monthly operating systems basically using a similar sort of kernel and that's it, and they each have a miniscule tiny niche fanbase with hardly any rational cooperation, and 2- lack of decent vendor support at the "on the shelf" retail level. And I don't see number #2 changing until #1 changes and there really IS a true well supported and universally adopted "linux standard operating system". I doubt this will happen though.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Hard drive mp3 players existed for a year before the iPod and they consisted of two models:
The Creative Nomad, 14oz, 5"x5"x1.5"
The PJB100, 10oz, 6"x4"x1"
Apple released the iPod and made it a consumer object, rather than a geek object. Apple changed the entire market! Before Apple they were:
Large (bigger than a paperback. Now all of them, LIKE the iPod, are smaller than a deck of cards)
Heavy (at 10oz or more. Now all of them weigh less than 6oz)
Slow (using USB 1. Now all of them, just like the iPod, use USB2 or FireWire)
They were good for cars, good for work, good for train trips, and good for airplanes, before Apple got a hold of them. After Apple they became good for walking, roller blading (yes I have rollerbladed with iPods), working out at the gym, anywhere.
It was like the difference between a desktop and a laptop, in mobility.
The same with music stores. Before the iTMS, there were NONE that let you burn to CD. NONE that let you upload to an mp3 player. NONE that let you listen on multiple computers. NONE that let you back the music up. You say, "In the works", and I say, "Quickly saw what Apple did and tried to match them."
The only other player besides Apple who has made any money off Open Source would be... IBM. Red Hat hardly makes money, GNU and Apache aren't profit centers.
Here's the initial announcement and response about Safari's use of KHTML, with positive response from developers.
This suggests developers haven't been able to keep up with Apple's changes, which makes sense; a handful of developers working full time on anything can outstrip hundreds of developers working part time over weekends and evenings.
As for gcc, the idea is to search gcc-patches and look for apple.com addresses. Searching Google shows over 6k hits, though I'm sure some of them are duplicates. Some Apple devs maintain special branches (for example, in implementing ObjC specific features) while others contribute fixes, or add Altivec/VMX specific patches.
Where do you get your info that Apple ISN'T contributing?
GPL Deconstructed
I'm still waiting for them to submit Objective C++. As a matter of fact, one of the first successful FSF legal actions was forcing NeXT to release the source code to their GCC derivative.
This statement is misleading in several important respects.
First, NeXT's original plan to develop a variant preprocessor for the gcc toolchain and maintain it independently was indeed incompatible with the copyleft. However, it did not result in legal action. NeXT was informed about how and why it was incompatible and subsequently released the code. There was no law suit or formal legal action taken at all.
Also note that this was over 15 years ago, before even the BSD 4.4 source code was publicly freed in the law suit between the Regents of the University of California and AT&T. NeXT could not even share their changes to the BSD 4.3 kernel to anyone without a valid Unix Source License.
Regarding the subsequent divergence of the FSF and NeXT/Apple objective-c, it appears that the problem rests squarely with the FSF. The gcc maintainers have repeatedly rejected '#import' and other architectural features which are pretty major. They also deliberately allowed several aspect of the underlying runtime to diverge from the NeXT base because they either rejected or even backed out changes proposed by NeXT/Apple developers.
The code is there for all to see in the Apple branches published in Darwin. Apple developers propose changes to the primary gcc source tree, and argue for their adoption, but are often rebuffed.
I think that support for Frameworks, even for plain C, would benefit both Linux and BSD tremendously. However, unless gcc developers accept those changes they will remain unavailable.
Search the gcc developer mailing list over the past 5 years for discussion of Apple submitted changes, if you don't believe me.
Denial, "not just a river in Egypt". What a load of horse hockey.
You provide links to evidence which appears to justify the opposite conclusion.
Your first link, http://dot.kde.org/1097096753/1097113373/ is an email asking about what's going on with merging Apple changes back into KDE. The immediate reply states:
To me this suggests that apple added so much code to KHTML/KJS that it made more sense architecturally to split them into two frameworks "WebCore" and "JavaScriptCore", These are still released in their entirety under the GPL. There are so few developers on the KHTML side that they have been unable to keep up with the changes. Seriously, how is that Apple's fault?
Forking happens all the time. It would take far more effort and money for apple to continue to backport changes piecemeal to the KHTML/KJS trees than to fork the distribution. The sensible approach would be for the KHTML/KJS team to accept the architectural changes and simply start using the WebCore and JavaScriptCore, which is cleaner, better maintained, and of higher quality due to all the work Apple has done. Rather than grouse about how much effort it takes to backport changes piecemeal, why not adopt the superior libraries which Apple has produced and continue to improve them?
NIH syndrome works both ways.
The final link you give is entirely out of context. You state that Apple recommended doing a diff to see what has changed. Actually, the wording was "The best way to see every change line by line is to diff against the originals.". Immediately following, was about 14 pages (in my browser) of itemized descriptions of the changes performed, organized by functional description, subdirectory or even by function call.
Thus, your assertion is at least deliberately disingenuous, if not an outright lie.