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WebObjects Now Free With Tiger
Reverberant writes "Macworld reports that has Apple released WebObjects as a free application. From $50,000 to free, the software used to build the iTunes Music Store and Dell's original online store is now available for free to Tiger users via Xcode 2.1." From the article: " The software has historical importance to Apple-watchers: it was originally released in March 1996 - but not by Apple. In fact, WebObjects was developed by NeXT Computer and became Apple's software only when that company acquired Steve Jobs' second computer company later that year. While not software on the tip of every Mac users tongue, WebObjects sits behind several significant implementations - the most famous current example being Apple's iTunes Music Store."
. . . Well, the average Tiger user will also never use the developer toolkit that came with the OS, but that doesn't stop Apple from including it, does it? Why does something have to be useful to every user to be released?
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Having read the article quite closely, actually, I don't think he had an agenda. I just think he did it backwards. He took his SUSE 9 system and looked at what versions of MySQL and GCC it had. Then he built GCC for the OS X machine, then used that to build MySQL. He probably felt really good about that being a fair test, too! After all, the software was the same on all machines!
He'd have done better to use OS X Server with the shipped MySQL, of course, as your source points out. Apple's platform isn't fully mainstream for either GCC or MySQL, and it's hardly unfair to allow Apple's own tweaks to these packages to be used in the test. It's still a pretty real-world test he's doing, so it's not like it can be cheated.
Maybe it was deliberate bias, but I try not to suspect evil when simple incompetence can explain it.
You win again, gravity!