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Jobs Offers Free Mac OS X For $100 Laptops
bonch writes "Steve Jobs offered Mac OS X free of charge to the $100 laptop effort by the One Laptop Per Child project. However, his offer was declined because the project was looking for a 100% open source solution. The laptops will now be running on Red Hat Linux on AMD chips."
Actually, OSX runs VERY well on an old 333MHz iMac with 64 megs of ram. I won't take the latest version, mind you, but it works well. No lag in the dock or anything.
Red Hat used to be a quality distribution. But we have to go back to the Red Hat 5.x and 6.x days to notice that.
As time has gone on, there have been many improvements that they have failed to adopt. Dropping support for RPM in favour of APT is one such improvement that they didn't make. The whole GCC 2.96 debacle sure didn't help their reputation amongst developers.
Either way, you are correct, Red Hat is not the way to go. Mac OS X, especially free, would have been the best possible choice. Not considering that, Kubuntu would have been the second best option. It'd offer a solid, coherent KDE system, built upon the power of Debian.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
"There are people in developing countries who have never seen computers so it's not like, 'How is this better than Windows?"'
Well, with that argument, why not just hand them a pile of dogshit?
That's the most useless justification for staying with Red Hat Linux as I've ever heard.
Further, it's not as if Red Hat-proper is "free". You can bet your bottom dollar that Red Hat is seeing dollar signs out of this deal. Big dollar signs.
Sure, Jobs may have been in it partly for ulterior reasons as well - I'm not going to pretend to know what he's thinking - but considering that the entire core of Mac OS X is open source, and what's not open source is a very polished, easy to use, major-vendor-supported OS with amazing language and multilingual support, revolutionary accessibility support, including the first commercial OS to include a free full-fledged spoken interface, and so on, I think that rejecting it out-of-hand on the basis of wanting to be "100%" open source is a little bit short-signted and foolish, when one steps back and looks at the big picture.
I literally can't believe MIT rejected this offer.
(And no, there wouldn't be concerns with system requirements. Apple would have engineered a targeted version of Mac OS X specifically for this program.)
Did Steve Jobs offer to have OS X running on AMD chips? I presume that Apple already knew what processor the $100 laptop would have. I do not know the ins and outs of Apple's agreement with Intel, but I wonder how they feel about this. Still, since Apple is not actually manufacturing the laptop, I guess they can run their OS on whatever they want. Still, it is interesting to note that Apple would considering running OS X on AMD products.
The universal menubar provides a context menu that never moves.
Which was great when we had 9" monitors. Whether it is such a good idea when you have a 30" display, or multiple 20"+ displays is an arguable point. Saying you can just "fling your mouse" when the target is actually several feet away is really dubious.
Being the cynic that I am, I tend not to think that Apple had done research proving a fixed menu bar is the best for large displays. Instead they keep it around because it's a Mac visual trademark that distinguishes them from the competition.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
What, you mean like this?
If you think about it, GNUStep running on Darwin is already damn close to replicating OS X with Free Software. Sure, there's a few things missing (notably, Core*), but if OS X started getting really widespread adoption like this, those holes would be patched up quick.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The supposed recipients of these computers don't want something to tinker with...
...a computer they can actually USE...
Saying all users don't want to tinker is as dumb as saying that all users do want to tinker.
Being able to tinker with a device does not mean the device is not useful. If, using your example, a kid gets a cheap water pump and wants to modify it an any way - the addition of an internal purification filter (or whatever... I don't know enough about pumps to think of anything clever) for example - he will not be able to.
It's great to get something that just works and, if so motivated, be able to tinker with it to better address your personal needs. It may even increase its usefulness.
To use a computer tool, it should not be required to be able to "tinker" with it.
This is correct. But that's not what is being said. The OS should be "tinkerable"... that's not saying that tinkering is a requirement for using the computer, but a requirement for the OS. Whether the user tinkers or not is up to them.
The real story here has nothing to do with $100 laptops, Linux vs Mac OS X, or Open vs. Closed Source.
Steve Jobs proposed an arrangement under which Apple would allow computers other than its own to run Mac OS X.
Just this summer, Apple VP Phil Schiller was telling the media, "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac."
Now, this is a long way from selling boxed copies of OS X for installation on whitebox PCs, much less a bundling agreement with Dell...but still, it's a significant development. What other devious schemes might Steve Jobs have for OSX86?