Will MacIntel Kill Apple Open Source Efforts?

An anonymous reader writes in to say that "Rob Braun (OpenDarwin core developer claims Apple's open source efforts are now dead, because Apple is afraid of assisting OSx86 piracy. First, Apple withheld the source of cctools required to to build Darwin. Now it seems they are no longer releasing the source to OS X's xnu kernel. "

Comments

post-release fear.

[Travelsonic]

I guess the claims of piracy really hurting sales and technological progress really is only true when you factor in the senseless post-release/no-release fear.

PowerPC or Intel doesn't matter

[NaCh0]

Apple only looks out for itself. Anyone who looks at the company's history of openness can see this. This will be a repeat of the open PPC hardware debacle of several years ago. I can guarentee it.

Re:PowerPC or Intel doesn't matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, Apple has embraced the letter of open source but not the spirit.

Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[diamondsw]

So they missed a chunk of headers. It's happened before, and been fixed. I see no reason at all for Apple to get out of open sourcing Darwin. They won't include the TPM related kext's, of course, but the rest should be fine.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Raindance]

Yeah. The Intel move is pretty huge-- perhaps it'll take a little time for things to get back to normal with releasing sources for new things.

It would also be enlightening to read whether they're legally obligated to provide these sources.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[nocomment]

I dunno dood. It just wreaks of mklinux. I hope you're right though.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[clifyt]

Darwin isn't GPL'd or anything like that.

Its original source was licensed under BSD and then later released under an Apple license that was close to the BSD license -- but asked that you submit your changes back to Apple (or something similar).

As such, they are not legally obligated to release the sources in any way. They have only done so because they felt it was a good move on their part and would increase their valuation at the time (of which, the leaders may not think this is longer the case)...

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[peragrin]

Basically for what's in Darwin Apple doesn't have to release source code at all. Samba, Apache, Webkit(Safari's core) and various other pieces have to have the modified source released, but the kernel, drivers, and the entire BSD sub layer doesn't have to be released at all. that is why apple choose the BSD license to begin with. They don't have to give back changes, and can fuck the community.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Richard_at_work]

They don't have to give back changes, and can fuck the community.

The community licensed the code under the BSD license and therefor doesnt expect anything back, so how can Apple be 'fucking' them? Give over with the sense of entitlement, there are levels of freedom above what you use.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[jcr]

They have only done so because they felt it was a good move on their part and would increase their valuation at the time

Valuation never had anything to do with it. Releasing the Darwin sources was simply to make life easier for people developing drivers and other low-level code for OS X. Back in the NeXTSTEP days, it was quite a hassle to deal with showing your AT&T license before NeXT could show you the sources you needed.

-jcr

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, here's the problem. Neurosis, wild paranoia, and in fact the entire GNU/Open Source experience, is completely alien to a certain kind of person. Artists, fashion mavens, scientists, and other creative personalities will cut people a little slack for innocent mistakes, thereby demonstrating their sensitive, tasteful aesthetic. It's a rare instinct, this appreciation for beauty and truth; unimaginative squares haven't a prayer.

Dull little people, dutifully performing dull little tasks, should stick to Linux and Windows.
Staying cool is for different thinkers.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Frank Palermo]

Well, it may just be a mistake... but it's rather odd that if you look at the Darwin source code made available on Apple's site, you'll find the Darwin kernel ("xnu") is present in the PPC source for both OS X 10.4.4 and 10.4.5, but is missing from the x86 source for both of those. I highly doubt the two kernels are built from identical source code. From what I've read, some amount of TPM and/or EFI dependency is built into the OS X/Intel kernel itself, and that fellow-whose-name-it-is-apparently-a-DMCA-violatio n-to-mention had to heavily modify the kernel to get OS X booting on generic hardware. If the kernel source was identical between PPC and x86, a freshly compiled kernel from the Darwin source code should have made for a fairly simple drop-in replacement job, but it didn't.

It's not a smoking gun of course (and I'm no expert on the architecture of OS X), but it does look to me like Apple is withholding Darwin source code in an attempt to frustrate OS X hacking efforts.

-Frank

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Xabraxas]

This is exaclty why I prefer the GPL license. People who create GPL software cannot just one day stop giving source code back to the community. Those who have relied on this source code are now screwed. It just goes to show that BSD licensed software is not dependable in this respect. You can always count on GPL source code and if you don't get it you have legal recourse.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Richard_at_work]

You still have the last version of the code you downloaded, whats missing? The codebase Apple forked Darwin from still exists and is out there, what have they removed from you? Or are you saying that others should be responsable for keeping your codebase as feature rich as possible?

By using the codebase that Apple forked from, you would gain the same headstart as Apple did, so what obligation do they have to you?

You can 'prefer' any license you want, but dont act all pompus when someone else exercises their own freedom and licenses their software under a more liberal license than you would like.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Releasing the Darwin sources was simply to make life easier for people developing drivers"

And that doesn't add value to the company?

As far as I can tell, Darwin was never intended to be a true stand alone OS by any means -- just as a proof of concept box that was entirely for development (regardless of what the OpenDarwin guys state -- I think they are just having fun earning their geek cred).

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[diegocgteleline.es]

I highly doubt the two kernels are built from identical source code.

For the architecture-dependent code, sure. For the vast majority of the rest of the code (filesystem, tcp/ip stack, vm) no.

I looked a week ago at the mac os x 10.4.5 ppc sources and x86 sources. A wekk ago, there were just sources for the things that GPL forces apple to release - gcc, bash, etc - but you wouldn't find anything else, not only the kernel but userspace libraries made by apple aswell.

Today, it looks like they've added userspace libraries like "libsecurity" and stuff. Maybe they're too busy with the transition and they're releasing it slowly, who knows. But if that's the case, it'd be interesting to have a note from apple explaining that the x86 sources would take a while to release. And as you said, they aren't forced to release the TPM modules.

Anyway, it's not that open darwin has been too succesful....sure, there're people using it (including slashdot readers) but it doesn't seems like open darwin has been as succesful as, say, opensolaris.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Hes Nikke]

fellow-whose-name-it-is-apparently-a-DMCA-violatio n-to-mention

what maxxus? </harry potter>

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[TheRaven64]

Its original source was licensed under BSD and then later released under an Apple license that was close to the BSD license -- but asked that you submit your changes back to Apple (or something similar).

Sorry, wrong. Mach and BSD were both BSD-licensed. NeXT added a huge amount of proprietary stuff (IOKit springs to mind) to their kernel as well as parts from these two kernels. Apple added more when they made Rhapsody and later OS X. Eventually they released this code under a non-Free license. Their latest license is Free Software, but has a few nasty lines in it (like, you agree to allow Apple to use any of your patents if you use APSL code, as I recall). This is a long way away from the BSD-license. It is non-viral and per-file, which is nice, but it imposes significant additional points which prevent it from being GPL compatible.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenSolaris has been successful? I'm not being a dick, I'm genuinely surprised. I haven't heard of anyone using it.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[peragrin]

If the Community doesn't expect any code back then why are they complaining?

I can see if it was of a license in which they had to give out the modified code(the GPL, APL, whatever Webcore is under) but the kernel? That's BSD based and the community was complaining about it. The issue has been resolved(a minor error) but if that's the case why were they complaining to begin with. After all it's just BSD code.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[larry bagina]

People who create GPL software cannot just one day stop giving source code back to the community.

Sure they can. They can stop providing updates and new code, just like with any other license. Existing code will be unaffected, but that applies to BSD and other open source licenses as well.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[tyrione]

Clarification: I/O Kit (C++) device driver set of frameworks was developed after the merger and from day one was on both Intel and PPC. If one is going to make claims it's always best to get the timeline correct.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Richard_at_work]

Simple, different communities. Theres still no entitlement to the code.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[jcr]

And that doesn't add value to the company?

Not in any way that Wall Street would ever notice, no.

As far as I can tell, Darwin was never intended to be a true stand alone OS by any means

Not by Apple, certainly.

-jcr

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[TheRaven64]

The original IOKit was Objective-C. The code currently known as IOKit was an Embedded-C++ (not full C++ - no namespaces or templates, for example) replacement that was created for performance reasons.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Sorry, wrong."

Dude, fuck the hell off.

I'm sick of slashdot fucks throwing their weight around as if they were some sort of expert.

"Sorry, wrong". I specifically said "(or something similar)" -- which this is similar -- its very similar to the BSD license -- except Apple gets the rights to whatever you do. Past that, you can put it out however you want. But Apple gets the rights too. I said similar, not identical (either in spirit or text)...are you slashweenies this fucking stupid?

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Gentlewhisper]

Well, here's the problem. Neurosis, wild paranoia, and in fact the entire GNU/Open Source experience, is completely alien to a certain kind of person. Artists [atspace.com], fashion mavens [atspace.com], scientists [atspace.com], and other [atspace.com] creative [atspace.com] personalities [atspace.com] will cut people a little slack for innocent mistakes, thereby demonstrating their sensitive [atspace.com], tasteful [atspace.com] aesthetic [atspace.com]. It's a rare instinct, this appreciation for beauty [atspace.com] and truth [atspace.com]; unimaginative squares haven't a prayer.

Dull little people, dutifully performing dull little tasks, should stick to Linux [atspace.com] and Windows [atspace.com].
Staying cool is for different thinkers [atspace.com].

Whatever, just don't dirty my Bentley during your begging (working) hours when you retire with a garage full of overpriced Macs.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Cyno]

I see no reason at all for Apple to get out of open sourcing Darwin.

I see a reason. Why pretend to be open source when you're not?

Why does Sun, Microsoft and Apple pretend they're open source organization? Is it so they can trick ignorant users to give them more money?

Do you honestly believe they care about open source? Why?

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Not if they distribute it in binary form. Then they are required to make ths source code availalbe to all third parties.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they are the copyright holders for the code, they're not forced to continue providing it under the GPL - they can just relicense it under whatever other license they want whenever they feel like it (of course, exactly like BSD code, you'll still have the old GPL releases, so it's not different in any way there). It's only if they've got so many contributions from others, and the copyright for those additions wasn't assigned to them, that they'll not be able to relicense it under something else (unless they remove the affected code, or get the permission of the other authors).

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Anonymous Coward]

So do you maintain that whole gallery full of self-absorbed trust-fund mac whores just to troll about it on teh intarweb?

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[babbling]

Well, they are being fucked by Apple, but they gave Apple permission to do it to them.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[budgenator]

Wrong, wrong, wrong, you are not required to provide source code to any third party. The only people who have a right to the source code are the people to whom I've provided binaries, if I let third parties have access to the source code it's simpley a courtesy not an obligation. I'm sure that distributed GPL'd code doesn't indenture me in pertetuity, to provide source code to every Tom, Dick and Harry that might come along.

I can easily satisfy the source code relese requirement by bundleing it with the binarys; I'm not sure what happens if I give you the source and you proceed to lose them; you're probably shit outa luck if I want to be an asshole. If you distribute GPL'd code you got from me, you're responsible for the source to your distributees, not me.

It's customary for non-distributing developers to contribute any patches and modifications upstream to the developers from whom you've recieved any GPL'd code from as a courtesy to the developers and the greater community, but it's not a requirement. The system works because we tend to play nice with each other out of respect, rather than bludgeon each other with legal technicalities. If you need to bludgeon somebody legally, or are anticipateily being bludgeoned legally, hire a real lawyer.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[dgatwood]

I/O Kit has never been Objective C. You're thinking of its predecessor, DriverKit.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[dgatwood]

Ack! My poor home DSL connection! Thanks a lot....

David
(keeper of the domain)

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[jbolden]

what have they removed from you? Or are you saying that others should be responsable for keeping your codebase as feature rich as possible?

What they have removed from him is a code-base that is actually useful. Its pretty clear that Darwin in and of itself was not a great Unix, not even the best choice of a BSD. However darwin was the single most commonly deployed Unix; and throwing in binary compatibility its an order of magnitude larger than anything else.

The Darwin platform is evolving. By not releasing the evolving platform Apple is effectively closing it off and making it fully proprietary. That is an act that is hostile to the open source community.

This is a perfect example of the problem with the BSD license. Sure Darwin associated with OSX 10.1 will remain open source forever. Who cares? The version that actually matters is closed source.

______

Nota bene: I'm assuming for the purpose of debate this closing is occurring. I'm not sure whether it is or it isn't.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but your post, and in fact that entire website, "scene", and mind-numbing, conforming, immature, insecure bullshit makes me want to puke, literally a rancid feeling brewing in my intestines. Die. Please.

If you're for real, you have more problems than you'll ever know.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Eivind Eklund]

Keeping binary compatibility is a fairly small problem. I'm a FreeBSD developer - we've got four or five different binary APIs. Our own, Linux, SCO, Alpha (Digital Unix), MS-DOS, ... NetBSD has more. Maintaining these during continued development is a non-issue. It's a bit of effort, but really a non-issue. Adding support for more stuff is also generally fairly easy.

A problem that's an order of magnitude larger is drivers; that can get really sticky with new hardware. Fortunately, I think the OSX architecture may avoid the problem - assuming no DRM on drivers.

Eivind.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Eivind Eklund]

No, you can't always count on GPL source.

Let's say Oracle buys MySQL. MySQL is then dead for the open source community - at least to the same degree as OpenDarwin may be now, and probably more.

What this goes to show is that relying on an open source project that's primarily developed inhouse at a single company can screw you almost as easily as relying on closed source. The process is important, not just the license.

I'm very tempted to insert a suitable flame about relying on and repeating propaganda here. With words that my mother told me not to use. Since I'm a polite person, I'll let you think up your own instead.

Eivind.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the APSL if anyone wants to read it.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[jnf]

Many components of their OS, are however under GPL'd code, they have a lot of code borrowed from various KDE projects, in fact if I had to guess actual numbers, I'd say more of their backend userspace code is external source than written at apple, and in fact, a quick grab of The darwin 10.4.5 x86 source code list run through grep and wc -l reveals the following:

Projects under the APSL: 112 Projects under 'Other' licenses: 135

Without really looking into the subject, I'd say that at least in userspace, more of OSX is GPL than not.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[jbolden]

First off the binary compatability issue was mainly directed at the Linux family (the order of magnitude comment) that doesn't have it at all. Binaries for Ubuntu will not run on Redhat and vice versa. In other words from a binary perspective there is no "Linux" buth rather Linux is a family for a few dozen different OSes. FreeBSD is nowhere near .1th the size of OSX in terms of number of users.

As for binary compatability in practice I find it unlikely. IMHO the only people who really do a good job on binary compatability are Microsoft and Sun and they don't say its easy. They spend billions getting it.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Eivind Eklund]

Technical discussions are not meant to be won - they are meant to find out the truth. To help you improve your skill at this, I'll detail below how you are doing rethorical moves that get in the way of this:

] You're changing the frame of reference - you were talking about continued OSX binary compatibility. I used FreeBSD as an example of the workload. This is a case where I actually have almost a decade of experience as part an operating systems vendor, including how to do binary compatibility for completely foreign operating systems, and how to do binary compatibility from release to release.

Second, the number of users of FreeBSD compared to OSX is a red herring. We were talking about the workload of binary compatibility compared to the workload for other parts of operating system maintenance. This is related almost exclusively to the "width" of the call gates you have to maintain. The number of calls, the normalization of the parameters, etc. Good engineering can keep this fairly small, especially for the kernel/userland gating. The BSD gating Apple has inherited is fairly decent, and keeping compatibility *at this layer* should be a fairly small task, compared to the rest of the stuff that's necessary to do.

WRT binary compatibility in practice: I've had no problem using programs compiled for FreeBSD 2.x and upwards; I think 1.x programs also worked, not sure about that. There's been some explictly unsupported APIs that hasn't kept compatibility, most of those have since been stabilized.

Your only relevant argument was the Sun and Microsoft cost. Unfortunately, it is also targetted at another problem (but without experience in the area, I don't think you could be expected to see that). Sun and Microsoft does not spend billons keeping compatibility in this layer. I know Microsoft spend really large amounts overall, even if I'd be surprised if it was billions. That's due to Microsoft's choice of initial engineering, driven by their business model. I highly doubt Sun spends anywhere near that much - instead, they carefully engineer for this up front. And again, the kernel layer isn't where the problems are - the problems are in the libraries.

BTW, I just thought of an advantage OpenDarwin has in the area, apart from having a fairly narrowly designed kernel/userland gate. This is an open source OS with a specifically targetted for *those that modify source code*. This means that it is much less critical that the backwards compatibility be perfect than e.g. for Windows - instead, it's possible to just add good debug tools for compatibility problems, and have the beta-testers which tend use the system for actually doing stuff report/fix problems as they come up. It's not ideal, yet it offload the cost to somebody that can probably handle it much much cheaper than MS, overall. (MS explictly tests thousands of old applications inhouse, as they have to keep very careful compatibility for a changing set of libraries.)

Eivind.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[jbolden]

I wasn't really trying to be rhetorical. I was pointing out you missed the point of the original comment. However darwin was the single most commonly deployed Unix; and throwing in binary compatibility its an order of magnitude larger than anything else.

In other words.
1) If # of users of Darwin is A
# of users of any other unix is B
where A > B.

2) If we define two people to be using the same Unix if and only if their systems are binary compatible with each other (rather than source compatible) then
If # of users of Darwin is A
# of users of any other unix is B
where A > 10B.

The main point was never about the difficulty of binary compatibility but rather a statement about the popularity of Darwin. Further the discussion wasn't technical it was political I was arguing why something was good in the sense of being moral not good in the sense of being effective. Those two meanings of good are often opposites of one another.

Now your 2nd reply is clearly technical about why binary compatibility isn't so difficult to achieve. I'm not sure what you believe yourself to be debating We were talking about the workload of binary compatibility compared to the workload for other parts of operating system maintenance . When? I am kind of at a loss to know what you want me to respond to since I think you may be mixing threads up in your mind. I'll respond to the technical points but I don't know the context

_______________

Most of what you wrote I agree with.

However...

The number billions came from Microsoft. They indicated their cost for compatibility work (that included: testing, assisting other vendors, old hardware which mean writing drivers, writing custom applications specific patch code... for the XP transition was (mainly getting Win98->XP) was $8.4b. They may be lying but that's my source.

Sun had said that they believe Linux will need to get binary compatibility to compete in the enterprise space and that this will cost IBM and HP billions.

2) I think you are limiting the definition of binary compatibility in a way that most end users wouldn't accept. For them libraries and even commonly available applications would be included in the "call gate" (I like that term BTW).

OK I'll let you respond from here since....

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[John Harrison]

What!?!? Where on earth would you get that idea?

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the tone of the article linked in this story, it sounds a hell of a lot like the community WAS expecting Apple to give back and Apple being Apple, they haven't.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Xabraxas]

If that happens with something GPL licensed then they can no longer rely on the community to submit patches and make improvements. With the BSD license Apple can keep leaching off the community. The GPL is a two way street. With the BSD license, big corporations still have all the power.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Eivind Eklund]

For Linux overall, I agree with Sun's estimate. For Darwin, I think it's much less of a problem. Darwin has a much more tightly controlled development environment, and can achieve binary compatibility much much cheaper. And as I said, I believe MS is paying for old "shoddy" engineering (which probably was right business-wise at that point.)

And what I disagreed with was your claim that it's "effectively making it fully proprietary". I don't think there will be that large issues with running a different kernel and keeping binary compatibility. We (FreeBSD) do so for e.g. Linux binaries. Libraries are a different beast - keeping up with library development is probably effectively impossible.

Eivind.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Eivind Eklund]

Since I am the community (I'm a FreeBSD developer) and you are not, I get to define "leeching" (and spell it right).

My friends Mike, Jordan, and the rest of the guys at Apple are welcome to use the stuff I write. And if they use the stuff I write, they're more likely to create stuff that's useable as part of stuff I work on. And they do so. Even when my friends at Whistle Communications (now a part of IBM) branched the entire OS and went proprietary, they were contributing a bunch back, for a series of reasons. Which they couldn't have done if our codebase was licensed differently.

The GPL isn't a two way street - it's a "don't go here painting the fences, or we'll shoot you" sign at the top of the street. The BSD license is a "come on in and participate if you want to" sign, where a company may or may not paint the fences - however, they're at least in the street.

Eivind.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[jbolden]

OK so let me repeat so I get what you were trying to argue here:

Darwin has gone closed source A project lets call it "OSY" is created to use another kernel (we'll say FreeBSD's) in place of the Darwin Kernel. The idea will be to emulate the Darwin Kernel using an open source kernel. The libraries will just come right from OSX itself so they won't be a problem.

Is that correct? And if so:
a) Your argument is that creating OSY is easy (we will define easy as under 100 man years)

b) What advantage does OSY offer over OSX for the end user? For Darwin not to be "fully propietary" the OSY version needs to be better than OSX.

______

I'm assuming that OSY is easier (see definition of easy above) than FreeBSD actually being able to run OSX apps. If the applications can be ported directly to FreeBSD then the situation could be slightly worse than OSX because well FreeBSD is: crossplatform and cost free.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Eivind Eklund]

Using FreeBSD'ss kernel doesn't make sense. You're aware that it's notpossible to retract the present open license to the Darwin kernel?

In my opinion, the relevant kernel would be the open Darwin kernel, which is what is presently used in OSX. If a proprietary branch is made, it is only necessary to keep the open source codebase compatible.

I would estimate the continual cost of keeping compatibility in itself at less than half a programmer, probably significantly less, assuming reasonable development speed for the kernel. Reasonable development speed for the kernel, on the other hand, requires at least 10x that (probably significantly more, it depends quite a bit on the programmers and the context).

That's why I said that I believe binary compatibility isn't the important part of the problem.

Eivind.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[jbolden]

Oh OK now you are addressing my original post. We are getting into the whole BSD/GPL debate. Since you are with the FreeBSD team I think you may be a good person to have this with.

You're aware that it's notpossible to retract the present open license to the Darwin kernel?

I'd argue that it is very possible to effectively retract the open license. In other words assume Darwin 10.5 were
a) closed source
b) had a major change
c) was linked in with versions of libraries that wouldn't work under 10.4
d) made it hard to reverse engineer what has happening

I don't think the open source community could keep up. IBM wasn't able to keep up with Microsoft's changes to the Windows's libraries from Windows 3.0 -> 3.1 -> 3.1 for workgroups -> NT 3.51 under exactly these circumstances (they had rights to 3.0 source).

Lets take the 10.3 -> 10.4 changes for example and assume that Darwin had closed at 10.3

1) The introduction of the KPI's. Just getting end user descriptions of these would be nowhere near enough to implement them. What about if they had "hidden arguments" that were released to specific developers. So Adobe used stuff that wasn't part of the published spec.

2) Complex kernel locks. Now admittedly FreeBSD has had this for a long time itself so no question they know how to implement it. But its a whole different task to:
a) do it to another piece of software
b) do it in a way that maintains compatability with other apps.
Note that this was vital for the introduction of the dual core systems. Without it Darwin wouldn't have run on Apple's new hardware

3) A 64 bit subsystem. Obviously this is like reverse engineering a moderately complex 64 bit closed source app

4) And now since the kernel was closed source lets assume that Corevide and Coreaudio are directly in the kernel.

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Eivind Eklund]

NOTE: I'm assuming that there won't be DRM features that directly handle libraries and block them from running on any non-original kernel. That could be a problem (ie, require cracking the copy protection on each library).

I don't think (C) and (D) is likely to be doable without screwing up the debugging possibilities of normal developers. It is definately doable in a shared address space system like Windows 3 and with full library change. I don't think it's reasonably doable in a system with segregated address spaces.

I think we will always be able to get hold of a binary of the kernel *somehow* - even with really heavy DRM this should be doable by using the extreme techniques, like putting chips in liquid nitrogen, using electron microscopes to read out registers, etc. The kernel is actually a fairly small program. The FreeBSD kernel is about 4MB - I assume the OSX kernel is about the same. When I was a cracker on the Amiga (half my life ago - how time flies) I did complete reverse engineering of programs of that size (to compilable, commented source code). To find the interfaces, it would only be necessary to reverse engineer small parts of that.

As for giving out private APIs to some developers: I would think this to generally be too expensive, and as I said, reverse engineering is reasonable.

Lockdown is a very icky task. It's an extreme amount of work. I don't think it would be particularly hard to keep compatibility while doing it if you had a prior example, it's just that it's an extreme amount of work. And it's the kind of work I put into the 10x more part of maintaining a kernel,

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[jbolden]

No question. Since Apple manufactures the hardware they could, if they wanted, have a DRM scheme well beyond anything Microsoft would dream of. I implemented a scheme about 4 years ago for an X86 based system that assumed people were willing to break the machine to crack the system and our guess was still weeks of works for any hacker.

I didn't understand how shared vs. segregated memory makes such a large difference in terms of reverse engineering. Could you elaborate?

Re:Or perhaps it's a mistake?

[Eivind Eklund]

While I can't say anything specifically, security estimates (including mine, I think) often end up overblown. Some friends did breaks of DVD region protection for resale (while it was legal here), and the systems that were estimated at weeks according to inside sources usually took them 2-3 evenings. They would replace CPUs with probes (ICE), snooped buses, snarf all code and try to run it on a simulator, etc - whatever it took. They were a highly experienced embedded systems team.. They didn't have the expertise or equipment to attack things that were fully embedded in silisium, I think, but anything external seemed to be taken in much shorter times than the estimates, often by doing something unexpected. (Partial power failures create many interesting security breaches, for instance.)

Back to topic: In the split memory model, the data structures tend to be much simpler, because data is copied. Also, a call across a kernel/userland callgate is fairly expensive (hundreds if not thousands of cycles) so the calls tend to do much more, or you'll get abmyssal performance. Both of these tend to make things easier to reverse engineer - you don't have to reverse engineer 5000 different calls that pass complex structures around, you can instead reverse engineer one call at a time.

Also, the calls are gated through a specific system, so the arguments are somewhat normalized. It may be possible to go around each of these things, yet I think that would cost a lot of engineering complexity.

Eivind.

But it's still just Linux with a better UI, right?

[defile]

Exactly why I resisted the pressure to abandon Linux for MacOS X on the desktop. It's not Linux with a better UI, it's a proprietary system with candy coating.

And its true colors finally come out.

Will the cool hackers still dig it?

Their choice

[FidelCatsro]

Apples license allows them to do this , however it is a large PR disaster towards many OSS developers .Sadly I doubt most people will know or care.
It is a shame really , I was looking forward to a Darwin based OSS-OS

Re:Their choice

[Anonymous Coward]

"Zionist means you believe in the existence of Israel , not the states actions"

you need an apostrophe in "states"
"state's"

Not being a grammar nazi, just pointing it out for you to fix.

Re:Their choice

[Anonymous Coward]

Cheers ;) , I didn't notice that slip

Re:Their choice

[TheRaven64]

I was looking forward to a Darwin based OSS-OS

Seriously, why? Darwin is about the last kernel I would choose for real-world usage. I use it on a daily basis, and only put up with it because the GUI layer built on top of it is nice. Get rid of Quartz/Aqua, and you're left with an over-engineered kernel that has delusions of being a microkernel. It has all of the performance problems that first-generation microkernels had and none of the stability advantages. I am used to getting a minimum of a 2x speed increase when I move my (POSIX) code from OS X to a FreeBSD box - and the OS X box I've been using has better hardware.

If Launchd is that important to you, I suggest you finish the port to FreeBSD. Or take a look at Solaris' SMF, which gives similar functionality.

Re:Their choice

[ylon]

Hey, I've deliberated, for a few years now, of putting a translation layer on top of linux or FBSD so as to run Mac OS X on top of that and do away with the xnu/darwin underbelly. I've been pretty disgusted at traditional xnu/mach kernel performance as it stands. Any thoughts on that or anyone working on it? Perhaps a few of us ought to start working on this.

Re:Their choice

[TheRaven64]

You should take a look at NetBSD. There is a partially-working Darwin compatibility layer built on top of the existing Mach compatibility layer. It is not finished, but it can run a few things (XDarwin).

Re:Their choice

[ylon]

Very interesting, thanks.

This is surprising how?

[WindBourne]

I am not so certain that this is true, but if so, so what? The license allows for this. It was certain that apple did OSS while it benefits them, but not when it could hurt them.

I would guess that if they do not support OSS and it ends up hurting them, they will then do a Sun and re-open it. Sun did the same with Solaris X86.

Re:This is surprising how?

[Zemplar]

[throws gas on the fire]

This is because Apple is moving from Darwin to Solaris 10 x86 as its GUI code base!





Okay, okay, not stop spreading nasty rumors and get back to work!

Re:This is surprising how?

[nova_ostrich]

Nah, I heard they made a deal with Microsoft, and we're going to see the innovation from Vista finally come to the Mac...

Re:This is surprising how?

[dropdead]

In truth they are moving to a SCO codebase.

Re:This is surprising how?

[Zemplar]

Click here for [yet] another awesome piece of Microsoft engineering excellence.

Re:This is surprising how?

[AKAImBatman]

This is because Apple is moving from Darwin to Solaris 10 x86

The scary part is that switching from Mach to the Solaris kernel sounds like an awefully good idea to me. Must... get... OpenStep for Solaris... out... of... head...

Thanks for planting screwy ideas in my head, ya bum! :-P

Re:This is surprising how?

[jcr]

Careful, you almost made Jon Schwartz cream his jeans there...

-jcr

Re:This is surprising how?

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, if this really happened it wouldn't suck. solaris 10 has quite a lot of good stuff in it (DTrace!!!).

Re:This is surprising how?

[KaeloDest]

Definately not surprising. Now with the X86 build being public, OS X is Yet Another Unix. I would expect them to keep "Open" the parts of the kit that benefit them but why not keep MoBo level stuff *sekrt*
          Like I said before if the Maxxus Hacks were released as a shareware option Like Ryan Rempel's Unsupported OS X tool, then I think apple would not have smiled but might have turned a blind eye. But by making pre-patched 'Don't buy the OS' steal-me.torrents he forced Apple to behave like Apple Computer Corp. must.
          OTOH with Knoppix and Other linuxes AND Fink plus other tools running native in the IcBM (Intel chip Based Macs) units why is OpenDarwin x86 even remotely relevant?

Re:This is surprising how?

[Reverend528]

It makes sense. Aqua is pretty much CDE with drop shadows. I'm kind of suprised there was never a law suit between the two.

Re:This is surprising how?

[Zemplar]

"actually, if this really happened it wouldn't suck. solaris 10 has quite a lot of good stuff in it (DTrace!!!)."

I totally concur that Solaris is fantastic but this idea doesn't, as you so elegantly phrased, "suck". Imagine all of the goodness of Solaris with a easy to use GUI for those that want/need it. Then again, [this is the part that doesn't "suck"] all of the CLI tools and Solaris specific features and advantages would remain intact! Very cool if you ask me.

Another cool thing. Users start with the GUI and are immediately productive and can learn or master the OS's full potential at a later time, IF they desire...not because it's necessary to do anything useful with the OS.

Re:This is surprising how?

[drouse]

No, not the Solaris GUI ... that's too simple: They are moving to the UltraSparc CPU, with the HURD kernel, a Linux file system layout and user space and then the GUI is the new "iApple" which is basically WINE with some stuff thrown on top to make it look like the Mac OS X Quartz GUI.

The motherbord will have a Transmeta co-processor with software from Infinium Labs for the DRM ... anyway that's what I heard.

Re:This is surprising how?

[rthille]

Did you ever actually work on OpenSTEP for Solaris? I know a couple of people who worked for Sun on it, and it was apparently the ugly step-child as far a Sun was concerned, and Steve played the 'but you only licensed v1, you have to pay us more for the updated version' which really 'Steveed' it...

Re:This is surprising how?

[misleb]

...even if they didn't intend to!

Re:This is surprising how?

[Zemplar]

It may have once been an ugly step child, however, "Snapple" (as some have coined this idea) could make great in-roads into the corporate environment. Perhaps the Sun/Apple collaboration could allow terms that Apple serves the Home/Home Office users and Sun serves (and sells support contracts for) the large corporate users.

"A synergistic Win/Win"

Re:This is surprising how?

[speed_of_light]

we're going to see the innovation from Vista finally come to the Mac...

Yay! All hail Mac OS X 10.7 Fat Bloated Tabby!

Re:This is surprising how?

[jcr]

Aqua is pretty much CDE with drop shadows.

Oh, come on now.. Aqua's got room for improvement, but comparing it to CDE is a tad harsh.

-jcr

Re:This is surprising how?

[Anonymous Coward]

And Apple will still sell a load of them.

Re:This is surprising how?

[Cyno]

I just wish these fence sitters would quit opening their source code.

They have enough to worry about their competitors suing them over patents, no need to expand that liability with copyright.

Besides, I'd personally be much happier if they didn't try to compete with Free Software, which will win no matter how long they drag this out. Instead of admitting that Free Software and Open Source were right, they're trying to pretend proprietary software practices were right while leveraging the advantages of open source. Only they keep losing ground. Why is that? Because they're prime candidates for AA. Or Capitalists Anonymous, anyway.

All I know is I will not be giving Sun, Apple or Microsoft any more money... but I would never expect the average slashdot reader to hold corporations accountable for their actions, they're too spineless to think different.

Re:This is surprising how?

[drix]

John C. Dvorak, fancy seeing you here!

Re:This is surprising how?

[rthille]

Oh, I think that the solaris core is probably better than the current mach mongrel, especially given my experiences with software RAID on OS-X. I just don't think that OpenStep on Solaris (as it really existed) is the nirvana you were hoping for :-)

Sour Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Open source is/was the coolest thing about OSX. Without it, its just a pretty operating system with limited market share. Apple better not get too greedy - iPods won't be around forever.

Re:Sour Apple

[Overly Critical Guy]

Uh, maybe in your twisted niche Slashdot world...for most people, the coolest thing about OS X is its interface and top-notch frameworks. Who gives a damn if the Darwin source is available? Have you ever actually needed or used it?

Slashdot posters have a tendency to think their concerns represent everybody's concerns. Kind of like how we always see "Does it play Ogg?" posted, when nobody actually cares about Ogg.

Re:Sour Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

..for most people, the coolest thing about OS X is its interface and top-notch frameworks...

Slashdot posters have a tendency to think their concerns represent everybody's concerns

Oh the irony. How many people use Macs again?

Re:Sour Apple

[linguae]

Open source is/was the coolest thing about OSX

I disagree. The OSS components of OS X are pretty insignificant compared to the proprietary components of OS X (Aqua, Carbon, Cocoa, graphics toolkits, etc.). The core of the OS is just BSD and Mach. People like OS X because of what is running on top of BSD+Mach; the interface and ease of use. If Linux and BSD were just as easy to set up out of the box, and supported all of the applications and hardware that they needed, then BSD and Linux would be much more common. *nix has improved tremendously in the past few years, however, so we will see more *nix desktops in the future.

Re:Sour Apple

[Blinocac200sx]

Obviously you cared, or you wouldn't have read and replied.

Re:Sour Apple

[Valdrax]

Um. Thank you for... contributing?

Re:Sour Apple

[gb506]

More people drink Jim Beam than Van Winkle, but that don't make it right by a long sight. The masses may content themselves with uniform mediocrity, but that doesn't mean I have to...

Re:Sour Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

The OSS components of OS X are pretty insignificant compared to the proprietary components of OS X

Vader, is that you?

Re:Sour Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not the point. The point was that someone was criticizing slashdotters for thinking that their concerns are the same concerns of the greater population without realizing that they (the slashdotters) are a niche population. Like when someone complains that something doesn't play ogg and thinking it's the biggest dealbreaker ever when most people just don't care (which of course says nothing about how good a codec ogg is).

This same person in the same post is arguing about what the coolest things in OSX are and why most people like it, forgetting about the fact that Apple users are a niche population and that most people neither like or even care about OSX.

Re:Sour Apple

[gb506]

This same person in the same post is arguing about what the coolest things in OSX are and why most people like it, forgetting about the fact that Apple users are a niche population and that most people neither like or even care about OSX

It's not possible for a person to like or dislike something they've never seen or used. To do so would be irrational. The not caring part, however, is due to the same principal. Personally, I've never met a Windows user who wasn't intrigued by OSX upon seeing it in action. The reverse simply isn't true...

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[Rolan]

BSD actually, not Linux.

Does anything ever kill anything?

[sootman]

We see these stories all the time, I'm just wondering how often these predictions come true. One thing we know for sure is the iPod has survived many attempts on its life.

Re:Does anything ever kill anything?

[blibbler]

Well, video killed the radio star.

Re:Does anything ever kill anything?

[TeknoHog]

Well, for starters, Steve Ballmer f*cking kills Google, and if that isn't enough, then there's Chuck Norris...

Re:Does anything ever kill anything?

[maczilla]

No, video just turned the radio star into fat, balding, conservative men (and Howard Stern).

Re:Does anything ever kill anything?

[Anonymous Coward]

...and empty-v killed rock and roll.

(MRC="botulism")

Re:Does anything ever kill anything?

[soft_guy]

Well, video killed the radio star.

Tell it to Howard Stern.

Re:Does anything ever kill anything?

[violent.ed]

And I shot the DJ, and everybody saw .. meh?

Code Drama Queens

[maggard]

For all of those crowing "I told you so!" the files are all where they should be, still under an open license. There was apparently a hiccup which Apple fixed as soon as they found out about the oversight.

You may now move on to other pumped-up / days-old non-dramas.

Re:Code Drama Queens

[javax]

no they are not - just by having a look at the tarball listing obviously didn't tell you so...

Try to find e. g. the XNU sources.

Re:Code Drama Queens

[hkb]

Uhm, no they're not. Show me where I can go download 10.4.4/10.4.5 XNU kernel source that is compilable on Intel Macs.

Re:Code Drama Queens

[Anonymous Coward]

Anonymous Cowards filtered. If their words aren't worth so much as a nom de plume why should I value them any mor

Your signature doesn't fit.

Re:Code Drama Queens

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone modded this up 5 Informative, and the guy didn't even provide a link to support his claim?? Way to go, Pro-Apple mods!

Re:Code Drama Queens

[mlewan]

Comparing the lists at http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.4. 5.ppc/ and http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.4. 5.x86/ it turns out there are quite a few things that are stil not available for x86.

I shed the tiniest of tears

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, I don't care too much about the kernel. I would however love to see open standards for NextStep/Cocoa, and then maybe more people would use it. It is really nice, but Jobs can't have his cake and eat it too.

Re:I shed the tiniest of tears

[turgid]

Honestly, I don't care too much about the kernel. I would however love to see open standards for NextStep/Cocoa, and then maybe more people would use it. It is really nice, but Jobs can't have his cake and eat it too.

You're a decade late

There's a free-as-in-speech implementation right here

Re:I shed the tiniest of tears

[minus_273]

the funny part about that post is that the poster didnt know that and just blindlyu said more people would use it if it were open. guess what? no one uses gnustep.

Re:I shed the tiniest of tears

[INeededALogin]

never use absolute values when posting to Slashdot. "Never", "No One", "Nobody", "Always" will just get you into trouble. Why, becaue as of 5 minutes ago... I have downloaded gnustep and I am using it for my own devious purposes.

Now, I understand what you meant, but a lil search shows that at least some people are using it:

apps

The most popular application to use it would probably be Window Maker.

Re:I shed the tiniest of tears

[minus_273]

considering i do cocoa and gnustep development and actually post on the gnustep groups, I could have told you that. However, look at how much GTK and QT development there is an compare it to gnustep. The problem with gnustep is you need gnustep to run any applications it is not just a tool kit. It's not like running evolution on kde without gnome.

Re:I shed the tiniest of tears

[minus_273]

"The most popular application to use it would probably be Window Maker."

Window maker doesnt actually use gnustep..

Re:I shed the tiniest of tears

[INeededALogin]

I stand corrected:-) but... it is a friend

Re:I shed the tiniest of tears

[jbolden]

If you like the good ideas from OpenStep:

1) Objective C vs. C++
2) A drag and drop in UI builder
3) An integrated application scripting language
4) An application dock and configurable file manager with a column view ...

I can think of another alternative. IMHO millions of people uses GNUStep for all practical purposes. They just like Apple's implementation more than Paul Kunz's.

Re:I shed the tiniest of tears

[minus_273]

the real problem with gnustep is not gnustep it is GCC there is no objective-C++ compiler on non Mac platforms and it makes it very annoying porting applications from cocoa. GCC does not seem to be interested in accpeting objective-C++.

Re:I shed the tiniest of tears

[jbolden]

I think I may be ignorant here but as far as I understand it,

GCC works by:

1) For language X create a parse tree
2) For platform Y take a parse tree and convert it to a binary executable.

Clearly the Objective C -> parse tree stuff is platform independent and the
parse tree -> executable stuff is there fine for x86.

So what am I missing?

cctools is now released

[dmoen]

I RTFA, and I saw this in the email thread about cctools:

>>>I was amazed to find that the gas sources had been split out of cctools, so they could be provided in accordance with the GPL, but no other part of cctools was made available. So I never did get an answer to my question.

>>I see today a much more populated source tree for x86.
>>Thank you to everyone responsible.

>Indeed, I also would like to pass along my thanks, since I was one of the people to comment on this with my concern before.

Doug Moen

We need a "much ado about nothing" tag

[C. E. Sum]

Which would fit perfectly in this story.

A minor problem is blown out of all proprortion, and it's the end of open source on OSX-x86?

Re:We need a "much ado about nothing" tag

[guet]

I think perhaps 'As you like it', would be more appropriate, given some of the crowing comments about candy-coated proprietary OSs in the threads above.

Re:We need a "much ado about nothing" tag

[Timesprout]

Unfortunately it would apply to most /. stories given the propensity to emotive overkill round here

OS X vs. Linux desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used Macs for quite some time but can't find any convincing reason to use OS X besides that it looks nice. Recently I switched to a x86 notebook and now I am using Linux and the GNOME desktop and find it at least as good as OS X. Anyone else who feels the same?

Re:OS X vs. Linux desktop

[Shawn is an Asshole]

I've used Macs for quite some time but can't find any convincing reason to use OS X besides that it looks nice.

Here's my reasons main for using it:

1. Photoshop. I mostly use GIMP, but there are many things that can only be done in Photoshop.
2. WiFi that works.
3. Power management that works, complete with sleep mode (needed on my laptop)

I also love the beautiful eyecandy. Makes staring at the screen all day pleasant. Hopefully much of that will work in the recent OpenGL accellerated X projects, but it will probably take a while to get the same level of polish and elegance that OS X has.

Re:OS X vs. Linux desktop

[anagama]

I do. I've recently been using my powerbook with an external 20" widescreen monitor. Fortunately, everything I run in that screen is by X forwarding over ssh. Once upon a time when screen space was limited, having the menu bar for an application in the top apple bar was probably a good idea -- but if I have an OSX app running on the external monitor, I might have to traverse a couple feet of screen space to click the "file" menu item. But running linux apps over there is fine because the menu is inside the application window.

Other nagging issues for me are the lack of _universal_ middle click paste, sloppy focus (scroll background w/out foregrounding it), and lack of _integrated_ multiple desktops (yes I know middle click works in X11 and there are 3d party multiple desktop apps -- these are half solutions).

Re:OS X vs. Linux desktop

[bunbuntheminilop]

To state the obvious.

1- You can always run photoshop though wine
2-3 - ACPI in the new kernel is fine, and so is Wireless support.

Re:OS X vs. Linux desktop

[Reverend528]

I ran OS X for several months on my iBook before switching it over to gentoo. For me, the biggest issues were usability (OS X looks nice but is often very counter-intuitive) and software installation (3rd party OS X packaging systems seemed to think that software belongs in a fake root directory).

Re:OS X vs. Linux desktop

[Shawn is an Asshole]

You can always run photoshop though wine

I'm not going to use wine for anything serious. I use some programs that work fine in it, others seem to work and break every few releases. I also do not like the Windows version of Photoshop as I can't stand Windows-style MDI's. I'll stick with Macs for this until GIMP catches up.

ACPI in the new kernel is fine

I keep trying suspend and software suspend but it never has worked correctly on any machine I've tried it on. Most recently was with OpenSUSE 10.0.

and so is Wireless support

Only if you're lucky enough to find an adapter that has drivers or works under ndiswrapper.

Just as a note, Linux (Fedora) is my primary OS.

Re:OS X vs. Linux desktop

[miscz]

You could check before buying if your hardware was fully supported. Spending >1000$ without research is stupid. It took me few minutes to check if notebook I was going to buy works well with Ubuntu and when I've installed it later everything worked out of the box, including hibernation and wifi.

Re:OS X vs. Linux desktop

[bunbuntheminilop]

I'm not going to use wine for anything serious.

I don't use Photoshop, but from people I've talked to, Crossover office (if you're willing to pay for it) works perfectly and is well supported.

I keep trying suspend and software suspend but it never has worked correctly on any machine I've tried it on. Most recently was with OpenSUSE 10.0.

Only if you're lucky enough to find an adapter that has drivers or works under ndiswrapper.

I use Gentoo. They update the kernel regularly, and I haven't had any problems that I couldn't solve as far as wireless is concerned (and I've set it up with 3 different wireless adapters). You're right that ACPI isn't well supported, but its getting much better. Not having suspend isn't enough reason to ditch the mac? YMMV

Re:OS X vs. Linux desktop

[Shawn is an Asshole]

I don't use Photoshop, but from people I've talked to, Crossover office (if you're willing to pay for it) works perfectly and is well supported.

As I said, I really cannot stand using Windows-style MDI apps. That alone is work buying a Mac.

I use Gentoo.

I've used source-based distros for about 5 years before getting tired of it and switching a binary distribution.

Not having suspend isn't enough reason to ditch the mac?

For a laptop, yes.

Erm, that is not an official statement from Apple

[Jackdaw Rookery]

This is a none story, unless I'm missing something. Some headers were missed off files and some assumptions are getting made from it.

Where is the proof that Apple is changing their policy?

This seems like a story designed to raise OSS hackles rather than anything useful.

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[WindBourne]

Mach actually, with a BSD API and a mish mash of OSS tools.

I predicted this...

[argent]

Not specifically because of the "piracy" of Mac OS X (and I'm not certain that it should actually be called "piracy" - even in the colloquial sense - to buy a copy of Mac OS X and install it on a non-Mac, even if the EULA is enforcable), but the TPM capability of the Intel chipset does make Open Source Darwin a problem. Releasing the source to the OS without making it possible to use the source to bypass any strong DRM Apple happened to have a use for just becomes harder and more expensive.

Re:I predicted this...

[owenreading]

You can't actually buy a copy of OSX for x86, the only versions on the shelves are PPC. So you must either be downloading it illegally or copying it from a MacIntel install disc, and unless you wipe it from your new Mac, you're installing more copies than you have licences for. So all the OSX86 users out there pirated it somehow...

Re:I predicted this...

[Trillan]

Yeah, it is definitely still software piracy. Mac computers are sold with a license to use Mac OS X. The retail box you can buy is an upgrade, which presupposes you already have a Mac (and thus a Mac OS license).

<p>That said, there is a way to avoid it being quote-piracy-unquote while still breaking the EULA: buy and wipe clean an old Mac. Either never use it, or install Linux on it. I doubt Apple would consider this any more kosher, but on the other hand I doubt many are doing this anyway.</p>

Re:I predicted this...

[Anonymous Coward]

"even in the colloquial sense"

This is off the main topic, but you do understand the term piracy has been used in an official legal sense for 200 years now representing what I believe you are referring to as 'colloquial', don't you?

Its not a made up / reappropriated word that just came out a few years ago designed by the BSA / RIAA / MPAA and Microsoft...its meant copyright infringement as well as hijacking on the high see since before your grandparents were alive.

Just re-educating everyone that had been tainted by Stallman's Words Which Will Be Double++ Illegal In The GnuSpeak (located in its base form here: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html# Piracy ).

Note: Stallman does not state that this word is not a correct and meaningful definition and is careful not to be inaccurate, but has worded this so that a casual reading and a later misquote of it will play directly into that connotation.

GnuSpeak--

Re:I predicted this...

[HebrewToYou]

Please *preview* pithy posts.

Re:I predicted this...

[HiThere]

OK. You consider the usage of the term piracy to refer to copyright infringement to be legitimate. I don't. If you wish me to consider your comments as other than biased, you will refrain from that usage in commentary addressed to me.

English doesn't have a unitary standard dialect. In my dialect, using piracy to refer to something that doesn't involve violence and the physical removal of physical possessions from one person to another is a gross misuse, probably with intended psych-war (psychological manipulation for the ends of one side over another) effects. (I started to say "side-effects", but on consideration that often appears to be the main intended effect.)

I have no trouble believing that many elected and appointed officials have chosen to misuse the word in the way that you describe, but I still consider it a misuse with intentional pejorative meaning. And with the intention that the audience not notice that it is being manipulated.

Re:I predicted this...

[Daytona955i]

Or you could by a new mac, put linux on it after wiping it clean, and then you have a free license for OS X to go onto whatever you want.

Granted I don't think many (if any) people are doing this but it's possible. They all are violating the DMCA however.

Perfectly understandable

[thunderlizard]

It seems perfectly understandable to me... Apple slowly reduced access to outside developers (they didn't "kill off" their open source projects, as the main article trolled), because the process was being ABUSED by external, open source developers...

I think that in the end, Apple realized that the few contributions received from the OSS community were not enough to justify the abuses, leaks and other problems, so they took appropriate measures to protect their development environment...

Re:Perfectly understandable

[MacJedi]

What abuses? What leaks? What other problems?

I call bullshit.

Re:Perfectly understandable

[thunderlizard]

From the article:

"People started abusing the system, mailing developers, managers, and executives directly because their pet bug/feature/etc. was not getting the attention it so clearly deserved."

"Some things leaked out, which caused no end of fuss, and gradually projects were removed from the live cvs repository."

"For a while, the project floundered, trying to figure out how best to deal with the situation."

Whether or not the article is accurate is a different question...

Re:Perfectly understandable

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple realized that the few contributions received from the OSS community were not enough

Few contributions? Have they not based most of OS (minus the GUI stuff) on open source software? They haven't contributed much that people have actually asked to see, like iTunes for linux (yet it is available for Windows). Sorry but I dont see Apple embracing open source as much as they claim to be....

1. What is Darwin?

[demon411]

wondering what the british naturalist has to do with a kernel?

Darwin is used as the UNIX core of OS X. Darwin iteself is a version of the BSD UNIX operating system that offers advanced networking, services such as the Apache web server, and support for both Macintosh and UNIX file systems. It was originally released in March 1999. Darwin currently runs on PowerPC-based Macintosh computers, and is currently being ported to Intel processor-based computers and compatible systems by the Darwin community.

XNU is the name of the kernel that Apple developed for use in the Mac OS X operating system and released as open source as part of the Darwin operating system. It is a hybrid kernel combining the Mach kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University with components from the FreeBSD kernel as well as a C++ API for writing drivers called IOKit. XNU is an acronym for X is Not Unix.[1]

      1. ^ (2005). Porting UNIX/Linux Applications to Mac OS X: Glossary. Apple Computer. URL accessed on December 13, 2005.

Re:1. What is Darwin?

[Mercano]

Well of course X isn't Unix, its just a popular GUI system for Unix. XNU, however, IS Unix, so XNU can't stand for XNUs not Unix.

Re:1. What is Darwin?

[Watson Ladd]

That's not a correct biblography. A better version would go [1] Apple Computer. Porting UNIX/Linux applications to Mac OS X: Glossary.

Re:1. What is Darwin?

[Anonymous Coward]

XNU, however, IS Unix

Really? How odd. Last time I checked, Apple had no intention of applying for UNIX certification for their OS. When did they change their mind?

re: "Will the cool hackers still dig it?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Only the ones who remain true to their roots as artistes and models. Make no mistake, this is a positive development; Apple's actions will separate the aesthetes with good taste from the chaff of dull, dutiful drones.

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[Overly Critical Guy]

Calling OS X "Linux with a better UI" illustrates a profound ignorance of the OS X operating system, from the frameworks (Cocoa and its related APIs, the best application development framework bar none) to the core technologies like Mach and BSD. Ignoring its top features by dismissing it as a "proprietary system with candy coating" strikes me as counterproductively idealistic. If you feel pressure to switch, then switch! Whatever gets your job done better, and believe me, OS X gets the job done.

Not to mention that it's likely Apple just hasn't put the sources up yet in this situation. It took them a while to post the new Darwin sources, but they got them out. The only proprietary things in OS X are Aqua and related technologies.

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[temojen]

Not just a pretty GUI on BSD...
Mac OS has a few nifty non-eye-candy features not in most Linux distributions:

No root user, but admin group in sudoers (easy to do on Linux, but not done by default by most distros)
Home directory encryption available at the flip of a switch
Automatic detection and configuration of monitors
Most things just work, out of the box.

All of these (possibly excepting detection of monitors) could be done by a Linux desktop/laptop vendor with their own distro, but as far as I know aren't.

Re:Open source is dead anyway...

[Anonymous Coward]

Kinda like your sexlife?

You got "Steved"

[Animats]

In the Apple developer community, this is called being "Steved".

Remember OpenDoc.. Never forget.

Re:You got "Steved"

[Zaurus]

So, I read the OpenDoc article. What's a failed document-format-standard attempted by Apple in 1992 as a stab at Microsoft's Office products during a time period when Steve Jobs wasn't even associated with Apple have to do with "being Steved"? ...or the current topic at all?

Mod parent down.

Re:You got "Steved"

[Animats]

"Before long, OpenDoc was scrapped, with Steve Jobs noting that they "put a bullet through [OpenDoc's] head".

This sort of thing is why few will develop for Apple's proprietary technologies.

Re:You got "Steved"

[larkost]

I think you have the cart and the horse reversed here. None of the big software development houses supported OpenDoc, most notably Microsoft kept telling everyone about the great new system they were coming out with that would be so much better and work on Windows as well: OLE. After that there was a lot of money that Apple would have had to spend to support the product, and not much benefit since Microsoft's, Adobe's, and Quark's software would not have supported it at all. That was what killed OpenDoc.

On the flip side. your argument is also wrong because there are so many places developing for Carbon and Cocoa, which are both Apple proprietary APIs.

Re:You got "Steved"

[Forbman]

IBM had a lot involved with OpenDoc as well (remember reading some of the Byte articles about it).

Too bad OpenDoc lost. Try embedding a OLE container in a Word document that spans a page break. Or non-rectangular containers.

Oh, OpenDoc did this.

Re:You got "Steved"

[jcr]

OpenDoc had already failed by the time Steve came back to run the company. There was nothing there to salvage.

-jcr

Re:You got "Steved"

[Animats]

Right on schedule, about four to six hours after posting, the downward moderation appears. This happens every time a posting criticizes Steve Jobs. I wonder if there's a program searching for anti-Jobs statements, or just his fan club.

Re:You got "Steved"

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it's just the natural /. karma nerfing all the anti-Steve Jobs stuff from all the Steve Balmer Fan Club members trying to put a boot in. It's a natural cycle when there's a slew of Steves involved.

Re:Open source is dead anyway...

[ninja_assault_kitten]

Nice one!

I can see clearly now

[cyberbian]

Vista sales will be diluted so much by an open source Intel platform kernel as to make Vista a non sequitur. Microsoft has no small interest in seeing this stopped.

Apple has traditionally been a hardware company, and this change of approach is indicative of pressure from Bill to keep OS X off of every box in production.

What amazes me is that people are having a hard time connecting the dots between the anti-competitive Darth Vader of IE and Office fame, and Apple's (the hardware company)fear to have their OS run on everything

It's only a matter of time before the OS will be hacked, and customers chose to run something else. The success of GNU/Linux is a shining example of just how tired customers (Enterprise and Consumer alike) are of having to swallow FUD and bad code.

Bill Gates' fortune be damned, the people are demanding choice, and are being prevented by the huge market force that Mr. Gates wields. I guess that makes Bill and Ballmer red light sabre kind of guys after all... Use the force Steve! The people want your OS, and we're tired of the M$ corrupt crap.

Re:I can see clearly now

[Anonymous Coward]

The analogy fails a bit... the red lightsaber guys are way better than the other ones. Christopther Lee and Ian McDiarmid have red ones. Compare that to Mark Hamill and Hayden Christensen. Need I say more? ;-)

Re:I can see clearly now

[ne0n]

I like the contrast between Microsoft's approach and Jobs' less visionary leadership.
Microsoft wants to run on every computer worldwide, even the servers. They're selling it for $10/license to Dell, yet seem to be staying afloat somehow.
Apple wants their OS tied to expensive hardware which the vast majority has no interest in purchasing. Deliberately repressing the installbase is an interesting way to build brand recognition.

Jobs is doing Microsoft's work by preventing OSX from encroaching. Uphold the Windows monopoly as long as possible, at any cost.

Re:I can see clearly now

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a FUCKING MORON. I hope you seriously get fucking killed in a fire you are so fucking stupid. The success of Linux? What fucking success? The fact that you OSS faggots have been sucking off Linux for 8 years and it's still a piece of shit?

Re:I can see clearly now

[cyberbian]

I'm glad to see that you had the courage to respond Mr. Ballmer, it's unfortunate that you didn't have the balls to sign in with a handle that identifies you. This commentary is not atypical coming from you. Thankfully you can't throw a chair at me, and if we met in person, I'd invite you to.

Another WRONG Slashdot article

[Overly Critical Guy]

See this comment. Apple made a quick mistake and fixed it, and the sources ARE available.

Next.

Re:Another WRONG Slashdot article

[realTremens]

it's only as "WRONG" as your sig. at one time it was true, but it's been corrected. :)

Kurt Loder: "Are you opposed to file-sharing?"

Maynard James Keenan: "Not necessarily. But I wish people would realize what an artist normally makes on the sale of an album. Nowadays, you have to sell, like, half a million or a million records just to break even. And how many bands sell a million records? Not that many."

Re:Another WRONG Slashdot article

[Travelsonic]

Of course, at the risk of throwing this discussion, the artists should realize that the indusrtry they are working under can be considered a contributing reaon as to why they make so little.

Re:Another WRONG Slashdot article

[dysprosia]

Not quite. The xnu sources are still not available.

Re:Another WRONG Slashdot article

[bursch-X]

Well that's why G0d in his wisdom (at least for once) enabled REAL musicians with REAL instruments to make live concerts, so they get more money in and somehow can make a living. It's not like CDs etc. are your only source of income.

It just doesn't look so cool if you're a dancefloor bunny with no voice singing to your drum computer and a keyboard. That's why Tittney and the whole bunch need so many dancing bimbos so that you overlook the fact that they can neither sing nor dance, and all the musics made by the nintendo orchestra.

Re:Another WRONG Slashdot article

[dorkygeek]

Then please tell me, oh master of universal knowledge, where I can download the kernel sources for 10.4.5 arch x86??

• http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.4. 5.ppc/: xnu-792.6.61.
• http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.4. 5.x86/: no such thing!

Looks like your name doesn't fit your attitude well!

Re:Another WRONG Slashdot article

[tigersha]

And how does theft from the end users contribute to SOLVING the problem?

Re:Another WRONG Slashdot article

[Travelsonic]

And how did I say anything about justifying copyright infringement in that post? And while we are using retorhical questions, how does mis-naming crimes solve the problem either? How does making a (false) assumption when reading a post and replying based on that help either? Why am I wasting my time?

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[ethanrider]

It's pretty easy to do hardware support when you control the hardware.

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. THANK YOU. I really hate the fact that people don't understand this. Mod parent up!

MacIntel didn't kill it

[MacBoy]

Apple's switch to Intel didn't kill Apple's open source efforts...

People using Apple's open-source efforts to pirate Mac OS X killed Apple's open-source efforts.

Re:MacIntel didn't kill it

[Anonymous Coward]

If they'd sell it, we'd buy it. I already run a linux box without a warranty, why should I be scared to try an OSX box without one?

Re:MacIntel didn't kill it

[bill_mcgonigle]

People using Apple's open-source efforts to pirate Mac OS X killed Apple's open-source efforts.

That's not the only reason for it. I'm seriously considering a MacBook Pro now that Linux boots on it, and VMWare is running well. So I'd have Linux on the hardware (overall the most stable), a VMWare instance for OSX, and a VMWare instance for XP for when I need to check stuff in IE6.

To do this I'd need a kernel that doesn't check for the 'trusted computing' chip, but I'd still be running it on Apple hardware, in compliance with the EULA.

Re:MacIntel didn't kill it

[jbolden]

For that setup why do you need X86.

IE6 runs fine under virtual PC, and Linux boots on the PPC version. So what is X86 bringing to the table here?

Re:MacIntel didn't kill it

[bill_mcgonigle]

IE6 runs fine under virtual PC

Seriously now - nobody argues that using Virtual PC is pleasant. More importantly, Apple is discontinuting PPC hardware - you won't be able to buy a 15" powerbook in a few weeks.

Re:MacIntel didn't kill it

[jbolden]

VPC is fine for checking a few pages out. Running one old app under VPC in a windowed screen... Your post had indicating something had changed because of Mac on Intel. I just couldn't see how given that usage anything had changed. You can easily use IE6, you can easily boot Linux and you can run OSX.

You are right though that I wouldn't buy PPC hardware. Its the reason I'm not getting the truly excellent Quad powermac.

Re:MacIntel didn't kill it

[bill_mcgonigle]

You can easily use IE6, you can easily boot Linux and you can run OSX.

You're assuming the app running in IE6 isn't CPU intensive. Imagine a fancy new AJAX app dealing with streaming media.

Re:MacIntel didn't kill it

[jbolden]

But then you are really checking media player not IE6. In any case I can see why you need a fast windows, but I'm not sure that VPC won't introduce all sorts of bugs. IMHO you're stuck with Cygwin.

But anyway you've shown me what changed so....

Re:MacIntel didn't kill it

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck IE6. Any cunt can run Firefox; many people can't run IE6. As long as your page renders fine in Firefox, call it working. If IE users have a problem, it is their problem, not yours.

Re:MacIntel will be the death of Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

"At best they will become an OS and apps vendor unless they can come up with some
really exceptional hardware."

Don't worry! They are as we speak.

And the idiots paying for expensive x86 Mac hardware to run 95+ percent of their software at 1/3 native speed through emulation are helping fund it.

Thanks suckers!

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[temojen]

Which is exactly why I said a Linux desktop/laptop vendor, not a distribution vendor.

Go ahead. Waste mod points on me

[Anonymous Coward]

...but apple is being childish and short-sighted if they stop the Darwin X86 OSS support. A move that could really help them garner support is being stopped because they're worried about possible missing a few bucks because a couple of hackers are going to get this running on generic intel hardware.

Note to apple: If your position in the industry is relying simply on people's perception that your hardware is "special", you might as well get out of the computer business now.

Explanation from the Article

[Orrin Bloquy]

"...unnamed executives at Apple admitted that the sourcecode to Xnu had to be pulled after threats from the Church of Scientology."

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[temojen]

The first user is in the admin group by default because you have to have someone in the admin group (or you can never install software, create other users, change system-wide settings, etc). Admin group users still have to authenticate before doing anything via sudo, so system-wide bad things don't happen automatically without user intervention.

Once you've made a second user, you can switch them if you want.

I am not suprised; they got their free development

[paperclip2003]

I don't think it is about TPM or hacking:

I think a lot of companies are using OSS as free development; if this really works or not I don't know (most of the developers are the companies own). To a large corporation such as Apple Computer, free development is the holy grail because of high production costs, once they are done with that (base development) what do they need OSS for?

-R

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[Anonymous Coward]

No root user, but yet the first account you setup has root access.

Except that it doesn't.

Linux is just OSX with no applications.

[argent]

Exactly why I resisted the pressure to abandon Linux for MacOS X on the desktop

I'm not sure what your point is. Let's say the absolute worst thing happens and the next version of OS X is based on an NT kernel, all the UNIX-compatible stuff is supplied by Interix, and Bill Gates buys Apple.

All the commercial software I've got on my Mac will continue to run.

All the open source software I've got on my Mac will continue to run.

All the software I'd have been using under any other free UNIX will still be just as available as it is right now, and I can continue to use it on Linux or Mac OS.

If for some reason I want to run Linux on my Mac Mini, I will still be able to run all my Mac OS software under MOL.

If I want to run Linux on an Intel box I can, and all the software I would have been using on Linux and all the open source software I'm using on Mac OS X will still be available.

If for some reason I want to use my Mac software on an Intel box running Linux, I will be able to do so using Sheepshaver, under emulation, just as I woudl be able to use it using Rosetta, under emulation, on an Intel Mac.

What would have been the advantage of using Linux for the past three years instead of Mac OS X, even under the brutal worst-case regime I described above? I really don't get it.

Re:Linux is just OSX with no applications.

[defile]

What would have been the advantage of using Linux for the past three years instead of Mac OS X, even under the brutal worst-case regime I described above? I really don't get it.

This is exactly what I am addressing. The people who run Linux fall into roughly two camps. A) The people who hate Windows and saw MacOS as some kind of joke. B) The people who really depend on Linux and its environment of hacker-as-customer-#1 mentality.

There are a lot more of A, and when MacOS stopped sucking, finally, they immediately switched. This movement of type A moving to MacOS while type B stayed still raised a lot of questions: why aren't you moving to Mac? Questions I still get today, years later.

It's exactly the environment around MacOS X that makes it unsuitable for the type Bs. And it makes sense, there's so few of them. As Neal Stephenson said, the day [a software vendor] made a product he wanted to use was the day he shorted their stock, because he is a market of one.

Apple knifing source code releases is a symptom of where their concerns lie. It's not for hackers (which is good, if they want to keep making money), so will everyone please stop pretending it is?

Re:Linux is just OSX with no applications.

[StormReaver]

"What would have been the advantage of using Linux for the past three years instead of Mac OS X, even under the brutal worst-case regime I described above? I really don't get it."

That's because you are not accounting for history. I'll skip the details, and bottom line it for everyone: control.

The point behind using Linux (and Free software in general) is because someday, for whatever reason, your favorite proprietary vendor can pull the rug out from under you. Even if Apple is currently the friendliest proprietary company on the face of the planet, it still has the option of saying, "As of this moment, OSX (or whatever version) will no longer run [insert your favorite software], or will no longer support [insert your favorite product]."

Free software guarantees availability regardless of the whims of the developer(s) and/or providers. It is the single most important issue in computing, and is the biggest reason why Mac and Windows are not even options to me. Having been bitten by proprietary control too many times over the years, and having experienced the significant benefits of being in control of my own infrastructure, I won't go back.

Re:Linux is just OSX with no applications.

[a.d.trick]

You forgot group C) The people use Linux because it's free as in freedom.

You may think freedom is overrated, but for most of the linux users that I know. This is the reason.

Re:Linux is just OSX with no applications.

[Anonymous Coward]

What a bunch of horseshit. So you're saying that deep inside every commercial software company, there's a magic red button they can push at any time that will suddenly and instantly cause all existing copies of their software to cease functioning? Fucking horseshit.

With very few exceptions, proprietary software, once purchased, will continue to operate forever, just as well as the day you bought it. Pull the rug out from under you, my ASS. If they release an upgrade with new requirements, that's their perogative. You can choose to continue using your perfectly functioning paid version indefinitely. YOU have that choice!

You sound a lot like the people who get all pissed when a new product is released shortly after they bought the old version. They act as if their existing product suddenly blew up and stopped working the moment something better came out. Idiots.

Unless you're buying some crappy subscription-based software, your argument holds NO WATER whatesoever. I have a 10 year old machine that still runs perfectly, with software that's 8 years old. Many new versions of that software have come out, SOME OF WHICH NO LONGER SUPPORT MY OLD HARDWARE but I never felt the need to upgrade. The company could have gone under for all I care. My software works just as well as the day I installed it.

What a bunch of whiny, alarmist bullshit. I think all you really want is to get stuff for free (beer). Cheapskate.

Re:Linux is just OSX with no applications.

[argent]

Apple knifing source code releases is a symptom of where their concerns lie.

Except that didn't happen. It may, I agree with the arguments about that, and I'm amazed AND impressed that it hasn't. But... it hasn't.

The people who really depend on Linux and its environment of hacker-as-customer-#1 mentality.

Man, I've been a hacker, in the original sense, since I taght myself programming as a kid in 1972 so I could cheat on the BASIC computer games on the mainframe at Dad's office.

Linux isn't all that interesting an environment to hack in. The thrust of Linux hacking is in file systems, getting games and Windows applications to run, grooving on what Reiser's going to do next, and trying to turn Linux into the successor to OS/360. BOR-ING.

What else is there? Applications? Gnome? KDE? That stuff isn't Linux specific, and Gnome and KDE are both hacks in the worst possible sense in any case. Mono? Let's set ourselves up for getting Gatesed (and Gatesing ain't no rumor)! Berlin/Fiesta? Dead. GNUstep? The "Linux Hackers" have mostly abandoned that. WHat's left. What do you actually depend on? Details, please!

Re:Linux is just OSX with no applications.

[argent]

That's because you are not accounting for history.

I was writing free software and porting the UNIX environment to other operating systems before there was a GPL, I was working on free UNIX before Linux existed. I'm one of the tens of thousands of little guys who created that history you're talking about... before the Free Software Foundation decided it belonged to them. I've written, ported, and run UNIX software on 5th, 6th, and 7th edition, on RSX-11 and VMS and RSTS, on CP/M and MS-DOS and TOS and AmigaOS and Windows NT, on more versions of UNIX than most peole should have to know about.

So don't bloody tell me about history.

The most important lesson of history is you don't depend on ANY platform, not OSX or Linux, VMS or Tru64, Solaris or SunOS, RSX or RTE-IV, CP/M or Cromix or Regulus or Lanetix or Idris. You write your software so it's portable, you PORT your software so you know what portable means, and you don't tie yourself to *anyone's* wagon.

That's how you stay free.

The point behind using Linux (and Free software in general) is because someday, for whatever reason, your favorite proprietary vendor can pull the rug out from under you.

Except they can't. Did you actually bother to read my message where I explain in detail why?

Apple Already Bitten

[mysterystevenson]

The Apple has already been bitten, can't put "Humpty Dumpty" back together again ! Look at the Logo ! If you cut an Apple in 2, what do you get ? NO, not spare parts ! A real apple... seeds. That's what we have now, seeds of a new horizon. There will be anew,(TREE).

No boom today, boom tomorrow

[jmorris42]

Ok, this one was a false alarm. Tomorrow it won't be. I laughed as much as the next slashdot reader when Dvorak made his silly prediction of Apple on Windows but after thinking about it I think he was probably right.

Think it through folks, there isn't anything in a Macintel that won't be in every Dell this time next year. EFI is the future, we all know BIOS is on the way out and the machines that ship with Vista will most likely be EFI with EPT instead of traditional partition tables. They will also very likely be totally legacy free, USB keyboard/mouse, only SATA drives, etc. In other words, almost identical to the current crop of Apple hardware. We already know Apple hardware will run Vista and it already runs Linux.

If you think Apple is going to have a hard time justifying the premium on their hardware you are right. But the bigger problem is going to be finding a response to customers who begin to dual boot their Macintel to gain access to all of the cheap hardware on the shelves at Walmart or online at Newegg. It is device support that is going to force the issue.

In the end, Apple doesn't care about the underlying OS. Mach was handy, they only need a substrate to run their desktop environment atop. Remember that NextStep was ported to Windows once already and that NT based systems are a small sorta microkernel with one or more subsystems sitting atop it. Win32 and now Vista's stuff are but two which have existed. There was a POSIX one and an OS/2 compatibility one also in the past. Sooner or later Steve will swollow his pride and create a subsystem consisting of a modernized POSIX and NextStep and that will be OS XI. It will also ship with all of the Vista subsystem. That will allow all the device installers to run and gain the ability to run all Windows apps besides. Which also solves the Microsoft Office availibility problem.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[ClamIAm]

If you think Apple is going to have a hard time justifying the premium on their hardware you are right.

Such an assertion requires numerical justification to prove it's not BS.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[2nd Post!]

They don't have to switch to Windows to gain Windows apps, though.

The ability to virtualize and run Vista inside OS X, the adoption of WINE, or some hybridization between the two would allow a Vista compatibility mode without giving up OS X.

They would gain viruses, malware, and spyware if they switched to Vista.

By adopting WINE, they get none of those things
By virtualizing, they can contain those things inside a sandbox.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[That's Unpossible!]

In the end, Apple doesn't care about the underlying OS. ...
It will also ship with all of the Vista subsystem. That will allow all the device installers to run and gain the ability to run all Windows apps besides. Which also solves the Microsoft Office availibility problem.

Here's the thing. Apple wants to sell hardware. They do this by creating a unified set of products that "just work." These products are shiny goodness, great design, easy to use.

Grafting their prettyinterface on top of a Windows Vista subsystem will not make Macs work more securely, or more easily. They will gain the .NET platform. They will gain possibly the ability to connect to more devices. However, down that road means relying on Microsoft for Q&A and Security. Is that a good path for Apple? I don't think so.

(As a .NET programmer, I would love to see .NET platform become available on my macs, though.)

Apple wants MacIntel for two reasons: Intel can deliver the goods, and it makes it easier for Windows users to switch to Mac OS, and thus enter the Mac empire of hardware.

Dvorak continues to be a fucking moron.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[MBCook]

No way. I switched to PPC to get OS X, and when I replace my current Mac I'll go to x86 for OS X.

The prediction that Davorak reported on was flat out wrong. Apple won't do that. So what if Vista will boot on a Mac. People don't buy Macs because they don't run Windows, they buy them because they do run OS X. Why would they switch? Your argument is that they will have to move OSes because of hardware support?

What hardware support? Everything I've plugged into my Mac from the last few years has worked just fine. I plug in a USB drive and it works just fine within a few seconds, compared to a Windows XP computer which either asks me to install the generic driver, or generates 5 little pop-up balloons telling me that it found this, that, mounted this, did that, and it is ready to use. Printers? Most printers in the last few years (and most all of the big names, Epson, HP, Canon, etc.) support OS X. CD burners and such? If they are USB they use the generic USB storage drivers. If they are FireWire they use the generic FireWire storage drivers. Same with cameras and camcorders. Mice work without drivers. With everything going USB/FireWire (fewer and fewer reasons to buy expansion cards these days) work. Major manufacturers of other things (Adaptec, for example) sell products for Macs.

I see no hardware driver problem. Mac hardware is supported now, and things will only get better if Apple's market share improves.

As for switching to Windows, that makes very little sense. They would have to rip out the Windows GUI and put in the OS X GUI. That means that they would only be using the NT kernel. Why would they do that? That would put 99% of the computer world in the hands of MS. They would be beholden to MS for updates to add new features, new kinds of hardware, etc that wasn't already supported. The idea of a using a subsystem of POSIX and NextStep to make "OS XI" and run it under Vista or whatever is insane.

Basically, you are saying that Apple will, because they moved over to x86, dump 5 years of having a great OS (this doesn't include NextStep) to make a desktop environment to run on top of Windows (ala MS Bob) because of hardware drivers?

Huh?

Apple won't ditch OS X. Everyone likes OS X. Even Dell said they would sell OS X if Apple wanted to let them (I don't think they should). Moving over to EFI doesn't change things (although I would have liked OF better). They can keep their OS tied to their computers (within reason).

The idea of Apple moving to Windows is idiotic. Sorry, but it is. That would put them in direct competition with Dell and Sony and HP and such. With the margins they are used to, they would be slaughtered out of the market.

I've got $5000 that says Apple will move to quad-Cell processor based iPods before they will port their OS over to Windows (yeah, I know, makes no sense).

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[jmorris42]

> They don't have to switch to Windows to gain Windows apps, though.

Correct, that is a bonus though. The switch will be for device support.

But as for Wine, it is not a real option. Much as I like the idea of Wine, the reality is that in a decade they have yet to get more than a sampling of Win32 apps running (limping is usually a more apt description) and the Win32 API goes 'legacy' later this year. I'm afraid Wine is going to be like DosEMU, it will finally get finished long after most people have stopped caring. Seriously, Dosemu finally went 1.0, Redhat included it in a release.... and the next release marked it deprecated. Nobody cared about DOS by the time they finished it and nobody will care about Win32 by the time Wine hits 1.0. If Apple were to announce Windows support based on Wine everyone would laugh... exactly as we all did at Lindows in their early hype days.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[blackmonday]

"Which also solves the Microsoft Office availibility problem."

What the hell are you talking about?

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[Anonymous Coward]

"We already know Apple hardware will run Vista and it already runs Linux.
"

No it wont. I work at Microsoft and we added code to Vista to block out certain keys in TPM that are used in macs.

Mainly we did this because of Dell and HP wanted us to do so and we didn't want to support Apple hardware. Apple also did not want their users using windows since it would kill 3rd party software who instead would only write it for windows and expect mac users to run Windows instead of MacOSX.

Think about it? Why wont the beta's run on MacOSX today? We internally test Vista with pc's with TPM/TCA and efi. All of which apple has.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[jmorris42]

> No way. I switched to PPC to get OS X, and when I replace my current Mac I'll go to x86 for OS X.

And be honest for a minute. The day before Steve handed out the x86 Kool-Aid you would probably have been among the most rabid defenders of the inherent superiority of PPC. And when he announces OS XI you will be stunned and dismayed for a day or two and then be out on the online fora hailing it as the smartest thing since the last thing Steve did.

> Your argument is that they will have to move OSes because of hardware support?

No, my argument is that it will creep up on folks when they start dual booting. And eventually many will start asking why they have such a small list of supported hardware when OS X is running on their 'PC'. The trick is when they realize that what they have IS just a PC running OS X & Vista, and one side doesn't support all of their hardware.

Listen dude, I have been running Linux as my primary OS for over a decade, I know the feeling of looking over the fence wistfully at the happy folk capturing video (hell, how about just playing video much of the time), printing on cheap winprinters, etc. I know the annoyance of keeping a Win98 partition on my laptop because BellSouth won't let me past 1st level tech support until I have connected their supplied USB DSL modem to a Windows PC and confirmed a problem still exists.

> They would have to rip out the Windows GUI and put in the OS X GUI. That means that
> they would only be using the NT kernel.

You don't understand Windows NT's internals. They wouldn't be ripping out anything. It would simply be a matter of writing a new subsystem. If they did a proper job of it they would be able to let most binaries run unmodified without any sort of emulation penalty.

The reason they picked mach/Darwin was they needed an OS for PPC they could get NextStep up and running on quickly. It needed to be a modern OS with memory management and preemptive multitasking. By a coincidence Next's original machines ran something very similar. But now they are on Intel and there are other choices open to them. Linux or the other BSD based systems have better hardware compatibility but not as good as NT. Once you understand Apple does not care about the underlying OS it makes perfect sense.

And then factor in that a WinMac ends the game and other 3rd party app problem. So long as they can hold the line on their OS components running only on their branded PCs they have only upside.

They will wait a couple of years but they will do it. They have to let the faithful get past the PPC/Intel switch and rebuild their blind faith a bit.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[ceswiedler]

On the contrary, Win32 is going to become a de-facto standard for windowed applications. Microsoft is not going to be able to get away from the existing set of applications which use it, because Vista won't offer enough improvements over XP to make people switch like they did from DOS / Win 3.1 to Win95.

I predict that in 5 to 10 years, all OSs will support Win32 apps, though not necessarily as their primary app type. Wine will work well for existing binaries, and winelib will work even better for developers who want to make cross-platform apps from the start.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[Forbman]

Mach was handy, they only need a substrate to run their desktop environment atop. Remember that NextStep was ported to Windows once already and that NT based systems are a small sorta microkernel with one or more subsystems sitting atop it.

No, NextStep 3.0 on Intel was about as Windows-dependent or -based as x86 Linux is. It was still a Mach microkernal/BSD-based Unix at the core for the OS. You did not need a Windows license to run Nextstep 3.0 when it came out on x86's (but of course paid for the Win3.x license with the PC).

Unless you're thinking of all the various OpenStep-based Shell replacements (like LiteStep, LDX, OpenStep, GnuStep, DarkStep, etc), but those are clones running in Windows.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[jmorris42]

> No, NextStep 3.0 on Intel was about as Windows-dependent or -based as x86 Linux is.

Dig some more. Unless I have started going senile or something there was also a period when Next Inc was making most of their income selling Next like toolkits to Windows developers.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[Billly Gates]

" I work at Microsoft and we added code to Vista to block out certain keys in TPM that are used in macs.
"

Got any proof on this?

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[Tarnar]

And be honest for a minute. The day before Steve handed out the x86 Kool-Aid you would probably have been among the most rabid defenders of the inherent superiority of PPC. And when he announces OS XI you will be stunned and dismayed for a day or two and then be out on the online fora hailing it as the smartest thing since the last thing Steve did.

Dude, do you want to have a conversation here do you want to keep wanking and painting Mac users with a broad brush? The man says 'I bought a PPC machine for OSX', which you somehow warped into 'Steve Jobs is an infallible God.'

Is every Mac user an automatic member of the Church of Jobs?

You just admitted to using Linux. Should I piegonhole you and start making assumptions about your position with regards to code licensing?

You make a reasonable list of arguments in favor of Apple piggybacking on x86/Windows. Tone down the idiotic rhetoric and you might start a reasonable dialog, instead of drawing responses like mine.

(posted using my never-used account just so that this gets seen)

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[11223]

There was, but you're still going senile. The product that NeXT sold was called OpenStep for Windows. At that time, the old NeXTSTEP system was renamed to OpenSTEP (note the difference in caps!) and updated for the new API. There was also OpenStep for Solaris, which you can still find floating around for download - no SDK, though.

OpenStep for Windows lived on for a long time as part of WebObjects. I don't think it still exists anymore, though.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[Anonymous Coward]

If they do port to Windows, I want your "quad-Cell processor based iPod" instead of that crappy $5000 you've put up.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[jmorris42]

> Is every Mac user an automatic member of the Church of Jobs?

From the limited sample I have met personally, yes. Online you expect the crazies to dominate, but since the pattern also holds with offline my best guess would be at least 50% and probably 75% of Apple owners are currently affected by Steve's reality distortion field, some more strongly than others.

It is why I think Apple is doomed longterm. Because the users subconsciously believe it and they are closest to the situation. For some reason computing platforms create a LOT passion. However you only tend to see blind loyalty and striking out at any disent on the doomed platforms. We saw it on the Amiga, OS/2, Be and for a decade or more among the Mac faithful. Of course obituaries on Apple have been standard fare for longer than BSD is dying trolls on Slashdot so they ain't exactly in a hurry to die or anything... :) But so long as the users act as a besieged minority who believe in the bones their day is soon to pass so I am forced to conclude they will eventually be proven right even if it has to be a self fulfilling prophecy.

> You just admitted to using Linux. Should I piegonhole you and start making assumptions
> about your position with regards to code licensing?

That would be a fairly safe bet. You won't find many who have been running Linux for a decade who haven't become at least 75% RMS pure. Me I'm probably more like 85%. I will still use a closed program if nothing else is available for the task. I keep trying to use the Free ATI driver and keep going back to the closed one after a couple of crashes or wildly inaccurate rendering bugs.

And apparently you won't find many who have owned a Mac for more than a couple of years who haven't join the Cult of Mac.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[bnenning]

And be honest for a minute. The day before Steve handed out the x86 Kool-Aid you would probably have been among the most rabid defenders of the inherent superiority of PPC.

Highly doubtful. Mac users had been fed up with lousy G4 performance and the inability to get the G5 in a laptop for years.

No, my argument is that it will creep up on folks when they start dual booting.

What percentage of Mac users will dual boot? I'd bet it's quite a bit lower than you think. Slashdot readers are not a remotely representative sample. Similarly, the percentage of Mac users trying to attach wacky Windows-only peripherals is also much lower than you think.

And then factor in that a WinMac ends the game and other 3rd party app problem.

While creating the problem of "why should anybody write Mac apps anymore". Ask IBM how that worked out for them with OS/2.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[MBCook]

At this point, you read like a troll so this is my last response.

And be honest for a minute. The day before Steve handed out the x86 Kool-Aid you would probably have been among the most rabid defenders of the inherent superiority of PPC.

That Mac I bought last year was the first one since 1992. I was on Windows until I bought that Mac. I knew about the switch before I bought my laptop (I put it off a while in case they delivered Intel Macs real early). I knew that the G4 was underpowered (compared to Intel) when I bought the laptop, but that wasn't much of a problem for me. It was still faster than my 700 MHz P3, was fast enough for everything I wanted to do and then some (and a few games). The G4 and G5 are nicer chips than Intel chips. I like 'em better. But they just can't compete with Intel's fabs. If Intel got the rights to put out G5s I'd prefer one of those (thought it will never happen). It has nothing to do with Kool-ade. It is common sense. It doesn't matter if if a 1GHz G5 is faster than a 1GHz P4. When a 3 GHz P4 wipes the floor with a top of the line 1.67 GHz G4, it's time to switch.

No, my argument is that it will creep up on folks when they start dual booting. And eventually many will start asking why they have such a small list of supported hardware when OS X is running on their 'PC'.

Again, I think this is wrong. First off, people won't dual boot. Some people will, but your average consumer is not going to dual boot. I help many people with their computers. For most of them, the concept of the filesystem takes a long time to get into their heads (how many computers have YOU seen where EVERYTHING is in My Documents with no subfolders). If that is how they respond to that, how do you think they'll comprehend Dual Booting. Especially when they either have to buy two of every program (one for Windows, one for "OS XI") or have to reboot constantly to use the correct OS for the program they want to use.

As for the "small list of supported hardware", I'm going to have to cry fowl again. I can go down to my local computer store and buy just about anything in there. Any monitor will work with my Mac. Any hard drive. Any thumb drive. Any digital camera (over $30). Any mouse. Any keyboard (even if the symbols on the keys are wrong). Video capture? Most of the major products on the market work with my Mac. Scanning? Again, most of the major products work with my Mac. Routers, NICs, cable modems, optical drives, MP3 players, etc all work with Macs. In the time I've had my Mac I've bought a hard drive, a drawing tablet, digital cameras, and many other things. I didn't have to check ONE of them to see if it would work with my Mac. I knew it would. It was never a problem of "I like that but I have to buy this because it works". They all work for all intents and purposes. Out of all the hardware I've tried there is only one thing I've found which doesn't work with my Mac: a Sony snapshot printer. And even then, the other ones on the market do, and I can print off a memory card so it wouldn't be a problem (plus I have VirutalPC).

You may have a few high end users like yourself who run into that, but 99% of users will never have that cross their mind.

And then factor in that a WinMac ends the game and other 3rd party app problem.

We've got WINE and Cedega. Cames won't be a problem. There was even a page on MS's site the other day (taken down, of course) where it listed "Macintosh" as one of the platforms you could download DirectX for. If that happened, that would just about cure it right there.

As for the 3rd party app problem, once again, what are you talking about. Photoshop? I've go it. Dreamweaver? I've got it. Mathematica? I can buy it. MS Office? I've got it. Flash? I've got it. DVD Player? I've got it. Google Earth? Games? Garage Band/iDVD/iPhoto/iMove? Got it. Maya? Got it. Quicken? QuickBooks? Got 'em.

There is no App problem.

I'm not on Mac Kool-ade. I always liked Macs but I avoided them for ov

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[Tarnar]

From the limited sample I have met personally, yes.

Anecdote is not the singular form of data.

If you found a passionate Apple user, you know what they own. If you find someone with a Mac and a PC who doesn't care about one over the other, you'd NEVER KNOW they were a Mac owner, as they never spoke up.

However you only tend to see blind loyalty and striking out at any disent on the doomed platforms.

No, blind loyalty and striking out at dissent is par for the course of any platform. There are still Windows users who believe Microsoft can do no wrong, I find them in my industry. "Oh, sure, they make a few mistakes, but they are the best out there" they'll say, while recommending end-to-end Microsoft solutions.

You also see blind loyalty in other industries, especially the car industry. I know a lot of smug VW owners, for example.

And apparently you won't find many who have owned a Mac for more than a couple of years who haven't join the Cult of Mac.

Maybe. More likely, anyone who's owned a Mac was fairly satisfied with the experience and is ready to point that out to others. Graduating to the Cult of Mac is more reserved for the people who hang out on Apple rumor websites and trade pre-release copies of the next OSX release.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[bnenning]

For some reason computing platforms create a LOT passion. However you only tend to see blind loyalty and striking out at any disent on the doomed platforms.

You see it on any minority platform, because on them most of the users have made a conscious choice rather than accepting the default, and are therefore more inclined to defend their decision. There are Windows fans who are just as fanatical as Mac zealots, but they aren't as visible because they're surrounded by millions of Windows users who just wanted a computer. And Linux users have occasionally been known to strongly defend their platform...

However you only tend to see blind loyalty and striking out at any disent on the doomed platforms. We saw it on the Amiga, OS/2, Be and for a decade or more among the Mac faithful.

This should be your clue that the operative condition is "minority" and not "doomed". Well, that and your hypothesis's requirement of precognitive powers.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[Anonymous Coward]

As for the "small list of supported hardware", I'm going to have to cry fowl again. I can go down to my local computer store and buy just about anything in there. Any monitor will work with my Mac. Any hard drive. Any thumb drive. Any digital camera (over $30). Any mouse. Any keyboard (even if the symbols on the keys are wrong).

You must be talking about Powermacs, since the iMac and eMac have almost zero CIP support beyond RAM, and even then you won't know what works until you try it, short of one or two major brands which list themselves as Apple compatible. I remember when a firmware update to the 400Mhz G4 Powermac rendered a bunch of third party RAM incompatible, error beeps and all. There was no explanation from Apple, or a fix. The RAM which was installed before had run several nights through Apple's Hardware Test, and passed. Of course, there wasn't any explanation or fix from Apple. We stopped updating after we two servers, and had to buy direct from Apple replacement RAM for 14 others, which needed the firmware update. Gotta love that thinking different! Apple knowledge base had some lengthy rants about it.

You can read a bit more about it here:

http://news.com.com/2100-1040-255413.html

You don't mention video cards. Do you think you can just pick up any video card, slap it into your powermac, and have it be supported?

What about sound cards? Oh wait, why would anyone want to use anything but what Apple ships with?

And about that keyboard compatibility, we bought 30 USB Aopen keyboards, which don't work worth a shit for a lab of Mac Minis unless they're hotplugged.

What about SCSI adapters? I guess no one uses anything but SATA on the Mac these days.

WIFI adapter support? Oh wait, you have Airport, why would you want anything else that does the same thing for 1/3 the cost.

Try using a few generic gigabit NIC's and get back to me on your results. It would be nice if Apple published some sort of hardware compatibility list instead of making every hardware purchase a freaking easter egg hunt.

You can't forget about the shitty way Powermacs are designed to accomodate expansion. Case in point, you want to add an IDE 300gb hard drive to a 2Ghz G5 powermac. There's one spare drive bay, but the only cords run to the bay are SATA. Shit. There is an IDE header leading to the DVD-ROM, but only one molex power adapter, so the only real way to mount it is with double sided sticky tape and a power splitter, or tear apart the entire god damn chassis and rerun the wires. That's thinking different! Thanks Apple. The G4 powermacs weren't much better, often shipping with under powered PSU's.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[NMerriam]

The switch will be for device support.

Device support? in 2006? Maybe in 1996 that would have made sense, but now everything the average consumer buys for a computer is a USB device that just plugs in and works. Back when you had to buy SCSI or ADB devices it could be quite a challenge, and when Windows hardware still hung on to the parallel/serial ports, but I can't think of a single consumer device available today that won't work with a Mac (that isn't software dependant -- like WMP music players, and even then they'll show up as generic storage and still play your MP3 files most of the time).

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[jcr]

(As a .NET programmer, I would love to see .NET platform become available on my macs, though.)

As a Mac user, I say god forbid that I should ever have to run a .NET app on my Mac. Go native, or don't bother.

-jcr

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[jcr]

Even Dell said they would sell OS X if Apple wanted to let them (I don't think they should).

They should be so lucky.

Personally, I'd like to see Apple offer OS X to everyone but Dell.

-jcr

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[jbolden]

And be honest for a minute. The day before Steve handed out the x86 Kool-Aid you would probably have been among the most rabid defenders of the inherent superiority of PPC

I'm still a "rapid defender of the superiority of PPC". The quad G5 (2 dual core 970s) run about $4k fully loaded and are crushingly fast. The closest system is the IBM 9110-1M3 which runs over $10k for a similar configuration.

The problem is there isn't a good PPC notebook chip and the core of the high margin PC market is notebooks.

printing on cheap winprinters,

I print at home on the Konica Minolta 2300 dl which is a cheap winprinter with no OSX support. If you can handle Linux you can get Winprinters to work under OSX.

I know the annoyance of keeping a Win98 partition on my laptop because BellSouth won't let me past 1st level tech support until I have connected their supplied USB DSL modem to a Windows PC and confirmed a problem still exists.

Happens less with OSX since Mac customers will walk if they are treated that way. Linux customers are more value oriented. The "willing to pay more crowd" gets treated better.

Just to close though. I do happen to agree with your main point, I just thought your argument was weak. "OSX for Windows" could be a bunch of extra widgets and libraries running on top of the NT kernel. It gets Apple out of the OS business. The problem is cultural though, Apple and Microsoft won't make good partners because company cultures are so different. And frankly Microsoft doesn't make good partners with anyone.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[jbolden]

From the limited sample I have met personally, yes. Online you expect the crazies to dominate, but since the pattern also holds with offline my best guess would be at least 50% and probably 75% of Apple owners are currently affected by Steve's reality distortion field, some more strongly than others.

That's a tautology. Macs are more expensive and a minority product. By definition anyone using a Mac has made a conscious choice to reject the PC platform. They have had to pay more and put up with nonsense to do it. Hence they are more focused.

Oh and OSX was way better than Desqview / Windows 3.1. The OS/2 crazies were absolutely right. Problem was that IBM wasn't an OS/2 supporter.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[jbolden]

Huh? There is already a huge shift towards .NET, the windows developer community has shifted.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[Anonymous Coward]

From the limited sample I have met personally, yes. Online you expect the crazies to dominate, but since the pattern also holds with offline my best guess would be at least 50% and probably 75% of Apple owners are currently affected by Steve's reality distortion field, some more strongly than others.

Then you really are a moron. I work in a UNIX shop (not a "Linux" shop) and many of us migrated away from Sun on the workstation toward the BSDs and OS X. We don't run around waving our dicks about screaming how great OS X is. The other folks I've spoken to are like me: they tend to understate their platform choice and then go back to work. Contrast this with the Linux zealots in our area: my boss and I went to the "official" linux users group in a major metro area and I am not making this up: people needed to shower and act a bit more professional. I could not get a more stereotypical bunch of geeks together if I were giving away free Beowulf clusters. It effectively deep-sixed ANY chances I had of getting Linux into the server room.

It is why I think Apple is doomed longterm. Because the users subconsciously believe it and they are closest to the situation. For some reason computing platforms create a LOT passion. However you only tend to see blind loyalty and striking out at any disent on the doomed platforms. We saw it on the Amiga, OS/2, Be and for a decade or more among the Mac faithful. Of course obituaries on Apple have been standard fare for longer than BSD is dying trolls on Slashdot so they ain't exactly in a hurry to die or anything... :) But so long as the users act as a besieged minority who believe in the bones their day is soon to pass so I am forced to conclude they will eventually be proven right even if it has to be a self fulfilling prophecy.

Please. Apple has been around before Linux and they're going to be around after Linux. Just wait'll BillyG and crew (RIAA etc) start ramming DRM down everybody's throat moreso than they are now and a closed source OS will be required to deal with it. And NO there won't be any hoards of unwashed RMS groupies such as yourself coming to save the day since Joe and Jane average won't sympathize with you with respect to desktop OSs'. They don't give a damned as long as their stuff plays.

You've hit the high point on open source: packages like mplayer will marginally deal with multimedia needs right now and with the debut of more custom formats designed around DRM any hope that Linux/*BSD has on the desktop is toast. Apple will still be making workstations and Linux will still be used on small servers (say less than eight CPUs).

As far as getting OS X rolled into Windows: don't make me laugh. Microsoft can't even handle what's on their plate right now with respect to making it stable, and any other company (Apple included) has a snowball's chance in hell of engineering something that will run effectively in the manner you describe.

The more things change the more they stay the same: Windows will dominate, Apple will still have its niche, and Linux zealots will still be bleating.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[Budenny]

"However you only tend to see blind loyalty and striking out at any disent on the doomed platforms."

Very perceptive. You could add that the blind loyalty etc feeds the spiral. The more ordinary people come to associate the minority platform with fanatical attitudes, the less inclined they will be to buy it. It is getting harder and harder to recommend Macs these days because of it - regardless of the merits of the platform, because of the social implications.

It is very curious that the fanatics do not seem to understand that their tactics are actually alienating potential users and losing Apple business, and so making more likely the outcome they profess most to dread. There were some egregious examples of this recently on OSNews.

You cannot help wondering, reading the posts on forums such as this one, whether the Mac Zealot aim is to convert or is really to alienate. There seems to be a sort of masochistic pleasure taken in alienating the rest of the world and provoking their hostility, and then complaining about the Mac Haters... Weird stuff.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[Anonymous Coward]

What hardware support? Everything I've plugged into my Mac from the last few years has worked just fine. I plug in a USB drive and it works just fine within a few seconds,

Don't be so narrow minded. About half the USB devices I own don't work on the Mac (a USB webcam, two USB Wifi sticks and a USB TV tuner). And the Ericsson USB Adsl modem consistently generates a kernel panic if it's plugged in through a USB hub.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[Bert64]

EFI has been around for years, as has SATA...

It is microsoft who are keeping these technologies down, current versions of windows for x86/amd64 don't support EFI (but the ia64 version does) and they don't support SATA out of the box.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[HuguesT]

And .Net runs on top of what, in your opinion?

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[gnasher719]

'' The G4 and G5 are nicer chips than Intel chips. I like 'em better. But they just can't compete with Intel's fabs. If Intel got the rights to put out G5s I'd prefer one of those (thought it will never happen). ''

Actually, if Intel got the rights to the G4, and attached the memory subsystem from Pentium or Pentium M, and put four of them on a chip which should be quite easy, considering the relatively small number of transistors, and moved it to a decent clockspeed, that would be one hell of a chip.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[jbolden]

Its a different framework. Essentially independent. Their are (AFAIK) 4 frameworks inside of NT:

32-bit Windows (Win32),
Microsoft .NET framework (.NET)
16-bit Windows 3.x (Win16)
Dos

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[That's Unpossible!]

There is no advantage to going native over using .NET for 99% of windows programs. The speed is the same. The big advantage is security (no buffer overflows), the much better APIs and default libraries. I'm not saying get rid of Carbon/Cocoa apps. Just offer a way to run .NET apps alongside them, just as Apple already does for Java.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[The Wicked Priest]

(As a .NET programmer, I would love to see .NET platform become available on my macs, though.)

How about this? http://www.mono-project.com/Mono:OSX

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[HuguesT]

The .NET framework runs on top of win32 in a virtual machine environment. In fact one can still do win32 calls inside .NET and one must frequently do so in practice.

Re:No boom today, boom tomorrow

[jbolden]

Microsoft agrees that .NET is a framework.

Mod Story Down, it was a mistake at worst.

[javaxman]

Ok, I'm going to admit this is somewhat redundant, as a number of posts already point this out, but the story just isn't true.

Might the Intel transition impact Darwin's open source status a bit? Sure, it might. It will certainly make releases a bit slower as code is reviewed and seriously sensitive bits ( if any ) removed, but I'm not sure I see the reason why Darwin builds shouldn't be able to be done going forward...

[Another splash of gasoline on your fire]

[Savage-Rabbit]

[throws gas on the fire]

This is because Apple is moving from Darwin to Solaris 10 x86 as its GUI code base!

That was funny dude! But not as funny as Dvorak's speculation about Apple dropping OS.X and switching to making Windows boxes so they can compete with Dell, Lenovo & Co.

I should have become a journalist, this guy actually gets paid for starting flamewars.

Re:[Another splash of gasoline on your fire]

[WindBourne]

Ah heck, screw the journals bit; Become an analyst. IDG and Gartner expected Linux in 2005 to occupy less than 5% of INTERNET servers (i.e. just servers on the web) and less than 1% of ALL servers. These are analysts that make ~200K or so. Basically, they are paid by the industry lead to print whatever they want to say. Amazing thing is that IDG/Gartner have never been right WRT to competitors and yet everybody listens to them. Back in the late 80's/early 90's, they were talking about how OS 3x0, and AS400 would remain the dominant computers ignoring Unix on the servers and Windows on the desktop.

There is one!

[Winckle]

Try out Open Darwin!

Re:There is one!

[Anonymous Coward]

Their core developer just said it was dead.

Re:There is one!

[ChunderDownunder]

I think you're missing the point of the discussion. The links cite an OpenDarwin contributor who was cut off at the knees by Apple's lack of sources for x86. OpenDarwin depends on upstream releases of Darwin from Apple which weren't forthcoming.

Re:MacIntel will be the death of Apple

[tuffy]

OSx86 is all over the net now. Apple can now forget about selling hardware anymore.

Does anyone actually believe this? Besides a negligible number of hackers, who's going to trade Apple's integrated "Just Works" system for a hacked, unsupported MacOS that might work on whatever beige box they've got lying around given enough work?

Not the general public, I'm sure

OSX is overrated

[zymano]

We can build a better OS. Just add some accelerated graphics to bsd or linux and there you go .

Re:OSX is overrated

[Seanasy]

That's a pretty lame troll. Please, try harder.

Re:OSX is overrated

[HiThere]

You oversimplify, but I do consider KDE to be generally superior to OSX. (Not in many details, and certainly it needs to work better on my hardware to be as good, but generally.)

OTOH, the strength of OSX, like the strength of MSWind, is not in the OS, but in the available applications. That will require a lot more effort to repair. (Yes, it's constantly being worked on, and significant progress is made every year...I'd say every month, but there are cycles of regression.)

Still, just because *I* prefer KDE isn't any absolute standard of merit. Some people perfer Gnome, and they are right too. Some people prefer OSX. Some people even prefer MSWind. They are all right in recognizing what their preference is. (Sometimes I feel they don't fully realize the cost trade-offs inherent in their choice, but it's still their honest choice.)

Re:OSX is overrated

[zymano]

Interesting.

Re:OSX is overrated

[aristotle-dude]

Uh, yeah. Don't forget to add an easy to program against API like Cocoa, an audio framework like Core Audio to provide low latency audio at up to 24-Bit 192KHz, an image/video processing framework like Core Image/Video. Why your are at it, you might want to implement colorsync as well.

Re:OSX is overrated

[chefren]

Yeah there you go. You can even call it something cool, like OS X.

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[defile]

BSD actually, not Linux.

OH MY GOD, REALLY? I HAD NO IDEA. Oh, right, NOW I remember. Steve Jobs' attempt to manipulate Linus's insecurities totally failed, so they knifed the mkLinux project and looked for more willing cocksuckers at the FreeBSD project.

Sorry about the confusion.

Why is it...

[SilentOneNCW]

Why is it that all the headlines these days are so violent?
I'm sure that every time something happens in the tech world, the intent is not to kill someone/something. Won't whoever's in charge of the headlines please think of the children!

Re:Why is it...

[TeknoHog]

I'm sure that every time something happens in the tech world, the intent is not to kill someone/something.

I'm going to f*cking kill Apple Open Source Efforts *throws chair*

Re:Why is it...

[ClamIAm]

I hope you've never had to study writing... (it would kill you)

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[Anonymous Coward]

pardon, why except the detection of monitors? it is a capability of gfx card's which is called ddc ... if your driver has support for it, xfree 4.0 and up and xorg are happily using it ...... it even has nothing to do with distributions
- via unichrome driver supports this
- ati driver supports this
- open source ati driver has this
- nvidia driver is not tested by me, but i remember seeing it there too

ubuntu for example configures your system similar without root account, and home directory encryption like filesystem encryption is not available through a flip of a switch but through an entry in a config file ....

and by the way - as long as there is a possibility to put macosx onto the hardware -i- choose, i will think of trying an install, but i won't buy a dedicated macosx system at the moment

it would have been a big bonus if macosx would have been xen-compatible, so you could run linux and macosx virtualised without big penalties, but this is now in the wild - how long will it take, until apple sues the users, who dual boot macosx/linux/bsd whatever on their machines, because those machines are only licensed to be used with macosx?

happy trollin', this should have enough calories to consume

OSx86 piracy?

[sepluv]

From the story:

Apple is afraid of assisting OSx86 piracy

Maybe because I'm not an Apple user(?), I have no idea what this story is about. What on earth is OSx86 piracy?

"Aye...my hearties...I'm a pirate from the good ship, OSx86, a catchy name for my ship....aaaarrrrh...and I always eat an apple everyday 'cause remember a good apple assists in keeping the scurvy away....arrrhh." No...really...that's my best guess.

Re:OSx86 piracy?

[nsayer]

Apple doesn't want the Intel version of MacOS X to run on non-Apple Intel boxes.

In a way, at the moment it really is piracy, since no legitimate copies of MacOS X for Intel are available except those bundled with a new Intel Mac or obtained from Apple's developer support. And those are licensed for the hosts they came with only.

The situation will change when/if Apple makes boxed copies of MacOS X available in their stores - probably when 10.5 ships. If I buy a legitimate retail copy of the OS from Apple, then proceed to run it on non-sanctioned hardware, I don't think they can really use the "piracy" term anymore.

Of course, I don't think the term "piracy" applies to any situation other than armed robbery of ships on the high seas. The more accurate term is "Copyright infringement." The term that might apply to the situation described in the paragraph immediately above would be "Violation of License Terms," but that would rather depend on the terms of the license (which I'm sure will cover this situation explicitely).

Re:OSx86 piracy?

[squiggleslash]

Of course, I don't think the term "piracy" applies to any situation other than armed robbery of ships on the high seas.

Then it's time you checked both your dictionary and how the word is used in common parlance. Because copyright infringement has been a definition of piracy many, many, decades, and appears under the definition of piracy in most dictionaries.

The term "copyright infringment" is accurate, in the same way as "property misappropriation" is an accurate description of theft. However, it would be as ludicrous to complain about people using the word "theft" when they mean "property misappropriation" as it would be to complain that people use the word "piracy" when they mean "willful copyright infringement".

Re:OSx86 piracy?

[nsayer]

However, it would be as ludicrous to complain about people using the word "theft" when they mean "property misappropriation" as it would be to complain that people use the word "piracy" when they mean "willful copyright infringement"

Wrong.

"Theft" has always meant just that. "piracy" to mean other than armed robbery on the high seas is a very recent trend, one which serves the interests of the copyright cartels by making copyright infringement sound more harmful and serious than it is.

I'm not the only one saying this, either.

"There's not MUCH Mach in it"

[argent]

(and the vikings sing, "Mach Mach Mach Mach...")

It's booting through the BSD boot process, and the BSD kernel is running single-server, and they have increasingly moved away from using Mach messages because of the overhead. It's got more Mach in it than FreeBSD does, but FreeBSD was already using a lot of Mach code, and they've continued to re-import a lot of updated FreeBSD code (eg, FFS in Panther).

Like everything else, it's a mongrel. It's part Mach, part BSD, part NeXT, part Mac, something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue...

Re:"There's not MUCH Mach in it"

[rthille]

...something blue...

Yeah, but not for long. Bluebox is getting killed off with the release of the intel iMac (i^2Mac ?).

Part of why I bought the last G5 iMac (still have some stuff I need that's classic only)

Re:"There's not MUCH Mach in it"

[modmans2ndcoming]

hmmmm............ sounds like..... And I am just going to kind of make a suggestions here, see...... that you might need to update that crap software to the OS X version, or get over your nostalgia if it does not exist on OS X and get a replacement.

Re:"There's not MUCH Mach in it"

[rthille]

Well, it'd be more of a migration, without data export :-(

It's Managing Your Money, and it's got about 10 years of my financial data in it, that it doesn't want to export as much more than text reports. I could start using Quicken, or GnuCash or MoneyDance, or write something myself (I had a friend who managed his accounts in his custom dBase app :-) But I'd still want to keep MYM around to get at that old data occasionally.
Basically, migrating to something else is somewhere in the stack of things to do, burried under all the other things.

Forget It

[jarod213]

What an outrageous claim. Like Apple is the Open-source capital of America. A bull comment. Story here: www.semanticparanoia.com

Re:Forget It

[Anonymous Coward]

test test

Shooting their foot to spite their face

[Anonymous Coward]

If this is true, I certainly hope that people follow this guy's lead. Best quote, "I don't know how successful that will be, but source-code availability of the core UNIX is a reason that I and some of my colleagues have given to justify going with OS X; not having that makes other BSDs, Linux and Slowlaris[!] more attractive than OS X for some purposes."

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[linhux]

The first account you set up does not have root access. It has sudo access, which is different. The user has to authenticate (with password) each time he or she wants to do something that requires root-privileges.

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[Anonymous Coward]

just in case anyone reads this troll (ok I did :-)

When the supporters speak about how innovative Apple is they talk about how iMac was the first computer utilizing USB ... In reality Apple had absolutely nothing to do with the technical creation of USB

i've never ever heard any mac user trumpet the use of USB. so the entire basis of this is wrong. interestingly enough, intel had a hell of a time getting MS to put USB support into their OS, with plenty of NT4 machines having useless USB ports, and Win95 not supporting it either (Win95 OSR2 had an orphaned USB stack that basically works with nothing else), wasn't until Win98 that USB support "arrived".

Re:MacIntel will be the death of Apple

[wootest]

Spend a day at a supermarket. Pick 500 random people throughout the day. How many of them will be able to install OSx86 even when it's more refined? 30?

The people who will be installing Mac OS X on PCs will largely be people currently not buying Macs in the first place. Surely a fair percent will choose to go from buying Macs to buying PCs, but are you willing to bet that they'll all stay there? Drivers and official support will be lacking, as well as software updates. I'm willing to guess that a fair amount of the people that try it out will go back fairly quickly because of the experience being all the more cumbersome over time.

I'm not saying your scenario won't happen. It's *possible*. It's just not very *probable*. The rumors of Apple's death have been, are, and will continue to be, greatly exaggerated.

Apple Open Source Efforts Are Not Dead!

[Andy_R]

Unless Netcraft confims it!

XNU

[IflyRC]

I thought XNU was the guy that Tom Cruise thinks is trapped below a volcano or something. :)

OSX86 Piracy == increased market share

[daksis]

I think that we are blowing Mac "fears" of OSX86 piracy completely out of proportion. I have a sneaking suspicion that Steve and his crew would like nothing more than OS-X86 to be available tomorrow running on hundreds of x86 PCs across the globe. Let's face it, for your average person, the OS is moot. Joe Average User wants "tools" to get work done quickly and in time to get home for little league. He could care less what the OS running things looks like.

(NB: We're assuming that consumer OSs are pretty much limited to Windows and OSx here... granted there are other user friendly OS's but they aren't really hitting the mass market....yet.)

If we consider that OS-X has a comparable suite of tools to get work done as your standard consumer friendly MS OS - then the next barrier to entry becomes cost. It's a version of the all things considered equal: most people can't tell you the difference between two HP laptops running versions of windows, so how do you explain to the guy who's trying to buy a new system at the local best buy or circuit city that these two pieces of hardware do pretty-much the same thing, but you're going to pay a 25% premium because that other one *looks* cooler. Joe Average is likely to judge technology in a simple, superficial way; one of the most superficial methods available is price. If the windows pc lets him get email and surf the "inter-web" *and* costs less welp, then that's the choice to make.

What gets interesting is when someone has made this investment and they aren't happy with windows. Currently, they're stuck. Most people don't have a geek friend that will happily burn them a user friendly distro, or spend the next three weeks teaching them how to build a BSD box. The old scenario for someone wishing to switch from windows to OsX would be something like:
Step 1: "Buy new pc that is two or three times the cost of current cheap windows box."
Step 2: "Pray that you really like OSX"

If OS-X is unlocked and allowed to roam free, then people are now free to try out OS-X with a minimal investment in the software. Don't like it? No problem, go back to windows. Shucks, if Apple was really devious, they would be paying people to create live-cd distros of OS-x86 to hand out to people so that you could have as many people trying out their OS as possible. Remember, for your average user, the benefits of an OS designed with usability in mind are too intangible for them to switch. Windows "works well enough". Joe Average User has to see, touch and feel the improvement for it to be real. The only way to get Joe Average to switch is to provide him a low risk environment where he can experience the user-interaction elation that Mac users are always going on about. Mac could have an army of people using their OS on "unsupported" non mac hardware - a great guerrilla tactics way of increasing market share.

Re:OSX86 Piracy == increased market share

[Y-Crate]

The fears are not overblown since they are based in historical fact. Those that doubt this need to look no further than the Mac clone debacle of 10 years ago.

- Apple cannot afford to produce OS X without selling Mac hardware. This is the case wether anyone wants to admit it or not. Apple brings in an enormous amount of money from their iPod division, and the retail sales of OS X fatten the bottom-line considerably. However, the core of their business remains desktop and portable hardware.

- It would be an incorrect assumption to think that Apple would still sell enough of this hardware if OS X was made available for common x86 hardware.

- OS X sales would increase dramatically with the disassociation of the software from the hardware. Even an extremely optimistic projection would not allow OS X's sales to come close to generating the revenue Apple currently receives from hardware sales at anytime in the first few years after the transition.

- OS X would lose the benefits of tight integration between the hardware and the software that it currently enjoys.

To sum it up, Apple would lose their primary source of income, gain a new source that would be highly unlikely to make up for the shortfall, and OS X would lose many of the benefits that it currently has due to the limited hardware pool it is required to support. The final outcome would be Apple's bankruptcy, and an OS that would exist merely in our memories, going the way of Amiga OS and Atari's TOS. Dreams of it being open-sourced would not be realized, as the multitude of technologies licensed to produce it would prevent that from ever occurring.

Re:OSX86 Piracy == increased market share

[dslbrian]

I have a sneaking suspicion that Steve and his crew would like nothing more than OS-X86 to be available tomorrow running on hundreds of x86 PCs across the globe.

I don't think so. Apple seems to view itself as a hardware manufacturer, and OSX seems to be a vehicle for shipping hardware. I imagine they take that stance as 1) they don't have a dominant enough position to support themselves with only software, 2) they want absolute control over the system components (limits what they have to write drivers for), and 3) they're greedy (commodity hardware at a non-commodity price).

Re:OSX86 Piracy == increased market share

[Cyno]

Before they shut it down I was considering running it on one of my systems, possibly even replacing Windows if they could get Cedega to work on it. But they had to go and be evil.

So now I won't have anything to do with Apple, even if they offer me a boxed suite with all the drivers for my hardware for free.

Actually, I probably would have just stuck to Linux anyway. Novell's XGL shows how little effort Apple puts into their 3D work. They say "Think Different" and expect you to conform. I hate freakin' fascists!

Re:OSX86 Piracy == increased market share

[jcr]

I have a sneaking suspicion that Steve and his crew would like nothing more than OS-X86 to be available tomorrow running on hundreds of x86 PCs across the globe.

Nope.

I was there for three and a half years. Apple engineers cringe at the idea of OS X running on any screwdriver-shop machine, because they actually care about the user experience. Many of us remember what a pain in the ass it was to get NeXTSTEP installed on a Dell or Epson PC. It's VERY important to Apple, that their users should not have to put up with that.

Maybe sometime in the next decade, when Vista has cratered and the next version of Windows is six years late (again), the Dells, HPs, and Lenovos of the world will cut a deal with Apple to allow them to sell OS X on their hardware, but I really wouldn't hold my breath for it.

-jcr

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[temojen]

pardon, why except the detection of monitors?

Because I didn't know about ddc when my company asked me to research the possibility of producing Linux Desktops & Laptops two years ago.

"Will MacIntel Kill Apple Open Source Efforts?"

[Evro]

That's a poor title. Something like "Is Apple Ending Open Source Efforts?" would be more fitting.

Will Slashdot posting imagined crimes hurt OSS?

[wardk]

probably not, except for the time OSS developers have wasted following this non-story

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[jocknerd]

Good answer, but not entirely right. I'm running OS X on a PowerMac Dual G5 and I've got 2 Dell 2005FPW monitors attached to it and it "discovered" and configured them correctly. Apple doesn't own that hardware.

Digression - "piracy", but first a message...

[argent]

Before we get into the digression I'm glad to hear that my prediction has not in fact come true, and a technical glitch has been blown way out of proportion (which is, now I think of it, what happened with the "Apple's ripping off KHTML" flamewar).

---

Onwards!

You can't actually buy a copy of OSX for x86, the only versions on the shelves are PPC.

That's only one of many reasons I haven't personally so much as downloaded any of the bits necessary to install any version of Mac OS X on Intel hardware. Don't make this about me, please, because it's not.

However...

and unless you wipe it from your new Mac

There's quite a few people working on and even successfully running Linux on the new intel-based iMac, as well as people working on running Windows on it.

Personally I think they're all nuts, but there are people who can install Mac OS X for Intel on a non-Mac without being "pirates".

Re:Digression - "piracy", but first a message...

[jbolden]

The apple ripping of KHTML was a real issue. Apple developers considered cooperation with KDE to be of minor importance, primarily because of Apple's culture of secrecy. Once these problems became publicly known Apple management freed up the resources for a decent compromise solution. I'd call that a successful lobbying.

Re:Digression - "piracy", but first a message...

[argent]

The apple ripping of KHTML was a real issue.

No it wasn't. Apple was already doing more than the GPL required, the whole issue was caused by people outside BOTH Apple and the KHTML team complaining that KHTML wasn't picking up "Apple's Fixes" and hassling them over it. Demanding that a port to a *completely different window system* maintain detailed compatibility is letting the crack-pipe think for you.

Re:Digression - "piracy", but first a message...

[jbolden]

No its the sort of cooperation that generally exists in the open source world. Apple should be trying to be helpful to KDE and KDE should be trying to be helpful to Apple. They should be sharing.

And after the community (which was outside both Apple and KDE) complained, Apple policy changed and those fixes now are getting put into KDE. Like I said that's a success.

Oh and no one ever accused Apple of being in violation of copyright law (i.e. violating the GPL) the question was whether their behavior was ethical. Evidentally Apple management didn't believe it was, so at this point what are you defending. Apple agreed they weren't doing something they should be and fixed the problem. Are you really trying to argue that they shouldn't have fixed it.

Re:Digression - "piracy", but first a message...

[argent]

*snort*

You're looking at "the open source world" through rose-tinted glasses.

Also: "Evidentally Apple management didn't believe it was [ethical]" is pure speculation. Apple's internal source code management system wqsn't designed for open source work. Well, you know, neither is mine. I don't release my repository, I release complete snapshots. Am I being unethical?

Fuck no.

Apple has consistently done more than they had to with their open source components. They do regular releases of their BSD licensed code, *exactly* as they had been doing with the Safari code. That was ... and still is ... considered way more than reasonable. Why on earth do you think they should have expected ANYONE would complain about them doing the same thing with Safari?

Maybe they should have expected that the whacko wing of the open source movement would pounce on something they were doing and make up a bunch of complaints that nobody's ever made of other companies that use open-source products. Regardless, they came back and set up a repository just for the KHTML code. And in return for going beyond the call of duty you come back and argue that this was an admission of guilt.

Man, if you want to discourage companies from using open source code in the future, you couldn't have done a better job.

Are you really trying to argue that they shouldn't have fixed it.

Hell no. Until you started implying underhanded motives to that very act the thought wouldn't have entered my head. Keep trying, maybe you'll convince me I'm wrong and they shouldn't have bothered to release anything but what they were absolutely required to in the first place. It seems they would have gotten less flack for it.

Re:Digression - "piracy", but first a message...

[jbolden]

You're looking at "the open source world" through rose-tinted glasses.

What cooperation. That's pretty much the rule. I do all sorts of open source work and I've generally found that to be the case.

Also: "Evidentally Apple management didn't believe it was [ethical]" is pure speculation.

David Hyatt said this. It isn't my speculation. The developers were told by management that the bad PR was a result of their actions and they wanted a policy change. That's from inside apple.

Apple has consistently done more than they had to with their open source components. They do regular releases of their BSD licensed code, *exactly* as they had been doing with the Safari code. That was ... and still is ... considered way more than reasonable. Why on earth do you think they should have expected ANYONE would complain about them doing the same thing with Safari?

Because KHTML ain't under the business friendly BSD license. Different community different rules different attitudes.

And in return for going beyond the call of duty you come back and argue that this was an admission of guilt.

No in return for doing this they were returned to being seen as being in good standing. Apple Inc wants to be seen as different than Microsoft they want to be praised by the open source community and that requires cooperation.

BTW there have been companies with your attitude towards community development. Caldera for example. What they found was they couldn't get cooperation from open source developers. It absolutely killed their business. RedHat customers got support and Caldera customers got slack from Apache, kernel, GCC...

If cooperation is needed shunning is very effective. In the days of OS7-9 the techy community made life hard for Apple users, which hurt Apple a lot in schools and corporations they don't want to go back to that. They want to be treated better than Microsoft they have to do more than what they are legally required to do. To the best of my knowledge Microsoft doesn't violate copyright law.

The Free Software community doesn't care about companies using open source they care about them joining the open source community. That's a much higher level of commitment. What's the benefit of having lots of companies use software without giving back?

Re:Digression - "piracy", but first a message...

[argent]

The developers were told by management that the bad PR was a result of their actions and they wanted a policy change.

That doesn't mean they thought it was unethical, that just means there was bad PR.

Because KHTML ain't under the business friendly BSD license. Different community different rules different attitudes.

Neither are many of the other components that are also released with the BSD licensed code on the same schedule. For that matter, there are actual open source groups that have maintained their own parallel forks of GPL code on the same kind of release basis. There's no reason for they or I to assume that there's any different "rules" or "attitudes" for GPLed codes. Because there isn't.

There's apparently a different attitude among certain outsiders to the KHTML team, and the KHTML team got irritated by the reaction of those outsiders... but the amount of steam they blew off was minimal. All the noise is coming from a very small group who still (as is proven by this exchange) got a chip on their shoulder about Apple and who don't, as you put it, consider Apple "in good standing" as a result.

BTW there have been companies with your attitude towards community development. Caldera [...]

Ah, Godwin's Rule already? Bravo. On the basis of I don't know what (you certainly can't tell what "my attitude towards community development" is from this thread) you've decided I must be a corporate shill.

To the best of my knowledge Microsoft doesn't violate copyright law.

What, apart from being found guilty in multiple suits of stealing code, technology, and trade secrets, and settling in more to avoid a finding?

The Free Software community doesn't care about companies using open source they care about them joining the open source community.

Yep, and Apple's maintained regular, timely, and increasingly complete releases of Darwin, they cooperate with and support the FreeBSD project, and they absolutely bent over backwards even where there was and is not even a hint why this ONE MAGIC SUPER SPECIAL ELITE open source product MUST be handled completely differently from EVERY OTHER open source product they're involved in... no matter what license they're using...

As for Red Hat... oh, man, you want to talk about a company that's got a bad attitude towards the community! Red Hat's forking of GCC, their magic installer-ofe-the-month and their "special status" causes no end of friction in the open source community. Their releases have often been "oh my god, what the hell are RH doing this time?", and RHN steers as close as they can to being "closed" as they think they can get away with... to the point where there's two separate projects doing nothing but maintaining a parallel distribution so Red Hat users can get the support they need despite Red Hat - I've got four copies of RHEL ES on the shelf and I'me running White Hat on the servers themselves because it's too much trouble to keep up with RHN through a hostile corporate firewall. The duplication of effort is insane.

Red Hat gets the support from the community because they buy it with market share and just plain cash. NOT because they're well-behaved.

Re:Digression - "piracy", but first a message...

[jbolden]

I'm starting to get the impression you are trolling.

Hold on a second here. The KDE developers were ticked off at Apple not providing useful patches. They were ticked off by no access to Apple internal databases without signing NDAs. I know from experience on another part of OSX the moment you start talking to Apple you are in NDA land. The developers of KHTML felt that Apple was not being cooperative. That is genuine. The developers of KHTML also felt that their user base had an expecation of cooperation.

The KDE developer community had been unsuccesful in lobbying for the changes in behavior that the wider free software community was able to get. So yes the developers were upset with Apple's behavior as evidenced by the fact that they had tried repeatedly to change it.

    You were asserting my events was pure conjecture. I've presented a clear case that developer behavior was overriden by management as a result of the public outcry, that was it was an example of succesful lobbying. Which if you look back was the point.

As for the more general point, Apple changed policy and now everyone is happy. You are asserting there is some sort of chip on my soldier when I've said nothing but that the problem is fully resolved. As for differences, Apple works very tightly with the GCC group and coordinates releases with them. So what was being asked for wasn't unique at all. Its the way Apple worked with Adobe on the LsserRighter 1, or the way Apple works with Hitachi on small harddrives or the way any company works when their goal is cooperation.

What does Caldera have to do with Godwin's law? They didn't kill anybody.
Now the RedHat comment were regarding RedHat vs. Caldera in the mid 1990s. But no I don't see RedHat doing anything that is closed sourcish.

The rest of the argument I can't follow. I've never liked their products too much myself but whether I like a product is very different from their standing and importance in the community. I guess you give an example of where they are doing anything particularly bad.

The GCC fork was IMHO an effort that was similar to their RedHat kernel (which has been a huge benefit to the main Linux kernel effort), that failed.

Re:Digression - "piracy", but first a message...

[argent]

The KDE developers were ticked off at Apple not providing useful patches.

The KDE developers were ticked off by people flaming them for not picking up the Apple patches, because the Apple patches were against the Apple sources, and only posted for information. This doesn't mean they were particularly ticked off at Apple for not providing the sources they were patching against... they even noted that they couldn't use them even with that source because the code bases weren't compatible.

They were mostly ticked off at being blindsided by a bunch of complaints from people about something they had no control over.

The developers of KHTML felt that Apple was not being cooperative.

I'm sure some of them did, but that's not why the flame-war erupted, and developers of open source software (or, for that matter, non-open-source software) have to deal with people "not being cooperative" all the time. Not just companies, but other open source projects, and people in their own project. "Not being cooperative" isn't unethical, and it may not even be voluntary.

"Not being cooperative" includes (for example) open source projects dropping support for other open-source projects. It involves people making incompatible changes in interfaces. GCC has gone through splits because of people "not being cooperative". GCC developers have flamed Red Hat for "not being cooperative". There are open source developers with widely used projects that are notorious for "not being cooperative". When I submitted patches to Tcl back around Tcl 2.x, John Ousterhout completely reimplemented all my work. When Dan Bernstein does stuff like that, people flame him for "not being cooperative", when John did it waited, and I looked at his code and I was glad he'd done it... his code was much better than mine. He had a good reason for "not being cooperative".

People can "not be cooperative" for technical reasons. Apple's doing a lot of the rendering in Safari by passing the work off to their native graphics... none of that code could even potentially be used to the KHTML team EXCEPT as information about how someone else had approached the problem, and some of the patches that started this whole thing off were that kind of change.

You were asserting my events was pure conjecture.

No, I said your INTERPRETATION of the MOTIVES behind the events was pure conjecture. Because it was, and is.

You are asserting there is some sort of chip on my soldier when I've said nothing but that the problem is fully resolved.

The person I originally replied to (was that you?) obviously doesn't consider it fully resolved OR THEY WOULDN'T HAVE BROUGHT IT UP.

What does Caldera have to do with Godwin's law?

Peter's contraflow to Godwin's Law... every community has their own Hitler.

The GCC fork was IMHO an effort that was similar to their RedHat kernel

AFAICT it was an attempt to bring some GCC3 (IIRC) features in to a GCC2 code base to take advantage of them before they were ready to go to GCC3.

But even if it was a technically different fork, so is Webcore. You can't merge Webcore and KHTML without a huge amount of work that's probably not worth doing... because KHTML doesn't have Quartz and Aqua to do the work for it.

Re:Digression - "piracy", but first a message...

[jbolden]

The first person in this thread to bring up the KHTML situation was you. Here is the parent to the first place you mention it.

The KDE developers were ticked off by people flaming them for not picking up the Apple patches, because the Apple patches were against the Apple sources, and only posted for information.

They were very ticked off which is they were lobbying. To pick a really simple example that doesn't involve knowledge of the code: Safari's "report bugs to apple" database contains millions of reports of problems with websites the html/javascript.... That's a huge plus for KHTML development. They wanted access.

Another simple example was Apple's internal rendering test scripts. Again doesn't matter for webcore or Konq.

Now neither of those is even part of the "source code" but are the kinds of things that partners in development would share.

Also the KTHML guys were reading Apple's changes carefully for ideas. One thing that was specifically requested was a way to translate bug numbers: "addresses bug r34578957-AL" didn't do the KHTML guys much good. Being able to see what r345778957-AL was would have been useful.
The broader open source community didn't make these issues up. They weren't the ones running into references to r345778957-AL in sourcecode.

You were asserting my events was pure conjecture.

No, I said your INTERPRETATION of the MOTIVES behind the events was pure conjecture. Because it was, and is.

I don't know what you are talking about I'd like some evidence.
1) Low level employees engages in action X
2) X becomes public
3) The public is unhappy with action X
4) management tells employees to changes action X and stop the public outcry
5) Employees change X into X'
5) The public is happy with X'

That's pretty stamdard fair for an admission by a company that X was the wrong policy. I think the burden is on you to prove that Apple believed it was the right policy given their public actions. It Coke close to 20 years to admit that not selling Coke Classic was a bad idea, but they changed course in a matter of weeks. If "unethical" is your only problem then yeah my case is weak there.

More importantly even if you proved it, it wouldn't dispute my main point that the open source community by lobbying moved Apple from X to X' which was their goal. In other words successful lobbying.

I don't consider Caldera and Hitler to be remotely similar. Caldera was obnoxious but basically was helpful to Linux. But again you ducked the issue. Caldera was a company that didn't get support from the open source community and thus they sank. The point was that crossing the line between a liked and a disliked company is expensive for companies that make use of open source technologies.

If you object to Caldera, Sun is having this problem. They are huge open source advocates and have open sourced lots of code. But because politically they have been so hostile to Linux they don't get the kind of cooperationa and goodwill that IBM does, even though objectively Sun has given much more code and much more important code to the community than IBM.

Re:Digression - "piracy", but first a message...

[argent]

The first person in this thread to bring up the KHTML situation was you.

Beg pardon. You didn't bring it up, but you did jump at it like a trout at a fly.

That's pretty stamdard fair for an admission by a company that X was the wrong policy.

You didn't say it was an admission of "wrong policy". You said "unethical". And even "wrong policy" is too broad. An unpopular policy may be a wrong policy, or it may not be. For example, Apple's policy of having Safari use the normal desktop applications for opening files downloaded from the Internet is clearly popular and I have been flamed for suggesting they should change it (even though most people would never notice the change I've suggested). And yet it completely violates basic security parctices and has been responsible for multiple demonstrated exploits. It's the wrong policy, even if it's a popular one. Similarly, the way XPIs are installed in Firefox is wrong policy for similar reasons, and yet even after an exploit showed up the Mozilla folks haven't changed this wrong (but popular) policy.

If "unethical" is your only problem then yeah my case is weak there.

*snort*

my main point that the open source community by lobbying moved Apple from X to X'

I haven't said anything about whether it was a successful or a useful campaign, or whether the outcome was good. Clearly both of these things are true. I have only said that the people complaining that Apple's behaviour was "unethical" or even "outside the norms of the open source community" have an unrealistic view of the open source community, and are applying a different standard to Apple than to (say) Red Hat.

For example:

Safari's "report bugs to apple" database contains millions of reports of problems with websites the html/javascript.... That's a huge plus for KHTML development. They wanted access.

Red Hat Network has a huge database of applications and other packages, millions of lines of code and bug reports and updates, but you have to pay them thousands of dollars a year to get it... if your company's firewall will let you.

Not to mention that "the open source community" includes people who were, in the late '80s and early '90s, putting features into GCC deliberately to break other C compilers... which they did so successfully that both of the competing open-source compilers I know of are dead in the water, and the only effective C compilers outside the GCC monoculture are commercial. Even FreeBSD has long since given up trying to keep the kernel compatible with anything but GCC.

Caldera was obnoxious but basically was helpful to Linux.

Caldera is the company currently embroiled in a lawsuit with IBM and Novell over whether Linux should even exist!

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, proof that just because you have a low user ID doesn't mean you're not a troll, moron, idiot, and/or general annoyance.

Custom hardware?

[Yoik]

I expect that Apple will put some hard_to_duplicate features in hardware to preserve their market and margin. That's what they have done before.

That could make it nasty to port osx to non-Apple platforms without severely crippling the result.

One good place for this would be a DRM/encryption chip.

If all you want is a taste...

[argent]

While I don't agree with the people who beable on about how "used Macs enable even the poor to productively use OS X, just look at eBay", it's worth noting that you CAN get Macs capable of running OS/X up to 10.2.8 without any tweaking for as little as $40... and get quite a good taste of the system from that.

I wouldn't release my source code

[Anonymous Coward]

A. It's a lot easier to write viruses/hacks for software when you have the source.
B. Do you tell your competitors your secrets? Without the source, it takes MS a couple extra years to catch up.
C. What legal/practical reason is there for releasing the source code, it's not like people are improving the software, they're just finding ways to install it on non-apple hardware and pirate it more easily.

Why do people think apple should do this?

But, Dr Evil...

[argent]

Sooner or later Steve will swollow his pride and create a subsystem consisting of a modernized POSIX [...]

He doesn't have to. ...that already happened..

Re:But, Dr Evil...

[jbolden]

Interex is similar in all but a technical sense to Cygwin. He's talking about something more like OSX for Windows. From an OSX perspective he's be replacing the Darwin layer with Windows and making the .Net/Win32-Com... widgets available to OSX. Sort of like the old Norton Desktop for Windows but more complicated.

Re:But, Dr Evil...

[argent]

Interex is similar in all but a technical sense to Cygwin.

Interix is not in any sense simlar to Cygwin. It is _precisely_ a replacement for the POSIX subsystem, it provides real usable POSIX semantics... not a crippled version... and serves the same purpose in Windows that what Apple calls "the BSD subsystem" does in Mac OS X.

Think of the NT kernel as Mach, and Interix as a BSD server, and you'll be closer.

Cygwin is just a bunch of compatibility libraries on top of Win32. It's not secure enough to be a real replacement for the BSD subsystem, but Interix is.

Apple _also_ already has OpenStep for Windows, so they could back-port Cocoa to that.

And for Carbon, they've got the compatibility library iTunes and Quicktime for Windows runs under.

Re:But, Dr Evil...

[jbolden]

I see what you mean. I was aware of the deep integration but when I was thinking about WSU I was thinking about the shells, tools... not about the kernel. You're right Interex does get Apple most of what it wants, and it wouldn't be hard to emulate almost everything in Darwin from Interex.

OK I see what you are saying. Good point. You may want to be clear you are refering to the core of Interex.

Re:But, Dr Evil...

[argent]

WSU is a lot more than Interix. Really, Interix itself *is* the core you're talking about... the updated POSIX subsystem (which did and does include the shell and tools, just as the BSD subsystem on OSX does... at one point, when it was called Rhapsody, Apple was considering leaving that stuff out as much as possible and only including the parts that were absolutely essential to running the system, but luckily they came to their senses). It started as an external product and only got bought by Microsoft and integrated with the rest of WSU later.

GPL

[whilo]

Now you know what the GPL is for... Freedom is hard to win but easy to lose. The value of the GPL cannot be overestimated! Not access to the source code, but your right for access to the source code is the key for free software.

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[Eccles]

I consider Mac OS X a handy platform for working on FOSS applications, and with Darwine, et al the Intel ones should be able to run just about any program out there, so I can use it for entertainment too.

Open source is valuable because it's voluntary

[Oz0ne]

No one is required to open their sources. If they do, good for us! If not, it's not for us to demand that they do.

Re:Open source is valuable because it's voluntary

[Swave An deBwoner]

The first of the three TFAs cited in the original post concludes with what strikes me as the most essential question regarding "contributing back to Apple":

Even now, we are going through yet another cycle of losing access that we once had. With the release of Mac OS X for x86 processors, Apple has chosen to not release source to key components of the OS, such as the kernel and all drivers. This means Darwin/x86 is dead in the water; Darwin/ppc has many closed source components and is a deprecated architecture. One has to wonder why Apple even bothers to release non-GPL'd source at all, if it is unwilling to cooperate with external developers to increase their return on investment and accept external bug fixes and features. Even worse, one has to wonder why people would want to donate their time to such a fruitless and pointless cause.

I accept the existence of an altruism that motivates people to contribute to philanthropic organizations, and to help those who are less fortunate, but to contribute one's time to a megabuck for-profit corporation? Please.

Re:Open source is valuable because it's voluntary

[argent]

Apple isn't required to open-source Darwin, though there are components they are required to continue releasing. That doesn't mean this wouldn't be news, something to worry about, etc, etc, etc...

well...

[maxpublic]

This is from the "from the somethign-to-think-about dept". I'd rather it was from the "we actually spell-checked this one dept".

Max

More digression on Piracy...

[argent]

Mac computers are sold with a license to use Mac OS X. The retail box you can buy is an upgrade, which presupposes you already have a Mac (and thus a Mac OS license).

Interesting point, one I have made (albeit with one extra word... 'the retail box is effectively an upgrade') many times. The problem is that there's been people running retail copies of Mac OS X on machines never licensed for it for way too long for it to be called "piracy".

It may be against the EULA, it may be illegal, it may be many things, but "piracy" is too strong a term.

But even more interesting:

there is a way to avoid it being quote-piracy-unquote while still breaking the EULA: buy and wipe clean an old Mac.

Everyone with a legal copy of OS X Intel they can install on a non-Apple box got it with a Mac they can install Linux on to stay kinda kosher.

Re:MacIntel will be the death of Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

A "hacked, unsupported" OS that "might work on whatever beige box they've got lying around given enough work" is exactly what the great unwashed masses out there are used to.

It is entirely possible that a hacked MaxOSX might be better and easier to use that your average Grandma's virus infested windows box.

The sad part is, if Apple weren't so used to getting by based on a cult of elitism instead of technological superiority, then they might consider selling a minimally-supports MacOSX for intel for $50, and really make a difference in the world.

I know most of the Jobs appologists will claim that OSX can't possibly work as flawlessly on the vast variety of hardware out there, and/or that support costs will be too large. They accept these arguments unquestionly because it fits in with their elitist worldview. The fact that a company as comparetively small as Redhat profitably handles these issues does not pierce haze.

The best reason for MacOSX to be released or widely pirated is spiritual. All these cultists will be forced to confront the sight of wife-beater-wearing trailer-dwellers using their precious software, and will be forced to ask themselves, "now that we both have a mac, what REALLY makes us different?" While there would surely be some mass suicides, hopefully the vast majority will use the moment of introspection to reform, stop wearing turtleneck sweaters on perfect warm days, and become useful members of society.

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[diegocgteleline.es]

Please, can stop having posts about this in slashdot?

Mac OS X DOES include lots of freebsd code - the tcp/ip stack, the whole POSIX layer implementation - it's not just a "BSD API". There's REAL bsd code there.

They use a derived mach microkernel (you know, just like NT) for things like the process scheduler etc, which is not that much code compared with the derived bsd code. A microkernel, in essence, it's not a kernel, it's just something that can be used to implement servers which implement the functionality which traditionally would be implemented in a monolithic kernel. In Mac OS X, it's derived freebsd code what does that. And it does it running in the same privileged address space where the derived microkernel runs for performance reasons, which makes mac os x have pretty the same disadvantages that monolithic kernels have, which is why mac os x is not a real microkernel. I need to look up that presentation from an apple developer where he showed statistics that showed how the bsd code was most of mac os x and mach and the io kit were just a minority when looking at the number of lines of code...

Re:Not The Only Thing It Will Kill

[Anonymous Coward]

I one corner, we have /. guy wanking off to internet pron. In the other we have Steve who has started several tech companies and led them to huge profits. Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets.

Like won't have an effect.

[TheZorch]

This very likely shouldn't have an effect unless they make it impossible for anyone but licensed vendors to write software for MacIntel systems which for Apple would be suicide. Without the ability to create software of your own using publicly available dev tools the Mac would become useless in the business arena. Apple would never be able to compete with Windows for corporate contracts.

It would be like Microsoft making it illegal for companies to ship C++ tools for writing Windows software. It would kill them.

presumption of "assisting OSx86 piracy" is wrong

[GodWasAnAlien]

Nowhere in any of the links given was "piracy" given.
I would expect the Apple PR to say something like this.

But there is no validity in the statement.

Open source would only perhaps add competition. This does not have anything to do with copy protection.

Limiting open source, and adding DRM as Apple is using it is meant to limit/stop hardware competition/cloning and limit/stop direct OSX competition/cloing.

pirate?

[asv108]

People using Apple's open-source efforts to pirate Mac OS X killed Apple's open-source efforts.

Pirate? Making OSX run on non-apple machines may be a violation of their user agreement, but its certainly not piracy.

Re:pirate?

[lurch_mojoff]

Pirate? Making OSX run on non-apple machines may be a violation of their user agreement, but its certainly not piracy.

So, if you're not pirating Mac OS X how exactly did you get a hold of a copy of the x86 version?

Re:pirate?

[mindtriggerz]

Buying it from a store?

Re:pirate?

[aristotle-dude]

Show me where you can purchase a boxed version of OS X 10.4.4 for Intel. Apple does sell PPC versions of 10.4.3 but nowhere can you get 10.4.4 for Intel or above without purchasing an Intel mac or pirating it.

Are you suggesting that if you own the Xbox version of a game, it is not piracy to copy the PS2 version? Unless you happen to be the copyright owner, you cannot change or dictate the terms.

Re:pirate?

[FLAGGR]

Wrong. They don't sell copies. The only way to get osx-x86 is to buy an intel mac.

Re:pirate?

[jacksonj04]

The x86 version isn't available in any store, only the PPC version. You may be able to get around this with licencing (ie copying the software is fine as long as you have a seperate licence, as with a lot of MS software) but IANAL.

Re:pirate?

[aristotle-dude]

They don't sell the Intel version in a store. You can only get it with a new Intel mac.

Re:pirate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple does sell PPC versions of 10.4.3 but nowhere can you get 10.4.4 for Intel or above without purchasing an Intel mac or pirating it.

Why would you have to attack and steal it from a ship?

I'm sure eventually Intel OS X cds will be available for sale, unless they decide to give all future updates out for free...

Are you suggesting that if you own the Xbox version of a game, it is not piracy to copy the PS2 version?

I definetly feel it's wrong to attack and steal from ships. Oh wait, do you mean copyright infringement? If so, your analagy is off. It would be more like this:

Are you suggesting that if you own the Xbox version of a game, it is not copyright infringement to run it on an Xbox emulator?

Re:pirate?

[jbolden]

Are you suggesting that if you own the Xbox version of a game, it is not piracy to copy the PS2 version?

If they shared the same code, they yes its not piracy.

Unless you happen to be the copyright owner, you cannot change or dictate the terms.

All terms have to involve rights or non rights to make copies. Generally its not piracy to copy content you already own for your own use to a different medium. That's why you can photocopy a book you own providing you keep the original.

Re:pirate?

[toddestan]

Wrong. They don't sell copies. The only way to get osx-x86 is to buy an intel mac.

An Intel Mac.... which which comes with a copy x86? You can certainly buy a copy of OSX x86. Just at the moment it comes with a rather large hardware dongle attached.

Re:pirate?

[gnasher719]

'' Wrong. They don't sell copies. The only way to get osx-x86 is to buy an intel mac. ''

So the only ones who could run MacOS X on a non-Macintosh machine both without copyright infringement and _reasonably_, would be people who buy a quad core super duper AMD machine, and a MacMini Intel (when it is released in a few months), remove MacOS X from the MacMini, put the MacMini away, and get MacOS X running on the AMD machine. (I can't tell whether this would violate any license agreements and whether such agreements are enforcable, but it wouldn't be a copyright infringement).

Doing the same with an iMac and a $499 Dull box would be exactly as legal, but completely unreasonable.

Re:pirate?

[demon]

It already comes with a hardware dongle, foo. It's called Apple's x86 machine. :)

Re:pirate?

[Slithe]

I think that is the hardware dongle he was talking about, foo.

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[Anonymous Coward]

the only proprietary things in OS X are Aqua and related technologies.

Except, of course, all of that DRM yumminess...

Honestly, Apple is using (all? mostly?) BSD-licensed source code. And that means that they can withold as much or as little of it as they like. Totally true -- that's their own call.

It sounds like in this case, Apple just made a mistake and they fixed it. The question is: will Apple always release the source code? Jobs may make promises...every engineer at Apple may make promises, but times change (who thought Apple would move to intel?), and companies change.

Re:Erm, that is not an official statement from App

[HiThere]

There may not be proof ... but I'm changing my plans. I was contemplating a MacIntel which would dual boot, but if Mac is likely to be as closed as MSWind, why bother. I'll get either a white-box or a Linux box.

Face it, the MacIntel will be more expensive, so if it doesn't offer me more, I won't buy it. And to me more doesn't just mean it doesn't have MSWind installed, it means it has a basically OpenSource system installed. (I know the Mac window manager isn't open source, but as long as the base layer OS is, I'm willing to accept that for the increased functionality of the applications that run on it. [I don't particularly like the OSX window manager, though I can live with it. I need some of the applications...but I can live with using them on older machines, I still have one computer dedicated to MSWind95, because of a needed application. It just never goes anywhere near the net.])

I'm not a large company, I only buy one computer every other year or so...but I also advise people on what computer to buy, and if I don't use it, I won't recommend it. (And I occasionally give computers as gifts to close relatives. If I don't think it suitable, I won't give it.) Apple is what I had been recommending to naive users. Now my recommendation is "Look for a slightly used Mac" (i.e., it's on "hold" pending appropriate resolution of this claim).

Official statements don't carry the weight of gold with me. Actions speak much louder than words. Officials have lied for convenience too often for me to put much trust in them unless I have *good* reason to trust their integrity.

OTOH, I do admit that developers are prone to take offense "easily" (from a company's point of view), and to jump to conclusions when presented with incomplete data. But few companies have really earned much benefit of the doubt, and Apple isn't really one of them. Apple can be trusted to go for stylish, and to attempt to make good user interfaces. It can't be trusted to not backstab it's developers. E.g., it has sold developer products for high prices that it knew it intended to immediately make obsolete, and/or discontinue. They caught me that way a few times, so I have experience behind my skepticism.

Re:MacIntel will be the death of Apple

[pair-a-noyd]

well whoever modded that as flamebait/troll is an idiot.
I *LIKE* Macs. I think they are freaking excellent machines and the OS and apps kick ass..

I'm just saying that the move to Intel was a BAD move. It's going to hurt them deeply. Before the Intel move what was the OS piracy rate? Um, like maybe ZERO?

To use OS X you had to have a REAL APPLE. Now any schmuck can build one.
As for saying it's too hard, ever heard of Maxxuss?? He just made it simple for
morons and it's HOT on the torrents right now. OS X 86 piracy is a HUGE problem for Apple now. And to say people won't pirate an OS is stupid.
How many people here have bootleg copies of Windows or have bootlegged it one or more times in the past? More than are legit I would wager.

Would I go out and buy a new Apple knowing it's pretty much the same hardware that any run of the mill beige PC is? No. I would have gone out and bought a brand new Mac if it had the legacy CPU and hardware that has been their mainstay.
But no way in hell am I going to fork over top dollar for a machine that's not just the same as but EQUAL in quality (same Chinese imported crap) as any beige box is.

There's an old saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

I'll buy a Mac again but it will be used. I won't buy any Intel based Mac.
I'll probably build one though, just for the sake of doing it.
But when I want a REAL Mac I'll find a used PowerPC based box.

For gods sake man - close the parentheses!

[Anonymous Coward]

For gods sake man - close the parentheses! I can't go on with my day until you do!

Daemon News Article

[Anonymous Coward]

Daemon News is also running an article saying similar things.

http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200602/apple.html

cnn:pirates raid cruiseliner, demand copy software

[GodWasAnAlien]

I saw this on CNN recently.

Pirates attacked a cruiseliner with machine guns today, killing several people, and demanding that passengers allow them to copy Windows(tm) and OSX(tm) from their laptops. It was tragic story, and should serve as reminder to the rest that DRM and copy protection are nessesary to fight against pirates.

Adding DRM is not about limiting competition and increasing profits. It's about saving lives.

Re:MacIntel will be the death of Apple

[larkost]

Of those 500 people I would bet that less than 5 (1%) of them would try to install MacOS X on their non-Apple computer. But here is where the problem is: 4 of those 5 people would have major problems with the install and blame Apple for those problems since they "paid lots of money to get a great computer". These same people also are the same people that the other 495 look to as tech-savy people, and take their advice on purchasing computers. This has all the makings of a big black eye.

Idiots

[koan]

Look at what piracy did for M$.

WRONG

[johnpaul191]

read above..... it was an error by Apple and has been corrected.
you'll have to find something else to trash Apple for today.

Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS driver

[billybob2]

Last July, Apple asked Anton Altaparmakov, lead developer of the Linux-NTFS project, to dual license the Linux-NTFS driver under the APL so that the Intel version of OS X can read/write files on Windows partitions (presumably for dual-boot computers). The problem pointed out by other Linux-NTFS developers is that the APL is not GPL compatible, and any changes made by Apple to the driver will be unusable in Linux. As one person put it:

This would open up a one-way street: towards OS X and away from GNU/Linux and any other OS based on the GPL.

Not to mention the Konqueror / Safari fiasco where Apple complied to the terms of the LGPL by the skin of their teeth, making it impossible for open source developers to port changes upstream.

In November, Apple has again tried to hijack Linux-NTFS code, this time by suggesting that it be licensed under the LGPL. This was promptly rejected by one main developer, who threatened lawsuits.

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[Anonymous Coward]

i've never ever heard any mac user trumpet the use of USB. so the entire basis of this is wrong.

You must be new here. Many Mac users seem to think the iMac was the first computer with USB ports. However, I do believe that the iMac's popularity helped push peripheral manufacturers to get their new USB peripherals out to market quickly because the iMac gave no other choice. Remeber all those USB adapters for the iMac?

interestingly enough, intel had a hell of a time getting MS to put USB support into their OS, with plenty of NT4 machines having useless USB ports, and Win95 not supporting it either (Win95 OSR2 had an orphaned USB stack that basically works with nothing else), wasn't until Win98 that USB support "arrived".

Duh. Windows 95 was released before USB 1.0 was released in 1996 (1.1 in 1998). That's why Win95 needed an update to support a port that didn't exist in its 1.0 version until after Win95's release. Perhaps we should give some credit to Windows 98 and the USB 1.1 spec for popularizing USB (along with the iMac, which was released in 1998).

As for Windows NT 4.0, there are many 3rd party USB solutions. Microsoft didn't provide drivers for their "workstation and server" OS that was released in 1996.

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[Hognoxious]

Gotta call bullshit. I have a machine that originally had win95 and I used an Archos USB mp3 player/harddrive to move the data off it onto the machine that replaced it.

The bigger question:

[nurb432]

Will Macintel kill apple?

"It's the applications, stupid"

[argent]

If it wasn't for the applications I'd still be using 'traditional' free UNIX as my primary desktop, and treating Windows as an X terminal that happened to run Office and games.

No matter how much you accelerate Linux or FreeBSD graphics, or how much eye candy you add, it won't matter if it's "a better OS" or not if it doesn't have the apps.

Re:"It's the applications, stupid"

[zymano]

Blame the monopolist.

whatever

[johnpaul191]

the point is that the project was started while Steve Jobs had nothing to do with Apple. nobody will deny Apple was in a bad place when Jobs returned. he made a lot of drastic changes at the time so try to save the company. some may have pissed you off, but odds are if Apple did not make these changes then the whole company would have gone belly up and been sold off in pieces. how would that have helped any developers either? you can't really blame him for a project that sounds poorly established after he had been FIRED, and before he returned.

besides this whole article is nothing but paranoia fed with anti-Apple angst. it was already shown to have been an error on Apple's part and has been resolved. another example of people blaming Apple or Steve Jobs for a non-existant issue. this is even less stupid than Apple being blamed for portable music players being too loud BECAUSE the iPod is the best selling MP3 player (but still outsold by portable CD players something like 10-1).

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, proof that posting as AC means you're all of that, plus a pedophile and a smelly jew.

perfect...

[Ahaldra]

"Hey this is just the first step in what will be eventually become the move to a MS Windows kernel. It's all starting to make sense now!"
I should stop channeling Dvorak, it creeps me out ^_^

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[WindBourne]

Time to address the dress down.
While I do not have my Tannenbaum at this location, I will simply pull the defintition from elsewhere.

Typically, a kernel (or any comparable center of an operating system) includes an interrupt handler that handles all requests or completed I/O operations that compete for the kernel's services, a scheduler that determines which programs share the kernel's processing time in what order, and a supervisor that actually gives use of the computer to each process when it is scheduled. A kernel may also include a manager of the operating system's address spaces in memory or storage, sharing these among all components and other users of the kernel's services. A kernel's services are requested by other parts of the operating system or by application programs through a specified set of program interfaces sometimes known as system calls.

The above fits the defintion that I have grown up with and learned in my BSCS. That is, a kernel provides services for other processes. A micro kernel is well a small kernel, but it is STILL the kernel. In contrast, as you are obviously aware, a monolithic kernel has not only ability to provide services but links a bunch of other code in to speed things up. In a monolithic kernel we simply include all the code from the API below.

Apple OS, has the Mach kernel with a derivitive set of code in user space. Some of it came from NextOS, some from *BSD, some from other OSS projects, but most from Apple itself. Just as you refer to a "derived mach kernel", there is at best, derived BSD code.

OSX is NOT BSD, any more than Linux or Windows is, for using BSD code (windows makes heavy use of BSD code, while Linux tends to borrow code until it can rewrite parts).

BTW, from my understanding of the NT kernel, it long ago left being a micro kernel. In the early days when the DEC controlled the development, it was a microkernel. But once BG re-controlled it (in NT 4.0), he pulled down a lot of user space drivers into the kernel for speed (While I have seen NT 3.2 code (yes, 3.2) from working at HP, I have never looked at NT 4 and above code; it is just what I have heard).

The wisdom of experience

[scribblej]

Give the kid ten years, then he'll get it.

[Cowardly refusing to submit a subject]

[Ice Wewe]

Another sleezy business practice by Microsoft to deprive their loyal customers. Wait a second... this isn't Microsoft! Apple, you had me fooled!

Witheld nothing

[Karem Lore]

If you read the next entry from the same user in the thread you posted you will find:

I see today a much more populated source tree for x86. Thank you to everyone responsible. Peter

Hence, check yer facts before using the message link as an attack at Apple.

karem

Re:Witheld nothing

[pogma]

Actually, the x86 sources are still missing quite a few projects. Last week, however, there were only GPL licensed sources on the x86 page. Apple released the source code to many APSL licensed projects this week, but not all of them. It remains impossible to build an OS based on the posted sources.

While I said "thank you" and meant it, opensource at Apple is certainly not hunky-dory.

Re:MacIntel will be the death of Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Before the Intel move what was the OS piracy rate? Um, like maybe ZERO?

I don't have the numbers, but decently high--figure 3-4% bare minimum, probably meaningfully more. Just because it was pirated onto another Apple computer doesn't mean it wasn't pirated.

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[diegocgteleline.es]

Sure. Which is why "microkernel" has the word "kernel" on it.

When I said "A microkernel, in essence, it's not a kernel", I mean that a microkernel by itself can do NOTHING, until you start to implement all the stuff that monolithic kernels have on it and userspace servers are supposed to implement. It's like when people says "ooh, qnx microkernel fits on the L2 cache". Sure it does, but then when you start to implement the necessary stuff it's going to get more or less as huge as a monolithic kernel is.

Re:Apple Already Bitten

[Bazzalisk]

What's that skip? Timmy's stuck down the well?

(Wow, on slashdot even the "witty" responses are duped)

ITYM "why Apple didn't use Linux"...

[argent]

If the BSDL wasn't there, they'd simply have gone with another kernel. Possibly BeOS, possibly NT, possibly they'd have continued to use the irrevocable UNIX licenses posessed by both Apple (for A/UX) and NeXT (for NeXTStep).

The chances of them using a GPLed kernel, though, are similar to the chances of Microsoft releasing the source to the NT kernel under the GPL.

Re:ITYM "why Apple didn't use Linux"...

[Slithe]

They did flirt with the idea of using Linux; see the Wikipedia stub at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux for more information. Jobs even tried to hire Linus Torvalds at one time.

2. What is Karma Whoring

[Anonymous Coward]

See #1

Re:cnn:pirates raid cruiseliner, demand copy softw

[cooley]

Mod parent UP! I was there and it was awful.

I had signed up for one of those new geeko-tourism packages. We had spent the last several days attached to a port, so we were excited to be nearing the CVS surrounding the galapagos, where we hoped to catch a glimpse of Darwin, or maybe a GNU.

Unfortunately our ship was soon compromised by these pirates who swooped in via the Cat5 cable. Their Captain, known as Bluetooth, just seemed to float right across to our ship, through the air; it was scary.

Anyway, they must not have known we were a civilian ship, because they kept asking to see the Colonal. I noticed that one of them had a USB key for a hand. They also tore every page out of the ship's log before they left....

Wow...

[Vlad2.0]

Mac fanatics don't get much more elitist than you, do they? Shouldn't you be burning out burning a cross on Microsoft's front lawn?

Re:Wow...

[pair-a-noyd]

Actually I'm not an Apple "Elitist". I'm a Linux "Elitist" to be specific.
I'm just an admirer of the Mac. Not a fanatic. I really don't know much about them and rarely use the two I have as they are older and slower machines.
I would like to have a totally modern and up-to-date PowerPC based Mac, I would use it fairly often for multi-media production. But for now, all my resources are tied up in beige box (AMD64) Linux machines.

Bottom line, I am very anti-microshaft and "pro anything but microshaft". If it isn't microshaft it's pretty much ok with me.

Re:OSX86 Piracy =/= increased market share

[DECS]

Piracy worked to entrench MS-DOS and later Windows, but would work against Apple.

Microsoft's business model involves licensing OS software as broadly as possible. That requires creating cheap licensing and allowing piracy to achieve dominant market share, while at the same time building complex licensing rules that monetize their market share control for the customers who can and will pay for it.

So, OEMs get fairly cheap licensing that allows them to sell a range of PCs from bare bones to elaborate gaming machines (with most of the software development covered by Microsoft). Microsoft then sells IT departments the related server licenses and client access licenses (per user licensing) to make their real money.

Apple is not Microsoft, and has never had a similar goal or business model. Neither did NeXT. Both aspired (driven largely by Steve Jobs) to develop and deliver state of the art hardware that ran exceptionally well integrated software. Apple's Macs were so far ahead of anything else available that the company began pricing its hardware at a significant premium, which resulted in turing the Mac platform into a hi-end brand through the 80s & 90s. NeXT, in agreements with Apple, entered the high end workstation market exclusively.

When Apple and NeXT merged, their combined control of markets wasn't spectacular: it was in the area of ~5% or less of all PCs shipped. The company targeted consumer sales, worked to regain strongholds in education, and has since delivered server products. They continue to make their money from hardware, not software licensing. In fact, the Xserve sales talk makes a big deal about how much cheaper they are when compared to Microsoft's client access style licensing.

The way Apple licenses its software should serve as a wake up call to anyone who still thinks that the company would secretly welcome piracy as an attempt to bump up its market share.

Apple already freely licenses Windows software that it believes would somehow benefit the company:

- Bonjour for Windows is free (establishes Bonjour as an industry standard)
- .Mac tools for XP is free (encourages .Mac subscription sales)
- iTunes for Windows is free (iPod sales)
- QuickTime for Windows is free (establishes QT as a standard)

So if Apple thought that Mac OS X for PCs would be a clever ploy, they could throw it out there. They do know how to distribute software, are not averse to developing free tools, and understand how to create maintain platforms.

Mac OS X however, is built to sell Apple's hardware. The combination of X + Mac hardware results in a package experience that is carefully controlled and easier to maintain.

Microsoft spends a lot of its development efforts in supporting a huge array of hardware and maintaining support for decades of legacy. Apple can simply drop old cruft, release new hardware and offer immediate support for it with a new patch of OS X.

Apple built another platform along the same lines with the iPod + iTunes + FairPlay iTMS. They work well as a package. Apple isn't licensing FairPlay for the same reason: you'd end up with a splintered experience of fake competition (everybody licenses the same songs for the same price anyway from the same music cartel), and Apple would suddenly lose control of a system they now own. So the next time the iTMS gets hacked, Apple wouldn't be able to release a patch that solves their problems, but they'd have to work with all these other stores/players/devices who were also selling FairPlay systems and figure out how to patch them all.

Look at Apple's 1995 attempt at licensing: there was no benefit for Apple. No innovation really, just nimble companies that could obtain small batches of faster chips and sell off Apple's reference designs with the fastest of PPC processors available. Apple owes its shareholders those profits, and they owe their paying customers new developments and innovation.

By copying Microsoft's business model, they

Re: "Will the cool hackers still dig it?"

[Gentlewhisper]

Only the ones who remain true to their roots as artistes and models [atspace.com]. Make no mistake, this is a positive development; Apple's actions will separate the aesthetes [atspace.com] with good taste [atspace.com] from the chaff of dull, dutiful [atspace.com] drones [atspace.com].

Whatever, most artists die poor anyway. Go use your mac and die as a Michael Jackson wannabe, I don't care.

Not quite sure where apple is headed yet.

[blackest_k]

It is interesting times
as a Mac OS hacker demonstrates the ability to get non mac hardware running OSX, apple shows a distain for his efforts that seems strange. he's not being stopped nothing Apples done actually impacts his efforts.

I think its obvious by now that OSX could run on PC hardware made by anyone but why isn't microsoft saying a single word about this.

Probably OSX will take a share of the market initially comparable to what they have now. Perhaps growing steadily as the OSX86 platform proves its better than Vista.

meanwhile envious windows users will be watching as hacked copys of OSX appear. Eventually at some point Apple will feel secure there is enough demand for OSX unbundled for certain supported hardware configurations.

The best OSX experience will be on Apple hardware but the barrier to entry is likely to be lowered to specific graphics hardware and a legal copy of OSX.

at which point Vista users will jump ship in droves.

Of course OSX might not be that good vista might be better than expected and Apple will remain a significant minority with enough sales to excuse microsofts share.

Personally I can't see why Apple couldn't decimate microsofts hold on the PC market. I am sure Steve Jobs hackles rise when he remembers someone saying they would Piss On Next.

I think payback is coming.

Re:Not quite sure where apple is headed yet.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if Apple will invest in Wine

Re:Not quite sure where apple is headed yet.

[Slithe]

The 'masses' would be far more likely to jump to a platform that [i]encourages[/i] hardware support and widespread distribution, such as Linux. Everyone who is prepared to launch the "Linux is hard to use" crap should check out http://www.ubuntulinux.com/. Anyway, Apple is a systems company; they do not exclusively sell hardware or software; they sell a Mac. They are not interested in competing with Windows directly; that is suicide. Linux has only beaten Microsoft in areas where MS did not have a significant domination, such as servers and embedded systems. While Apple does sell XServes, those servers mostly appeal to all-Mac shops. Unless Apple plans to add PDA functionality to the iPod, I think it will not succeed in the embedded systems market either. Too bad; that is where most of the money is nowadays.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[pclminion]

The problem pointed out by other Linux-NTFS developers is that the APL is not GPL compatible, and any changes made by Apple to the driver will be unusable in Linux.

This is where I part ways with a lot of open source folks. What exactly does it HURT to let Apple use this code? The code is for reading/writing NTFS, a specification which isn't officially available anyway and Apple has no control over. There is no risk of "embrace and extend" here. So what's the motivation for denying them?

Who cares whether Apple gives you back their changes or not? Could they actually make a significant improvement to Linux-NTFS? Are the Linux-NTFS developers admitting that Apple can do things that they themselves are too dumb to figure out? And anyway, why would a developer in Apple's position start making wanton changes to the code when they already know that it works? That's the whole point of using it (instead of writing from scratch) in the first place.

I'm not saying this as an Apple fan-boy, this is a free software issue. How can software truly be free (as in speech) when you place these sorts of restrictions on people who want to use it? Make whatever philosophical and ethical arguments you wish -- it's just wankery. Ultimately it boils down to pure selfishness. You don't want anybody to play your game unless they play by your rules. And this is said by those who purportedly oppose software patents and intellectual property.

Feh. Long live the BSD license.

Doing the numbers...

[argent]

Even an extremely optimistic projection would not allow OS X's sales to come close to generating the revenue Apple currently receives from hardware sales at anytime in the first few years after the transition.

Let's do the numbers.

Conventional wisdom is that Apple's margins on their systems are 40%. My experience with the Mac mini suggests that's probably about right, and their other prices are in line with that. Their margins on an Intel mini may actually be lower, based on Freescale's prices for the G4 and Intel's prices for the "Core", but let's go with 40%.

OK, for the Mini, if they sell the bundled software for $200 they'll break even.

For the iMac, they'd have to sell it for $500.

For the Macbook Pro or Powermac, $800.

For the iBook, $400.

They're bundling iLife, which they sell separately for $80.

Let's say their sales of all these systems are the same. Evidence is that the low-end systems are the bulk of the sales, but I'm not counting the higher end options on each system, ...

So, the average value to Apple of the "software part" is a bit under $500.

$80 of that is iLife, leaving $420 to make up.

Now, let's say they were to sell OSX86 "generic" for the same price Microsoft sells Windows XP Pro 1-2 CPU version for, or about $400, and the "Mac only" version for the same price Microsoft sells an XP Pro upgrade, or about $130. This is a reasonable set of prices, I think they shouldn't have much trouble defending them.

Looks to me like their net lost profit per sale would be pretty small.

And they could (like Microsoft) sell the quad processor version for more, to make up the massive profits on the Powermac.

There's other issues, of course, but I don't think they'd be hurting for lost revenue.

Re:Doing the numbers...

[jbolden]

Now, let's say they were to sell OSX86 "generic" for the same price Microsoft sells Windows XP Pro 1-2 CPU version for, or about $400, and the "Mac only" version for the same price Microsoft sells an XP Pro upgrade, or about $130. This is a reasonable set of prices, I think they shouldn't have much trouble defending them.

Microsoft doesn't sell XP Pro at that price. XP pro retails for $219 and sells generally for under $100 as part of OEM packs. You can buy a one off 30 pack for $3300 easy.

Re:Doing the numbers...

[Budenny]

Its an interesting argument, but you may have forgotten the upgrade revenue stream. They are getting around $120 a year for dot upgrades of OSX. Could they carry on doing that in direct competition with Windows?

Its generally accepted that the profits are on the hardware, but if you think about the upgrade revenue stream, which is 100% margin, not at all sure that is really true.

Re:Doing the numbers...

[argent]

Its an interesting argument, but you may have forgotten the upgrade revenue stream.

Why would you expect the upgrade revenue to change? What does Windows have to do with it? I'm not saying you're wrong, I just don't understand your reasoning.

Re:Doing the numbers...

[proberts]

Software margins are generally in the 90%+ range, the higher the volume of sales, the lower you can sell for and still keep your revenues growing up to the point where you saturate the market. Apple could grow for quite some time, and would gain significant volume- more than enough to make up the difference. The poster who broke it all down was working with 1:1 sales numbers, but the software-only numbers will be hundreds to one, if not thousands to one over the hardware numbers, making it very attractive from a purely financial perspective.

It's pretty obvious that this isn't a purely financial thing with Apple, or they'd have announced OSX on Intel, and set out to sell a couple hundred million copies.

Paul

Re:Doing the numbers...

[jbolden]

Apple already owns a few percent of the market. So it can't be hundreds to one or thousands to one.

It comes down to how high a percentage they could get and how much they could charge. What percentage of the market is willing to change OSes and pay a lot for it but not willing to buy Apple hardware (which doesn't really have any problems with it)? I'm not sure the number isn't not 0%. The original poster was trying to argue that Apple could charge close to what they get now. If they can't then its a whole different ball of wax.

BTW Microsoft spends billions per year supporting all different hardware. The cost ain't 0 to support a wide range of devices.

Re:Doing the numbers...

[Budenny]

Reasoning like this: if they sell OSX in the same way Windows is sold, they will roughly have to match the pricing structure. Maybe not exactly, but they can't be three or four times the price. So if an OEM copy of CP is 50-100, and includes all the service packs, OSX will have to as well. However, at the moment, the purchaser pays for the dot upgrades for OSX, and this must be very profitable at 100 or so a crack. Surely, this pricing policy won't be viable any more if they are trying to expand the market into the current Windows market?

Maybe I'm missing something.

Re:Doing the numbers...

[argent]

if they sell OSX in the same way Windows is sold, they will roughly have to match the pricing structure.

Why would you expect them to match Microsoft's pricing structure point for point, if they don't have to match Dell's pricing structure point for point now?

Not to mention that the reason Microsoft hasn't been selling updates is that Microsoft hasn't made any significant changes to the Windows NT product line since the release of Windows 2000. Microsoft's inability to get "Longhorn" out is a running joke in the industry.

Windows XP was the last upgrade at all similar to what you're referring to as "dot releases" of OS X, and that was mostly theme changes and bundling a stripped down version of Terminal Server with the desktop version. Most professionals I know who are running XP are doing so only because it came with a computer upgrade. They wouldn't have paid actual money to upgrade to XP from 2000, and it's really obvious that XP's a "tactical" release: putting an ugly new theme on Windows 2000 and releasing a crippled version as "Windows XP Home Edition" to replace Windows 98/Me let them force activation on the home market.

Meanwhile, they've been struggling to get their next "dot release" out for years and it's not expected until 2007.

Why on earth would Apple want to emulate *that* release structure? It's an embarassment.

Re:Doing the numbers...

[proberts]

Sure it can- I'd have to do real work to figure out the numbers, but my gut tells me that you'd get at least 500 software-only switchers for each current "go buy Apple haredware" switchers- Apple's current market share just removes people from the software-only potential pool- that doesn't mean Apple wouldn't sell 500 copies of OSX-x86 for each Mac they sell otherwise.

They absolutely coulld charge what they do now, or more and probably come out pretty well on pure numbers.

Microsoft doesn't spend billions a year supporting hardware, that's pure fabrication. First of all, Microsoft has a lot of vendors who pay for certification- If Apple didn't want to charge for support, then you'd just round the margins down ~20% and re-do the math.

Paul

Re:Doing the numbers...

[jbolden]

I think you are missing the point about apple being at 2.5%.

Lets say the current population of all PC buyers is 40 million (this just makes the numbers easy). Apple controls 1 mission of those already. They aren't going to get more than 40 million regardless of their strategy, since that's the total market Further assumes they take 10% of the market under a software strategy then they are up to only 4 million.

They can't sell 500 to on or even 50 to one since they've run out of the pool of all possible customers.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Anonymous Coward]

"Feh. Long live the BSD license."

Well, why not tell Apple to make their license BSD?

If it is good enough to ask GPL programmers to use, why not apple programmers?

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[John Jamieson]

My reason if I were them would be...
Apple would use it to increase market share, use my work to make tons of cash, and then not give anything back.
This would be bothersome to someone who picked the GPL, because obviously, they would have picked it because they believe this knowlege belongs to mankind, not some rich individual (jobs?).

That seems like a good enough reason to me.



You can twist the issue all you want, but it still sounds like fanboy talk. I have never contributed any code to a GPL project, and even I know the philosophy. (if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck...)

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[mdarksbane]

Note that since that fiasco they have complied with almost every term requested by the Konqueror developers, setting up a cvs visible external to apple and working with the KDE developers to get them security clearance to see the apple proprietary stuff.

Just because they were slow in doing it because they were busy getting a project to market doesn't make them evil, since they did make a significant turnaround in this space. if you're going to criticise them (rightly) for following the bare minimum initially, you can at least mention that they have improved significantly since then.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Mr. Underbridge]

It might annoy me to think that I was basically working for free for a company who takes my work and makes money from it.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[jschottm]

I'm not saying this as an Apple fan-boy, this is a free software issue. How can software truly be free (as in speech) when you place these sorts of restrictions on people who want to use it?

Speech can be limited and still be free. Insert usual lines about yelling fire, etc.

If your goal is to ensure that everyone has access to the code (and its descendents) that you write, then the APL/BSD license is bad. Many people working on GPLed software believe in that. Otherwise you're just doing work for a commercial enterprise for free.

If your goal is to try to get as many people to use your code as possible, the BSD license is fine. If your goal is that every person in the world has the option to benefit from the code that you write, it's not. There's a place for both licenses.

Apple (from limited reading of the posts) brought nothing to the table but wanted a leg up from Linux. Unless your only goal in life is to have your code used by whoever, there's no benefit to helping Apple in this case. And Apple wasn't overly helpful to getting read/write access to HFS+ access in Linux.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[pclminion]

My reason if I were them would be... Apple would use it to increase market share, use my work to make tons of cash, and then not give anything back.

So you're saying, you're a greedy bastard. You don't want to aid anybody else around you unless they give you something in return. Is that it?

This would be bothersome to someone who picked the GPL, because obviously, they would have picked it because they believe this knowlege belongs to mankind, not some rich individual (jobs?).

"This knowledge belongs to mankind." That's great. Now you're making teary-eyed philosophical statements about software which... reads and writes Microsoft's proprietary filesystem. Do you have any sense of proportionality?

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[Anonymous Coward]

Many Mac users seem to think the iMac was the first computer with USB ports

The iMac was the first USB-only computer. It was also the first big-box computer available on the market that I'm aware of that shipped with USB peripherals. Yeah, you could buy a system with Win95b and USB ports on the motherboard, but the periphs in the box were still PS/2.

Most Macheads don't try to argue that the iMac was the first computer on the planet that had USB, they argue that the iMac was the first computer on the planet that actually used USB.

And I'm not willing to cut Microsoft much slack, even Win95c barely supported USB. Win98 supported it properly, which was years after the ports started showing up on motherboards.

Re:cnn:pirates raid cruiseliner, demand copy softw

[yo_tuco]

"I was there and it was awful."

I'm glad to hear you made it out alive. But CNN report was missing a lot of detail. Did the ship's Kernel get GNUend down in the Raid 5 attack? Did the pirates steal anything else like a Perl, Ruby, token or Cache from the passengers?

And did anybody get the name of the pirate ship that must have just zipped out of iSight without a traceroute. The whole incident seems awful suspicious to me. These guys must have had a man-in-the-middle to hijack that ship so easily.

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[Overly Critical Guy]

What do you mean, "all that" DRM yumminess? The only DRM is if you buy something from the iTunes Store, and even so it's still the most liberal DRM out there.

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess this is a bit off-topic, but in my experience, Mac OS X is not at all robust for 64-bit computing, very much unlike Linux and Solaris and AIX and Tru64 and IRIX and HP/UX and... pretty much you name it. So I don't see how Mac OS X "gets the job done" by any means. (If it does, it's just dumb luck!)

And Mac OS X is not just unstable. It doesn't run 64-bit on Intel (or AMD) hardware and you won't find a single GUI application for Mac OS X that is actually 64-bit. (Mathematica doesn't count, because its non-GUI kernel is the only 64-bit part and it must be built separately from the GUI frontend).

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Anonymous Coward]

> What exactly does it HURT to let Apple use this code?

Why should I work for Apple for free? Under the GPL, they pay us back with code if they use our software to make other software.

I use the BSD license when I have a different purpose in mind.

Re:MacIntel will be the death of Apple

[Rick Genter]

Spend a day at a supermarket. Pick 500 random people throughout the day. How many of them will be able to install OSx86 even when it's more refined? 30?

And how many of the same 500 will be able to install the latest verison of Windows? Probably not many more; most people get it preinstalled on their computer and never deal with the installation process.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not called greed. It is called a fair deal. We have been down this road before with kerberos and Microsoft. We need not go down there again.

You are just another (blow) jobs cheerleader. But you need to peer through your pom-poms sometime! Enjoy your DRM.. erm I mean ipod.

Re:MacIntel will be the death of Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

But no way in hell am I going to fork over top dollar for a machine that's not just the same as but EQUAL in quality (same Chinese imported crap) as any beige box is.

The great irony here is that if you buy an iPod, it WILL ship from China.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05226/553353.stm
MacMini made in China too..
http://duncandavidson.com/essay/2005/01/mac_mini_o n_its

I bought a $1200 Hewlette Packard laptop a month ago..
Guess what it says on the bottom?
"Designed by Hewlett-Packard. Made in China"
And they shipped it FedEx from Shanzen (sp?) China

OF COURSE they're not pulling the tools...

[Mr. Protocol]

Of course they're not pulling the tools. There would be no point. They're about to abandon open source entirely, overnight, and switch to Microsoft Windows as an operating system. It will just solve SO MANY problems for them.

No joke and no lie! It says so right here, in John C. Dvorak's column. And he's never wrong.

Is he?

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Hymer]

It does not hurt... but Apple will use it commercially and get paid for it so they should take it as it is or buy a license for NTFS from Microsoft.
--
This is an emulated sig.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[MidnightBrewer]

The Konquerer developers commented on the so-called fiasco and said that there really wasn't a problem and that there really wasn't a better way to go about porting the patches, etc.

Narrow minded: Apple can only give back source

[AHumbleOpinion]

... Apple would use it to increase market share, use my work to make tons of cash, and then not give anything back ...

That's pretty narrow minded, or maybe just simplistic. Source code is not that only thing Apple can give back. They could:
(1) Give cash to the NTFS developers.
(2) Give hardware to the NTFS developers.
(3) Require Apple to provide bug fixes. (4) Increase the visibility and credibility of the NTFS project.
(4) All of the above and more ...

For all we know Apple may have been perfectly willing to return bug fixes and some enhancements to the community. They gave the community HFS+, gcc improvements, etc. They may have merely wanted to be able to decide on enhancements on a case by case basis, or maybe statically link to the code from proprietary software. So rather than reach a reasonable accomodation where both parties would benefit the developers show that OSS is not quite ready to work with the business world. Whether or not this is literally true or not doesn't really matter, it does give that impression to suits hearing of this incident.

Re:Narrow minded: Apple can only give back source

[angulion]

Why would GPL stop them from doing just that now?

Re:Narrow minded: Apple can only give back source

[bursch-X]

Because they'd have to GPL the whole fucking thing. And if they wanted to to that they wouldn't have created their own licence for darwin in the first place. got it?

Re:Narrow minded: Apple can only give back source

[jbolden]

I'll say it right now. GPLed open source is not and never will be ready to work with software producers that don't wish to follow the 4 freedoms. I'm glad the suits have that impression because its completely totally 100% accurate.

Re:Narrow minded: Apple can only give back source

[jbolden]

They would have had to GPL the Darwin-NTFS module not Darwin. You can like APL and GPLed code.

Re:Narrow minded: Apple can only give back source

[AHumbleOpinion]

They would have had to GPL the Darwin-NTFS module not Darwin. You can like APL and GPLed code/

They may have some addition that can not be GPL'd. Perhaps a 3rd party's license, a patent, etc. Again, if they could get the code under an alternative license then I'd wager the NTFS team would receive some bug fixes and enhancements. Overall a win-win.

Re:Narrow minded: Apple can only give back source

[jbolden]

What you are describing is classic embrace and extend. The number one argument for the GPL over the BSD license is to prohibit things like companies creating and distributing another version linked to 3rd party copyrighted and patented code. If they people who wrote NTFS-Linux would have been satisfied with bug fixes in exchange for that they would have been part of the BSD community.

Re:Narrow minded: Apple can only give back source

[John Jamieson]

Narrow minded? You are accusing the wrong party. It is not the GPL developers but Apple. A corporation is MANDATED to be narrow minded. They are mandated to maximize profits, not to do what is right, or good for mankind! If Apple respects the shareholder, they will try to screw the open source deveopers out of as much as they can, without scaring away the cow that gives the free milk. (That is why Apple treats them like crap so often, and then backtracks enough to keep at least the fanboys happy)

True, Appl could give a little cash or hardware, but what is a paltry amount of cash or a little hardware, when the real value of the software is in the millions or tens of millions of dollars?
Do the developers sell out for crumbs from the table of Apple?
Again, the GPL is all about the knowlege (the source code) being free. Being rewarded by a closed source company is not the goal. (most of those guys have day jobs working with closed source software, and that they do for money)

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[pclminion]

Why should I work for Apple for free?

Get real. According to this logic, anytime anybody benefits from something you've done, you're "working for them for free." I'm not surprised to see that the "gimme gimme gimme" mentality of GPL proponents remains intact.

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple-haters and small penises?

Apple is regarded by its haters as a marginalized platform that hasn't innovated anything. They claim Apple didn't pioneer the consumer GUI or desktop publishing, even though they did with the original MacOS and the release of Postscript-based printers in the 1980s, through which Adobe became a prominent player. Almost always the haters make the same claims with modifiers like "only 15% install base" or "overpriced hardware" or "Mac fags." They also like to blur your vision when equaling "invented" and "popularizing." Apple haters always minimize the importance of Apple's involvement in innovation (even though historically the PC industry follows Apple's lead) and at the same time downplay other companies' cloning of Apple's moves.

Case in point "USB":

When the haters speak about how non-innovative Apple is, they talk about how the iMac was just a fashion statement that had no effect. In reality, Apple was the first company to take the fledgling Intel technology called "USB" and implement it across the whole computer, forcing hardware manufacturers to fully support it in their devices. This in turn meant drivers for Windows users when Microsoft finally caught up with full, reliable USB support in Windows 98. Apple haters will pretend Steve Jobs wasn't directly responsible for the fact they have USB ports on their computers and pretend that wasn't innovation.

The same can be said for a lot of products Apple haters claim that fans think Apple "invented." In truth, Apple was simply the first to market with a lot of the technologies, and the first to innovatively integrate them into a personal computer. When PC users were listening to beeps through a tiny speaker, Apple users were working with full audio and MIDI, even FM synthesis, before it was widely available to PC users. Long file names were something Mac users were used to for an entire decade before PC users had their eight-character limitation removed. This is one of those nuggets of history Apple-haters wish people would forget. This continues to this day where Windows and Linux users are stuck manually configuring networks and clicking through wizards, whereas Apple's innovative Bonjour technology auto-discovers and configures a network of Macs with no configuration required.

The haters love to use the phrase "off the shelf parts" as if that means anything, since every computer technology is technically an off-the-shelf part, as they are designed and produced that way.

It is true that Apple are fast at picking up new industry technologies, and as a result, the Mac is a more advanced platform than the PC. This is a design decision by Apple to keep the Mac computer innovative and ahead of the competition, who are still basing their systems on 20 year old BIOS implementations, for crying out loud.

Under the helm of Steve Jobs, Apple executed two successful transitions, the first being the OS X success, and the second being the seamless Intel transition. In the PC world, such transitions have been very unsuccessful, and a large number of PC users and organizations still run DOS-based Windows systems like Windows 98. Analysts expect only 38% adoption of Vista by the year 2008.

Conclusion:

All things considered, when the dust has settled, after decades of innovation and jumping between CPU families and platforms, Apple haters continue to claim the Mac is "nothing less than an ordinary PC," without explaining what constitutes an ordinary PC, or ignoring that Apple had design oversight over Intel's motherboards, or that the iMac was the first 64-bit consumer desktop system and continues to remain the smallest and thinnest. In 10 years when PCs finally look like the iMac, Apple haters will again pretend that Apple wasn't the first to market with this revolutionary innovation in computer design. With a lot of work, Linux was booted though with compatibility issues, and Vista continues to remain a major issue with the lack of CSM and VGA drivers in the firmware. But with OS X, nobody cares.

Think different? Absolutely, and before anyone else.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[diegocgteleline.es]

Ultimately it boils down to pure selfishness

No it,s not. I'm not against capitalism, but companies have tons of methods to win money than using code from students with acne.

Apple has lots of $$$. Want to collaborate with open source? Release your changes. You don't want? Well, there'snothign wrong with it - you're a company, you sure have enought money to pay developers.

You don't want anybody to play your game unless they play by your rules

Yeah, the game must be played with Apple's rules, right? That's what bsd is about, right...

You just don't get the WHOLE point of GPL. GPL is not about forcing people using code and not being "friendly enougth". It's about don't allowing _unfriendly_ people, and it's not exactly that the ntfs people is putting rules, it's APPLE who is trying to force other to follow their rules. It's not ntfs developers who is being kiddy and stupid here.

This is like arguing that democracy is crap because I'm not free to kill anyone I want under it. Please.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Makarakalax]

One reason to use the GPL is the hope that someone will give back. Having said this, if anyone wanted to use any of my GPL'd works under another license, I'd let them. I agree with you that it's better the code gets used, why else am I making it freely available in the first place?

I still licence with the GPL though, because as said, I hope people will contribute, and the GPL does encourage that to a certain extent.

I still feel miffed when some middle-man company makes money for doing nothing with some GPL code, ie rebranding and selling. But that's because everyone who contributes nothing to the world pisses me off. Fucking middle-men. But Apple using the code? That's good as far as I can see.

It was obvious all along...

[CarpetShark]

Personally, I've been expecting it ever since Darwin was open sourced. I knew they wanted to be on x86 back then too.

The only reason Apple would open source the kernel but hold back on the rest is if they wanted the open source community to help them write drivers for OS X hardware. That didn't really happen (probably because others had similar suspicions), and so Apple had to do most of the Darwin development on x86 themselves. I expect the sales model of Mactel -- very specific, pre-packaged hardware rather than retail/OEM OS X to compete with retail/OEM XP -- is a direct result of that failed OpenDarwin project.

hum

[zpok]

Not only is this story bull, I can't believe people still think a hacked OS X is good for Apple's market share.

I'm totally OK with all the hacking, it's not mine, I kind of understand the fascination and am sure I understand a geek's wish to fire up any OS on his hardware of choice. Hell, I don't even like windows and can't wait until they have it running on Mactel.

But fact is, it won't be a good experience for your average possible switcher. And keep in mind, they're not computer lovers, they are clueless just like most people are clueless about a lot of things they're not really into. So they'll go "yeah, Apple, I tried that, a friend of mine installed it. It sucked and *broke my computer*.

Mark my words.

And for those not totally with me, let me explain: a very large part of the Apple appeal is lack of frustration. Plug and play, extreme integration of hard and software, everything supported that's supposed to be inside your computer so that the hardware part of the story is largely irrelevant. That's why most mac users will happily report "oh, I updated the OS and it seems so much snappier". Yes, they are clueless, and no, that's not a problem. And that's what they tell their windows friends. Variations of "I don't know, I don't care and you know what, I'm happy".

Now picture that sort of expectations with hardware that isn't supported. A nightmare. None of the familiar Windows panels and shortcuts to all your "places", not a hint as to where to find the hardware inside and outside your box and only pretty and shiny to look at. Oh, and a spinning beach ball.

If Apple would license to certain specs that would be a different story, but a hack is only interesting for those interested in that sort of thing, and we are .001 of the total market (I just love made up statistics, but you get my drift, no?)

Re:hum

[Budenny]

"Plug and play, extreme integration of hard and software, everything supported that's supposed to be inside your computer so that the hardware part of the story is largely irrelevant."

People keep issuing this propaganda, as we have to keep refuting it. Its a variant on the 'big lie' from political discourse. It is not true.

There is no more integration between OSX and the hardware on a Mac, than there is between XP and the hardware on a Dell. Both OSs communicate with their hardware via drivers, and neither set of drivers is particularly better or different. The hardware indeed is pretty much the same in the Mactel era - main board, disk, memory, processor, opticals, graphics. In fact, when you run Linux on a PPC Mac, the OS is just as integrated with the hardware as when you run OSX on it.

Having fewer drivers for less hardware is not integration with anything. It is just having less drivers.

Re:hum

[zpok]

Well each to his own I say. I'm sure the windows experience is just as nice as the mac experience. And all windows users are dell users.

Propaganda my ass.

I liken the integration of for instance my disk burner to the windows experience, thank you very much. If I need to fiddle with settings, I'll use a different program, but for 99% of my time, drag and drop or pushing one button is way preferable to having to choose at which speed my disks may burn etc etc etc...

I liken the experience of plugging something in and having it working to "blablabla has detected new hardware ... etc etc".

You suggest I speak of somehow OS X being magically better integrated, I suggest the experience is better, and indeed, integration of software and hardware is a HUGE part of it. The difference is not in Jobs' aura, it's in dedication to KISS. It's not for all people, since everything is subject to taste, and some people like to for instance tune their car, but if you really think a Dell and Windows are just as seamless as a mac and OS X I bet you can't figure out why people like the iPod so much. Hint, it's not the pretty colors.

If you don't get what I mean by these examples, just think potatoes potatoes and let's agree to disagree.

But I know which computer is suitable to my parents and which not. And I know which setup makes me lose more time, which btw has nothing to do with taste.

Re:hum

[Budenny]

Everyone is entitled to like and dislike what he likes, and I make no criticism whatever of your choice of computer, for your parents or for yourself.

What I do not believe, and will not let go unchallenged, is the statement that OSX is somehow more integrated with its hardware than any other OS. It simply is not.

No amount of abuse is going to change the simple fact that if you get a usb drive and plug it in, whether it is in OSX, XP or Linux, it will be auto mounted and appear on the desktop or in My Computer. Similarly, no amount of abuse is going to change the fact that when you unpack 95% of the world's computers with XP, the hardware is perfectly well integrated. It just works. No amount of abuse is going to change the fact that OSX uses drivers just like all OSs do.

I am a Mac user too, its not a question of hostility to Apple, it is about not alienating the rest of the world by talking obvious nonsense!

Re:hum

[zpok]

I added examples of hardware software integration.

Which means: you have a set of hardware, which does stuff. You have software functions inside the OS, no matter at which level that makes use of this hardware.

With windows this means: hey, want to write a CD? Just fire up one of many CD writer programs and fiddle with the settings.
With os x this means: hey want to write a CD? drag and drop and click burn.

That's what I mean.

Again, I'm not suggesting OS X is magically better integrated with its hardware, or that its hardware is better, I mean - and I hope that I explained it right this time - that OS X adheres to KISS and integration with its hardware is a huge factor.

I'm not talking about what you're talking about, that's clear. I don't care that a stock Dell is very comparable to a stock Apple computer, I'm talking about the stuff OS X adds that makes all this work as if it's all one thing instead of an OS on top of a computer.

And to get back to my point, I don't think you will disagree with me that a lot of this will go boink if you try to transplant that to just ANY PC setup. I stated in my original post that this would be a different situation if Apple would license to specs.

I don't care how similar most pc hardware is, compared to the millions of combinations that are out there, the amount of stuff inside the boxes Apple has to take into account is MINIMAL.

You may be an apple user, just as I am partly a PC user. I think we both know that parts change more in dell lineups than Apple lineups, that - while apple has its share of issues when it comes to keeping everything compatible with all their configurations, it is still pretty usual to buy a pc that has issues out of the box because somewhere along the production line some piece of crap got changed for another piece of crap. It's not like 5 years ago when that was almost a given, but still, it's a problem and one you hardly get with Apple (not that you don't get other problems, mind).

I hope you don't just take me for an advocate of the church of Jobs. I'm talking about stuff I see daily, and I'm not exaggerating or claiming PC's are crap and Apple is bliss. We may be at cross purposes when talking about hardware-software integration. I see what you mean, it's just not what I meant.

Re:hum

[Budenny]

Fair comment!

Re:hum

[zpok]

Why thank you.

Re:hum

[proberts]

Actuall, drag and drop burning has been implemented in XP for a while now. I prefer *nix, but your example is a bad one.

Paul

Re:hum

[zpok]

Well how about that.
Will try this out, don't know where to look for it though.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[arose]

Somone asks people to give him free reign on their code under the BSD license and says that others have a "gimme gimme gimme" mentality?

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the 'fiasco' (also known by 'bitching') came after Apple's WebKit team had already spent significant time internally trying to make the project public facing. Today, WebKit is a rather active and successful open-source project.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[arose]

What exactly does it HURT to let Apple use this code? The code is for reading/writing NTFS, a specification which isn't officially available anyway and Apple has no control over. There is no risk of "embrace and extend" here. So what's the motivation for denying them?

They sure ass hell can use it, all that is required of them is to release the code they combine it with under the same license. When free software resources are used to make proprietary software stonger it certainly hurts.

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[ChunderDownunder]

No root user, but admin group in sudoers (easy to do on Linux, but not done by default by most distros)

Ubuntu.

[Sorry, I'm just perpetuating the problem on slashdot that every *nix discussion has at least one stray Ubuntu reference!]

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[soft_guy]

I believe that the things you speak of are part of the VESA standard.

Re: "Will the cool hackers still dig it?"

[Achromatic1978]

Me, I'm still laughing at how licking a hairy foot somehow equates to 'good taste'. Ye gods.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[JBMesserly]

Why should I share my code with you if you're not going to share* your modifications with me? I'll take tit-for-tat over unconditional cooperation any day! (see Altruism)

* Share in this case is defined loosely: you are allowed (under the GPL) to charge any amount for your changes, but you can't add any extra licensing restrictions that would forbid me from doing the same things I let you do.

The choice of licenses

[einhverfr]

You have a serious problem with the BSD license and that is it tends to allow one to subsidize the competition. In essence, one can put in a lot of work and someone else can not only make money off it but undermine your own product.

This is not to say that the BSD license is always inappropriate, but for small projects like Linux-NTFS, it can be a problem. The GPL can allow that problem but it is less problematic.

What might have been appropriate in this case, however, would be to work out a contract with Apple so that any of their contributions would be similarly dual-licensed. This way it might have been workable to everyone's benefit.

that would be a self-destruct

[idlake]

In the end, Apple doesn't care about the underlying OS. Mach was handy, they only need a substrate to run their desktop environment atop. [...] Sooner or later Steve will swollow his pride and create a subsystem consisting of a modernized POSIX and NextStep and that will be OS XI. It will also ship with all of the Vista subsystem. That will allow all the device installers to run and gain the ability to run all Windows apps besides. Which also solves the Microsoft Office availibility problem.

That would reduce Apple to an application vendor. How long do you think Apple is going to last as a vendor of iApplications and Cocoa libraries? They'd be competing with software companies having a few dozen employees and (in the case of Cocoa) better libraries and better IDEs.

Apple has no unique technology, they have almost no research, and they don't really innovate. What Apple has going for them is branding, style, and an all-in-one solution. That's enough to be successful in this market (many other companies survive on branding and style alone), but if they try to take on Windows software houses or PC hardware vendors head-on on price and functionality, they're going to lose.

The one thing Apple could and should do is become a little more open to open source technologies. In particular, Apple should make X11 and Gnome a GUI environment on equal footing with Carbon and Cocoa. Right now, Gnome is a cumbersome third party install, and their X11 integration sucks.

Re:that would be a self-destruct

[jbolden]

he one thing Apple could and should do is become a little more open to open source technologies. In particular, Apple should make X11 and Gnome a GUI environment on equal footing with Carbon and Cocoa. Right now, Gnome is a cumbersome third party install, and their X11 integration sucks.

Ahh I'm not even sure what to say on this.

1) X11 integration is great. Apple wrote a custom X11 which can share a clipboard, is Aqua aware, integrates with the Dock, has a Mac like Window manager.... That better than almost any OS I can think of has ever done for their secondary windowing system. For example: Windows under OS/2, dos under windows, Windows under Desqview, classic under OSX.

2) Apple has paid FTE's working on the DarwinPorts project. Their gnome support seems pretty good.

3) I assume you mean GTK on an equal footing since Gnome::GTK, OSX::Cocoa/Carbon see diagram. But in that case it isn't the Gnome GUI so I don't know what you mean.

Re:that would be a self-destruct

[idlake]

1) X11 integration is great.

No, it's not.

Apple wrote a custom X11

No, they didn't. They modified MIT X11.

which can share a clipboard, is Aqua aware, integrates with the Dock, has a Mac like Window manager.....

Have you ever tried USING X11 for anything non-trivial on the Mac? Try running OpenOffice 2.0 on OS X, it shows some of the blatant shortcomings pretty easily. For example, X11 doesn't pick up the Mac international keybindings, even though it should. Native X11 keyboard rebinding doesn't work properly so that you can't even have consistent key bindings between X11 and native apps. X11 doesn't change resolution when Quartz does, making it impossible to use Impress for presentations. Dragging from the finder doesn't work. Most cut-and-paste operations other than plain text don't work. All X11 apps are a single group. You can't start X11 apps by double clicking (everybody gets around that by having special startup scripts). X11 isn't even preinstalled out of the box, or started up automatically.

Apple knows about these problems, they just don't fix them--deliberately.

2) Apple has paid FTE's working on the DarwinPorts project. Their gnome support seems pretty good.

DarwinPorts is unusable: installing packages takes forever, and that's assuming they even compile. A large proportion (I'd guess about 1/3-1/2) packages fail to compile altogether (among other things, I have never been able to get a working Gnome or Gtk+ out of DarwinPorts).

3) I assume you mean GTK on an equal footing since Gnome::GTK, OSX::Cocoa/Carbon see diagram. But in that case it isn't the Gnome GUI so I don't know what you mean.

It means fixing the above problems with X11, preinstalling and automatically starting X11, preinstalling the Gnome and Gtk+ libraries, automatically starting the Gnome servers at startup, and doing whatever is necessary behind the scenes to make the Finder integrate with Gnome apps like the native Gnome file manager. It probably means a few other things, but that would be a good start.

Re:that would be a self-destruct

[jbolden]

As I'm reading what you want that's not "becoming a little more open" its a full change in the development direction of their OS. For example:

Most cut-and-paste operations other than plain text don't work.

That has nothing to do with X. That has to do with widget compatability. Go to freedesktop.org and you will see how hard it was to get cut and paste between KDE and Gnome apps (both of which use X). They have to replicate that work on both Carbon and Cocoa in both directions. Then they would have to keep it working through changes in both platforms. What you are asking for is a lot of work for apple. In particular it would mean coordinating their GUI development with open source GUIs.

All X11 apps are a single group.

I actually like that. It should be an option though.

You can't start X11 apps by double clicking

That applies to any Unix program. You can start bash by double clicking you need to have a unixcommand.command file. That seems deliberate to me, probably designed to stop virus and the like.

preinstalling and automatically starting X11, preinstalling the Gnome and Gtk+ libraries, automatically starting the Gnome servers at startup,

Just change your startup scripts. Apple has made that dirt easy. Most X11 users don't want Gnome servers. Do you want KDE services automatically loaded? As for the libraries Gnome libraries are specific to the version of Gnome. So what you really want is an apple release of Gnome.

But from Apple's perspectiver why Gnome over KDE or for that matter GNUSTep (which is less work for them)?

I have never been able to get a working Gnome or Gtk+ out of DarwinPorts).

Well try fink. I've gotten to work fine. But what I mean by work is, it works as well as it would on any non mainstream Unix (like running it under Solaris or AIX). If I want my X apps to really work well I'm using a Linux.

No, they didn't. They modified MIT X11.

I'm not sure if you are nitpicking or just poorly informed.
MITX11 -> X consortium X11 (old X.org) -> Xfree86 -> XDarwin -> Apple X11.

Re:that would be a self-destruct

[idlake]

As I'm reading what you want that's not "becoming a little more open" its a full change in the development direction of their OS

It's not about "being open", it's about producing a reasonably usable X11 server for their OS.

You conveniently skirted around the real biggies: the fact that screen resolutions and keymaps just don't work makes X11 almost completely unusable for day-to-day work.

I'm not sure if you are nitpicking or just poorly informed.
MITX11 -> X consortium X11 (old X.org) -> Xfree86 -> XDarwin -> Apple X11.

Neither. I'm pointing out that your claim that Apple "wrote a custom X11" is wrong--Apple didn't "write" an X11 implementation, they modified the MIT X11 implementation. Like a lot of "their" stuff, it's someone else's stuff that's been hacked a bit.

They have to replicate that work on both Carbon and Cocoa in both directions. Then they would have to keep it working through changes in both platforms. What you are asking for is a lot of work for apple. In particular it would mean coordinating their GUI development with open source GUIs.

Yes, that's what it would mean.

That seems deliberate to me, probably designed to stop virus and the like.

It probably is deliberate--it probably is to maintain non-Macintosh applications as foreign objects. Apple wants to tie developers and application writers to their platform.

Just change your startup scripts.

And how do I ship applications (open source or proprietary) that way? Am I supposed to give users a page of instructions on how to enable X11 and install Fink?

Well try fink. I've gotten to work fine.

Fink works a little better than DarwinPorts, but it's still unusable for mainstream use. Any mainstream Linux distribution is easier to install, more consistent, and easier to use than Fink on OS X.

If I want my X apps to really work well I'm using a Linux.

My point exactly: X11 doesn't reall work well on Macintosh, even though it could. X11 is a marketing gimmick for Apple right now, something that is intended to induce people to switch but that doesn't work well enough for heavy-duty use and that you can't ship software for.

Which brings me back to my original point: Apple doesn't really have any brilliant new technology. What they have is branding and single-source hardware/software. If Apple started shipping OS X as a layer on top of Windows, Apple would have nothing left to support such a huge company. Apple knows that, which is why they will continue shipping the software/hardware combo that they are shipping, and why they will keep crippling the open source compatiblity of their system.

Re:that would be a self-destruct

[jbolden]

You conveniently skirted around the real biggies: the fact that screen resolutions and keymaps just don't work makes X11 almost completely unusable for day-to-day work.

Well because they aren't biggies. They certainly don't make it unusable. I use X all the time.

First off I and most other OSX users never change resolutions. I never changed my X resolutions when I use Linux, or when I used to use Solaris or when I used to use AIX or when I used to use NexTStep. OTOH I know that X has excellent variable resolution handeling for the people who do do it. I'm sure that Applescript can change the Aqua resolution. So you are talking about a 2 line script to the sinc the two.

As for keymaps, I mentioned I'm not an international users. However the keybindings on X are an X file that lots of X users change. You can set those to what you want. I mentioned I'm not an international user so I have no idea, but most of the other stuff you've posted has been a little misleading. At best its annoying.

'm not sure if you are nitpicking or just poorly informed.
MITX11 -> X consortium X11 (old X.org) -> Xfree86 -> XDarwin -> Apple X11.

Neither. I'm pointing out that your claim that Apple "wrote a custom X11" is wrong--Apple didn't "write" an X11 implementation, they modified the MIT X11 implementation. Like a lot of "their" stuff, it's someone else's stuff that's been hacked a bit.

Everybody's X came from MIT. What is means to write an X is to implement MIT's code for your platform. That is the definition and its been the definition of 20 years.


It probably is deliberate--it probably is to maintain non-Macintosh applications as foreign objects. Apple wants to tie developers and application writers to their platform.

Non-Macintosh applicatiosn are foreign objects. The HUG is pretty clear about that.

And how do I ship applications (open source or proprietary) that way? Am I supposed to give users a page of instructions on how to enable X11 and install Fink?

Why would people who want an X app not have an X server? Either your customers are Mac users in which case your apps should be in Aqua or they are Unix users in which case you can assume they have X. If they don't have X its a double click from their OS disks. Just give them a link to Apple's page on installing X. As for Fink that was your comment regarding Gnome. Fink Gnome works fine.

Fink works a little better than DarwinPorts, but it's still unusable for mainstream use. Any mainstream Linux distribution is easier to install, more consistent, and easier to use than Fink on OS X.

Of course it is. Fink is a foreign applications interface its like Wine on Linux.

My point exactly: X11 doesn't reall work well on Macintosh, even though it could.

To make it really work well, as you said above Apple would have to do a lot of work. Further using your definition they would have to abandon the HUGs. Which means it can't as long as the Macintosh is anything like it is today.

X11 is a marketing gimmick for Apple right now, something that is intended to induce people to switch but that doesn't work well enough for heavy-duty use and that you can't ship software for.

Sure you can. Apple offers an excellent practical desktop for Unix users who need more than just Unix. X11 works fine for experienced Unix users. You can ship software to a Unix user customer base which uses X11.

You cannot ship software which uses X technology to the general Mac user base and Apple doesn't want you to. That's policy not a bug.

Apple doesn't really have any brilliant new technology.

Well with technology very few end companies have "brilliant new technology" but....

1) Aqua's use of graphics cards for coprocessing is far beyond virtually any other OS. (Coreimage)

2) Applescript. No one else has a scripting language which cuts across almost every app in the OS like this since Symbolics.

3) Objective C is basically an apple technology

4) Adaptive dimming

5) Xgrid compiles

6) ACL technology in a mainstream OS.

Re:that would be a self-destruct

[idlake]

First off I and most other OSX users never change resolutions.

You aren't giving any presentations then.

To make it really work well, as you said above Apple would have to do a lot of work.

They could probably do it with the FTE's that are wasting their time on DarwinPorts.

Further using your definition they would have to abandon the HUGs. Which means it can't as long as the Macintosh is anything like it is today.

You mean their interface guidelines? Apple isn't following their own guidelines anyway; Macintosh consistency is a sham--it's been abandoned long ago, and supporting X11 properly doesn't make it any worse.

X11 works fine for experienced Unix users. You can ship software to a Unix user customer base which uses X11. You cannot ship software which uses X technology to the general Mac user base and Apple doesn't want you to. That's policy not a bug.

Apple needs to decide: do they want to be a professional system for scientists and engineers or do they want to be a hobbyist system. In the first case, they must support X11 better. It's not a question of whether scientists or engineers are too dumb to install and set up X11, it's that it's too much work. If people have to invest that much work in getting Macs to run, they might as well set up a Linux machine.

Re:that would be a self-destruct

[idlake]

1) Aqua's use of graphics cards for coprocessing is far beyond virtually any other OS. (Coreimage) [...] 2) Applescript. No one else has a scripting language which cuts across almost every app in the OS like this since Symbolics.

I disagree with both of those points, but it's not worth debating that.

3) Objective C is basically an apple technology

No, Objective C and its core libraries were developed by Stepstone, borrowing heavily from Xerox's Smalltalk-80 system. NeXT took Stepstone's system (and my impression is that the term "rip off" might apply), and Apple got the whole thing as part of the NeXT acquisition.

4) Adaptive dimming

You mean of the laptop screen? You must be kidding--consumer displays have been doing that for a long time.

5) Xgrid compiles

Do you mean distributed compilation? That's been around for at least two decades.

6) ACL technology in a mainstream OS.

Do you mean "access control lists"? Windows NT has had those for a long time, as have most UNIX systems. Linux has had them for half a dozen years as well. The reason you don't hear about them is because they don't work.

Even if your list of "innovations" were actually Apple innovations, you're really reaching for the bottom of the barrel--I mean, screen dimming? Come on. Compared to the massive amounts of innovation that have gone into Linux, UNIX, and Windows, at the kernel, library, UI, and application level, Macintosh is pretty dull technologically.

Again, that's not wrong or bad--Macs are decent, well-designed machines, but that's all.

Re:that would be a self-destruct

[jbolden]

Apple needs to decide: do they want to be a professional system for scientists and engineers or do they want to be a hobbyist system. In the first case, they must support X11 better. It's not a question of whether scientists or engineers are too dumb to install and set up X11, it's that it's too much work. If people have to invest that much work in getting Macs to run, they might as well set up a Linux machine

Apple has decided. They want to be a system for creative professionals and this is their primary market. They hope that lots of technical people buy. They have some appeal to scientists and engineers but they don't want this to be their primary or even an important market. They think (and I agree) offer a better overall experience for people who use Unix apps and desktop apps then Linux/Wine or Windows/Cygwin or Windows/WSU/HummingBird...

But there is no intention at all of Gnome being a core interface. People who run Gnome as their primary system should by Linux not OSX.

Re:that would be a self-destruct

[idlake]

Apple has decided. They want to be a system for creative professionals and this is their primary market.

Seems to me, scientists, engineers, academics, and students are the most creative people around.

In any case, Apple is marketing to anybody they can, and science and academia is probably their most important after home users so they need to support them better. Apple simply has a conflict: they want people to port to Cocoa, but they also want to play in this market. I think it will be a few more years before Apple will resolve the conflict one way or another. I think that if they keep (nearly) ignoring the open source GUI technologies and try to compete with proprietary stuff, it's gonna hurt them badly.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Do you have any sense of proportionality?

Do you? All they're saying is, "if you want to have my code, this is what I expect in return". Nothing stops Apple from saying, "no thanks", and writing their own driver. Heck, they can still read the *documentation* and *source code* from Linux-NTFS to help write their driver, thus saving a ton on reverse-engineering costs.

Now, if you were to say that copyright law, which allows these developers to restrict the distribution of their code and derivative works in the first place, was unreasonable, then you'd have a leg to stand on. But in that case, criticising the Linux-NTFS developers while saying nothing about Apple would be inconsistent.

It's still true....

[Anonymous Coward]

Darwin 10.4.5 PPC source contains xnu (kernel) source, Darwin 10.4.5. x86 source doesn't. That's not how it's supposed to work, is it? Although it's well within Apple's right to do this, as xnu is under the APSL...

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[node 3]

Who cares whether Apple gives you back their changes or not?

Obviously the Linux-NTFS people do.

Are the Linux-NTFS developers admitting that Apple can do things that they themselves are too dumb to figure out?

No.

How can software truly be free (as in speech) when you place these sorts of restrictions on people who want to use it?

The restrictions are there to ensure freedom. You might as well as the question, "how can a nation be 'free' if it has laws which put restrictions on its citizenry?"

Make whatever philosophical and ethical arguments you wish -- it's just wankery.

There are three problems with that. First, you just made a specific philosophical argument (re: freedom of speech). Second, your whole post is a governed by philosophy. Third, the whole basis behind GNU and the GPL is philosophical. You might as well tell a mathematician that their solution to the Monty Hall problem is rubbish, because it's not obvious to you, and that any mathematical arguments are "just wankery".

Ultimately it boils down to pure selfishness.

You're confusing selfishness and will. Placing software under the GPL a matter of will (such as stating, "I want this software to have these four freedoms, and to be compatible with other GPL software"), but it's not "selfish".

Feh. Long live the BSD license.

BSD and GPL have two very different, although similar, goals. The BSD license is best if you most want for your code to be used, in absolutely any way whatsoever. The GPL is best for ensuring your code remains free. Which you prefer is a very philosophical, and personal, choice, but neither is "selfish".

Your sig [offtopic]

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

There is no 72dpi

On my machine, I get this, which is the accurate resolution of my monitor:

$ xdpyinfo | grep dots
resolution: 97x96 dots per inch

The reason it's accurate is that I bothered to set DisplaySize in the Monitor section of my xorg.conf file. It's nifty, because whenever I buy a new, higher-resolution monitor, most of the text on the screen remains the same physical size (so I can still read it). The exception is xterm.

Re:Your sig [offtopic]

[temojen]

me@hebe ~ $ xdpyinfo|grep "resolution"
resolution: 121x121 dots per inch
me@hebe ~ $ xdpyinfo|grep "dimensions"
dimensions: 1920x1440 pixels (403x302 millimeters)

o.O

At that resolution, you have to set it or you can't read the text. (I use this monitor for editing scans of Large Format film)

Re:MacIntel will be the death of Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that a company as comparetively small as Redhat profitably handles these issues does not pierce haze.

The fact that red hat doesn't develop the software they sell/support does not pierce your haze.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[budgenator]

You don't want anybody to play your game unless they play by your rules.
That's the way life works, nobody is begging Apple to use GPL'd code. GPL'd code costs, it has obligations in the license; apple is not a special case. If apple don't want to play the GPL game then fine, the GPL isn't the only game in town; they can take thier ball and find an other court to play on.

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[Ma�djeurtam]

gutter:~ majortom$ sudo passwd root
Password:
Changing password for root.
New password:
Retype new password:

Done.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[budgenator]

software which... reads and writes Microsoft's proprietary filesystem
dude its microsoft's software that's writing to Microsoft's proprietary filesystem; people who use that Linux- NTFS driver, are people who use NTFS thusly have a license to use the Microsoft software. Is this something that is too difficult for Apple, noway; it's mostly likely something they can't do because of a contractual agreement with microsoft. You lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas.
they would have picked it because they believe this knowlege belongs to mankind,
it's the knowlege of how to execute a Microsoft binary inside a Linux kernal that he is talking about that the developers wanted mankind to know.

What is the return for Darwin Developers?

[Enrique1218]

Even worse, one has to wonder why people would want to donate their time to such a fruitless and pointless cause.

I never did quite understand the gain for open-source developers to work on Darwin. Apple certainly benefits from an improved OSX, Safari, and other which they will in turn sell for a profit. I love OS X and I gladly pay Apple so they can hire developers and keep improving the OS. But, I don't expect people to volunteer talents without any expectation of compensation. What is the reward? Don't say Macbooks, that is crumbs compare to what Apple rakes in. I can sort of see the gain in Linux from a academic point of view. You can test new ideas and have fellow developers expand and improve on them. Something grows out of this colloboration that noone owns. The situation is a little different with Apple where those innovations go to Apple's bottom line. It seems one-sided.

Re:What is the return for Darwin Developers?

[jbolden]

Well for me the reward was not having to try and re-patch the same problem over and over and over with each upgrade. I BTW wasn't successful in getting my patch into Apple. Their isn't any easy way to submit a patch. You can submit a bug no problem but not a solution. Which is perhaps one of the reasons they haven't gotten much benefit from being open source.

Re:What is the return for Darwin Developers?

[Enrique1218]

See, there you go. You are not even given the satisfaction to see your solution being implement and receive some recognition of your work. In science, we believe in open ideas but you give credit where credit is due.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[blackdragon7777]

Part of the point of the GPL is to open source as many things as possible in a virus-like manner. There is no reason that Linux-NTFS can't dual license with the LGPL. Apple would get what they want and any changes they make to Linux-NTFS would be given back and they wouldn't have to GPL their whole kernel.

The GPL does impose it's beliefs on people. That's the other point that it has. There is no freedom of choice for developers with the GPL.

Slashdot business model

[Rob_Bryerton]

This seems like a story designed to raise OSS hackles rather than anything useful.

I though that was the /. business model:

1. Troll readership
2. Cash in on ad impressions as furious nerds are reading & posting incendiary replies to CmdrTaco et al
3. Profit!

Notice the missing ??? step? Somewhere, an Underpants Gnome is proud.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[blackdragon7777]

If the Linux-NTFS group was truly only wanting apple to give any code changes back then they could release it under the LGPL and both parties would get what they want. Since that isn't happening, I suspect they just hate companies or people programming for a living.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[ldj]

Wow. You just don't know when to quit, do you?

I suppose you think the Red Cross, Salvation Army, etc. (name your favorite charitable organization) consist of a bunch greedy wankers because they only give to the "needy". After all, if they were truly charitable, they wouldn't put restrictions on their giving. They would give equally to those worth millions.

I feel sorry for you. Someday you might grow to actually understand the subject about which you've been spouting off here. And then you'll have to deal with the knowledge that you have these public comments, eternally archived to your embarrassment.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[babbling]

"How can software truly be free (as in speech) when you place these sorts of restrictions on people who want to use it? Make whatever philosophical and ethical arguments you wish -- it's just wankery."

It is a restriction, but it ensures that everyone else has the exact same rights as Apple do. Apple wanted to take this source code and make yet another program where people are not free to do whatever they want with it.

In other words, Apple wanted permission to use the source completely as they wished, so that they could stop other people from doing the same. The GPL has a clause that prevents them from doing this. If they keep the binary version of the program to themselves, then they don't have to comply with any of the GPL.

Manipulate unfocused windows

[Anonymous Coward]

By holding the command key, you can manipulate unfocused windows with the mouse.

Re:Manipulate unfocused windows

[anagama]

That's good to know, but still a half solution. I just want to put the pointer over the window and scroll -- I don't want to hit a combo-key to do that. It doesn't work w/ a scrolling trackpad. I don't have a scroll wheel mouse with me at the moment (common situtation w/ a laptop) so I can't actually test it out, but I'll try later.

one more

[Anonymous Coward]

Group d-just plain cheap dudes. We appreciate the GPL thing, but really, cost was more important. Free as in cheap to get. Never liked windows at all because it was even too retarded for cheap guys. Never used any commercial unix, that was only for suits or suits drone slaves at some cube farm. Used Mac classic as the best alternative between price and ease of use and availability. Also way more secure than the other stuff "out of the box". Apple switches to OSX. Prices stay high for no reason at all other than they choose to. This has gotten to the sucky point by now. Look around, there's this "linux" thing that might work, check it out.

It works OK. Sometimes a PITA, but you can usually get done what you need to on cheap hardware, but there's always some compromise you have to make or something, it never quite gets all the way "there". . I still wouldn't put it in the easy to use class, and the bewildering array of redundant and overlapping "distros" (that is the gheyist word ever invented, sorry) that are similar but just enough different to make them not work well together UNLESS you are a serious near full time player will always make it too much of a moving target for the external hardware vendors to take it very seriously, or the bulk of the computer using public to take seriously. That will continue to be the major problem with anything based on the Linux kernels. Most people never "buy" an OS. It comes pre installed on the hardware they purchase. Windows you can make work, mac more or less is required to work, Linux is hand grenades in the alley at night, it may or may not hit the target but it will always make some sort of noise.

Not quite.

[Anonymous Coward]

Please educate yourself on the situation before you speak. Indeed, much of the system is available as open source but the kernel (XNU) is not. The reason? The new AES commpage/dsmos page encryption scheme within the kernel that is being used to run Apple's encrypted Intel binaries (such as Finder, ATS, Rosetta, etc.) on-the-fly.

I can understand that Apple wanted to protect their system, but the half-assed protection they used (which involves transferring a hard-coded plaintext key in open memory) as well as hiding this source code have stalled hacking efforts a week or two at best. Nonetheless, Maxxuss et al. have single-handedly made Apple critically reconsider its open source position.

MOD PARENT +1 FUNNY

[argent]

...something blue...

Yeah, but not for long. Bluebox is getting killed off with the release of the intel iMac (i^2Mac ?).

Har! MOD PARENT +1 FUNNY KTHX!

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[Anonymous Coward]

Theres Windows 95 OSR1 released in 1995 and Windows 95 OSR2 released in 1997. The latter version is also (incorrectly) known as Windows 95B or Windows 97. There may be even more (interim) versions. I remember Windows 95 OSR2 in fact had USB support but i'm not sure for which USB versions that was. Probably 1.x.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Wooky_linuxer]

No one is denying Apple the chance to use Linux-NTFS. They can use it, as long as they accept the GPL. That is a simple concept to grasp. You never wondered why Apple doesn't want to use Linux-NTFS code unless it is under their licensing? If I write my code, I get to choose which license it will use. You think they should change their license because Apple asked them?

Hypocricy - GPL3 to the rescue?

[hutchike]

Apple benefits from lots of GNU open source code, then decides to keep the crown jewels (X86 kernel) a dark secret? Sounds like corporate hypocricy to me.

This is a plain example of why the GPL version 3 is such a good idea. Just as it would require a company like Tivo to remove its DRM (or provide a back door), so it would open up the Intel Apple machines (with their similar DRM chips). I'm sure there are many companies that have broken open source licenses - maybe Apple is one such and should be prosecuted to release all code connected to any GPL license? Who goes after license offenders?

At least the Sun commitment to Open Source is total - they are even GPL'ing their SPARC chips.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Anonymous Coward]

I can take all your GLPed software, sell it and make money right now. The GLP license isn't hostile towards capitalism, only towards proprietary software.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[JBMesserly]

Huh? The LGPL allows anyone to build a work on top of (linking to) a library without "giving anything back." It's a weak license that only covers the core library, which is why the FSF recommends against its use. (Weak protection is probably the reason that the LGPL & BSD-style license are massively less popular than the GPLv2.)

I don't see why you have a presumption that Apple has a moral right to use Linux-NTFS's code. The developers of any library--Free or proprietary--have the right (under copyright law) to set the terms of its distribution and use. Usually the developers ask for some form of compensation; developers of proprietary libraries ask for licensing fees and place restrictions on its use (EULAs). Developers of GPLv2 licensed libraries only require that, if their work or a derivative of their work is redistributed (with or without a fee; the GPL allows charging as much as you want!) that it be without additional copyright restrictions. Why do you find that so onerous?

Regarding: "I suspect they just hate companies or people programming for a living", I can't speak for Linux-NTFS's developers. But as a general statement about developers of GPL-licensed programs or libraries, your statement erroneous. The very fact that there are GPLv2 libraries that are sold commercially (MySQL and QT come to mind) is a strong counterexample.

Why brings up an interesting thought: why doesn't Apple offer to pay for a *proprietary license* to use the source code? If they were acquiring any other library, that's what they'd have to do. (It'll probably cost a pretty penny, though, and some developers might not be interested. Once again, their right.)

Mod the AC up...

[CottonEyedJoe]

Even if you are BSing about your employer this makes alot of sense. When the possibility of dual booting first came up I wodnered if we wouldnt start seeing 3rd party developers drop mac support and suggest users boot into Windows to run their apps. I didnt think about Micheal Dell's reaction when he realized Apple might release a system capable of dual booting windows. I imagine it didnt please him too much.

Re:Mod the AC up...

[Budenny]

Why would Michael Dell care one way or the other? Not going to affect his business.

Then we have the irrationality about dual booting. Mac people seem to prefer it. The argument given is that if you can boot into Windows, the mac native versions of apps will no longer be developed.

Whereas, if you can much more conveniently run those same apps in virtual mode using Windows in a virtual environment, this will have no effect?

The practical effect will be that the easier it is to run Windows on mac, the less likely people are to demand OSX native apps, and so virtualisation is a greater threat than dual booting.

Which makes me think the real objection to dual booting is a religious one.

Re:Mod the AC up...

[CottonEyedJoe]

The story has passed... but for posterity...

>Why would Michael Dell care one way or the other? Not going to affect his business.

You dont think? Dell has laptops that compete in the same price range as Apple's offerings. Apple is a hot brand, I'd think Dell would be a bit concerned if Apple's sexy laptops all of a sudden ran Windows natively.

"Whereas, if you can much more conveniently run those same apps in virtual mode using Windows in a virtual environment, this will have no effect?"

Well, you can already run Windows in a virtual environment on a mac (Microsofts own VirtualPC which has run on Macs for 10+ years). There goes your argument.

>Which makes me think the real objection to dual booting is a religious one.

I have no objection to dual booting. If I had an intel Mac and could dual boot windows I would.

Not true

[Anonymous Coward]

"Highly doubtful. Mac users had been fed up with lousy G4 performance and the inability to get the G5 in a laptop for years."

Not in my experience. Every time I complained about the poor performance of the G4 powerbooks (frankly from the day they were introduced), I was pointedly told "Well, it's fast enough for *me*", as if paying a lot of money for underpowered laptops was some sort of gift.

The guy painted with a broad brush, but frankly, I thought he hit the nail on the head for the most part. My experience on slashdot has been that if Steve Jobs were killing babies with a pitchfork, the mac faithful would defend it. I don't want to hear another whine about what a genius the guy is. His *computer* company is rapidly becoming irrelevant while he sells mp3 players. And nobody is saying what Apple is going to do when the iPod fad blows over. I don't see the next trick coming.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[ddimas]

The problem pointed out by other Linux-NTFS developers is that the APL is not GPL compatible, and any changes made by Apple to the driver will be unusable in Linux.

This is where I part ways with a lot of open source folks. What exactly does it HURT to let Apple use this code? The code is for reading/writing NTFS, a specification which isn't officially available anyway and Apple has no control over. There is no risk of "embrace and extend" here. So what's the motivation for denying them?

Who cares whether Apple gives you back their changes or not? Could they actually make a significant improvement to Linux-NTFS? Are the Linux-NTFS developers admitting that Apple can do things that they themselves are too dumb to figure out? And anyway, why would a developer in Apple's position start making wanton changes to the code when they already know that it works? That's the whole point of using it (instead of writing from scratch) in the first place.

I'm not saying this as an Apple fan-boy, this is a free software issue. How can software truly be free (as in speech) when you place these sorts of restrictions on people who want to use it? Make whatever philosophical and ethical arguments you wish -- it's just wankery. Ultimately it boils down to pure selfishness. You don't want anybody to play your game unless they play by your rules. And this is said by those who purportedly oppose software patents and intellectual property.

Feh. Long live the BSD license.

No silly. The rule is if you play with my ball you've got to let me into the game!

Re:OSX86 Piracy == Death of MS

[FFFish]

'cause that means BSD is now the core OS. The competition will be between GUIs, not between OSes.

Trade?

[BerkeleyDude]

And Apple wasn't overly helpful to getting read/write access to HFS+ access in Linux.

So is full read/write HFS+ support available in Linux yet?

If not, then maybe Linux-NTFS developers could trade NTFS code for the HFS+ code? :)

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, did you ever have a look at the site: http://webkit.opendarwin.org/ ? I don't think you did. There there is actually their version of konquerors rendering engine. If you had checked their mailing lists you would know that there are a lot of ports (some of the in the same source tree as webkit) going on right now. So Apple and KDE are actually cooperating to a larger degree than you think or say.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[toddestan]

Get real. According to this logic, anytime anybody benefits from something you've done, you're "working for them for free." I'm not surprised to see that the "gimme gimme gimme" mentality of GPL proponents remains intact.

It's not like that, it's the idea that you can also benefit from letting someone else use the code because they are required to make the changes they make available. If they didn't care about stuff like that, they wouldn't use the GPL in the first place.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[bursch-X]

I'm sorry but RedHat and all other companies using GPLed software are doing JUST THAT. It's not that they pay anyone except their employees for the work done in the GPLed code they're using.

Yes they give the changes back, but they still make money FROM YOUR WORK WITHOUT PAYING YOU.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[bursch-X]

Why brings up an interesting thought: why doesn't Apple offer to pay for a *proprietary license* to use the source code?

I'm pretty sure, they also tried that. That's what they did with CUPS. They've got a proprietary license for it, so they can do whatever they want with it, but don't need to publish the source code.

But for whatever reasons it looks like the parent is correct. The NTFS guys just seem not to like companies and other capitalist pigs ;-)

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[bursch-X]

Concerning selfishness.

Hmm, I have the impression that many, many sentences that start with "I want..." end up being selfish gibberish in the end. There are exceptions, though.

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[jrockway]

Actually, the OS X kernel is deliberately crippled to disable certain core UNIX functionality when running Apple's DRM apps. Google PTRACE_DENY_ATTACH.

[OT] Analysts

[Anonymous Coward]

It was only after I spoke with a couple of my friends who became analysts that I understood the situation. Listen to what these guys do when they want to publish a report.
1. They go to each of the market players, and talk on the record about the sales volume etc.
2. Since some of this is confidential information, they then talk off the record, to get a better handle of things.
3. Of course, they will unofficially pass on some of this confidential information around.
4. The guys who were interviewed for the report? Well they're the guys who buy them too!
5. They talk to the market leaders, and don't pay so much attention to the underdogs! How will they pick up new trends?

What it seems like is that these analysts basically function as a communication channel between these competitors, and secondarily produce reports for others. Since we the public don't have the secret information that the market players have, we can't make as much use out of the report as the company itself can.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[jschottm]

You don't want to aid anybody else around you unless they give you something in return.

No, GPL types don't want to aid them unless they're willing to give everyone something in return.

And for the record, there's nothing wrong with quid pro quo. Would you drop by my place and wash my car for me? Or hang out at Apple HQ and scrub the bathrooms for free?

The article is RIGHT !

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn... those apple weenies are annoying... so yes, maybe the cctool stuff +might+ have been fixed, but what about the rest ? The kernel isn't open source, the drivers aren't opensource, none of them, at all. In fact, it's a continuing trend from darwin/ppc where less and less modules have been released in source form, or in some case they were in such a state that they wou;dn't build anyway (stripped of bits & pieces for no obvious reasons).

Apple Open Source is and has almost always been a joke

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[assassinator42]

Linux-NTFS can't write NTFS files, can it? At least, not very well.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[MoneyT]

I've never understood this GPL argument. What does allowing Apple (or anyone) to use the code without GPLing their whole damn project or even releasing changes back to the world have to do with mankind's knowledge of your work? If your work belongs to mankind, Apple using it doesn't prevent mankind from using it. That's the whole beauty of open source, it's not scarce.

Re:cnn:pirates raid cruiseliner, demand copy softw

[bursch-X]

Bush says it was Osama Bin Laden an we have to Attack Afghanistan^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H, Iraq^H^H^H^H, Iran for it. Do we still have bombs left?

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[MoneyT]

BSD and GPL have two very different, although similar, goals. The BSD license is best if you most want for your code to be used, in absolutely any way whatsoever. The GPL is best for ensuring your code remains free. Which you prefer is a very philosophical, and personal, choice, but neither is "selfish".


I never understood this. What part of the BSD license does not ensure that MY code remains free. As I look at it, once someone modifies / changes /derrives my code, it's no longer exclusively MY code and therefore does not have to be free. Furthermore, even if that remains my code, my code is still free because I provide it under BSD and people still have access to MY code, just not the my code that someone else has.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[MoneyT]

In other words, Apple wanted permission to use the source completely as they wished, so that they could stop other people from doing the same. The GPL has a clause that prevents them from doing this. If they keep the binary version of the program to themselves, then they don't have to comply with any of the GPL.

How does Apple using the NTFS source remove the rights of anyone else to use the NTFS source?

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Anonymous Coward]

The important sentence is "Yes they give the changes back." If they do that, it's all the pay that's asked by the GPL.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[node 3]

Hmm, I have the impression that many, many sentences that start with "I want..." end up being selfish gibberish in the end. There are exceptions, though.

Such as "I want this software to be free", which is the sentence in question, which isn't "selfish gibberish".

But more generally, I was making the distinction between selfishness and will. Will is wanting things to be a certain way. Selfishness is wanting things for yourself. Sometimes these coincide, sometimes they do not, but I was pointing out is that they are not the same thing.

Placing your program under the GPL is a matter of will. You will it to be, and you have the right and capability to make it so. Doing so is not an act of selfishness, it's an act of generosity.

It's pretty simple

[spitzak]

Your code becomes non-free when the other company, with much more publicity and ability to distribute the program, modifies it in such a way that your original version does not interoperate, thus reducing the value and utility of your code to zero.

Re:It's pretty simple

[MoneyT]

That assumes that the value of my code is directly derrived or at lease very proportional too it's interoperability with the company's modified code.

An NTFS driver should not have such a problem.

Furthermore, if the source from the company is closed, then my code has utility and value in that it's open which is the point in the first place.

Re:It's pretty simple

[Anonymous Coward]

An NTFS driver should not have such a problem.

That problem mostly occurs when Microsoft or Apple are involved. Notice how both companies really like the BSD license.

But of course, how would an NTFS driver for NTFS have anything to do with Microsoft or Apple? It's not like Microsoft has any say over the NTFS filesystem layout, or Apple has any say over OSX... Or?

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[nolife]

If it wasnt for that GPL code, Apple would have nothing to use and would have to develop that functionality themselves or pay someone to make if for them or license it from.

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[Overly Critical Guy]

First of all, it is not "crippled" to disable "certain core UNIX functionality" for Apple's DRM "apps" (there's only one, and it's iTunes). Second, it's called P_DENY_ATTACH, fully documented in the ptrace man page, which allows a process to avoid being debugged. Third, this flag isn't set in the OS X kernel, it's set in the application. Fourth, Darwin is open source, so you only have to remove the if statement in ptrace().

It was cute the way you tried to use scared words like "deliberately crippled" and "core UNIX functionality" without actually giving details, though. Next time, get a little informed before passing along what someone told you was true on the Internet.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[burnin1965]

"How can software truly be free (as in speech) when you place these sorts of restrictions on people who want to use it?"

How? By placing restrictions that make sure it stays free. Thre great thing about the GPL and its restrictions is that there is a large pool of good code out there and all you have to do to utilize and participate is adhere to the rules which say you keep the software free.

If your a scum sucking leech who wants to profit from other peoples work the GPL is a bad thing. That's pretty harsh but no more harsh than the attacks the GPL is enduring from the scum bags.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[jbolden]

Who cares whether Apple gives you back their changes or not? Could they actually make a significant improvement to Linux-NTFS?

Yeah, why not? Its not like Apple hasn't been able to make significant improvements in many areas of computing. Better error codes, better integration with languages other than C, better cross CPU support. Apple has done some unique stuff with filesystems that are virtualized on top of another very different filesystem, which is where you want to go with NTFS/LInux integration. I can think of lots of things it might offer them.

Are the Linux-NTFS developers admitting that Apple can do things that they themselves are too dumb to figure out?

I can't see why they wouldn't admit this. Apple has access to some of the best developers in the world. They can hire the very people who wrote NTFS.

I'm not saying this as an Apple fan-boy, this is a free software issue. How can software truly be free (as in speech) when you place these sorts of restrictions on people who want to use it? Make whatever philosophical and ethical arguments you wish -- it's just wankery. Ultimately it boils down to pure selfishness. You don't want anybody to play your game unless they play by your rules

Damn straight. Its called building an open source community. One of the main goals is to make it hard for people to write non open source software. The pain that apple is experiencing is deliberate. This is exactly why Microsoft is worried about academia using the GPL, because lots of commercial software starts as government / academic software. 15-20 years from now many apps might cost 3x as much to develop if they want to avoid being GPL licensed.

How can software truly be free (as in speech) when you place these sorts of restrictions on people who want to use it?

The GPL creates freedom for users of software by putting restrictions on developers. The BSD license destroys freedoms for users because it wants to empower second generation developers. Very different purpose.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[jbolden]

Because you usually no one cares about "your code" in the line for line sense but rather in the organically developing sense. Once people have modified the code and the modified version becomes the standard the free version becomes worthless or near worthless. The important version is the one that is in use. That's why the source code for windows would be much more useful than the source code for Digital Unix.

The purpose of the GPL is to help people gain access to the source code for the programs they actually use, not the source code for the great grandparents of the programs they actually use.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Anonymous Coward]

I call bullcookies you pro-Apple fanboi! There is nothing that Apple can hope to accomplish that Free/Open Source can't do a billion times better. (Why do idiots always consider open source people dumb?) Core Linux developers are on the internet engineering task force (along with other extremely high profile developers). There are more PhD's developing for Linux/Free/Open software than all of the proprietary software companies *COMBINED*! The problem with allowing Apple to use the Linux NTFS is that if Apple decides to add DRM tags to it, only Apple can read/write. Everyone else is suddenly 'incompatible' and stupid apple fanbois start ranting 'oh, those open source people can't figure it out'. You say 'oh, that's just too bad' I say "Chuck you Farley!" Wanna use Open/Free software, then play by the rules. Otherwise, you don't play.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[lpq]

pciminon said:
What exactly does it HURT to let Apple use this code? ... So what's the motivation for denying them? Who cares whether Apple gives you back their changes or not?

What [who] does it hurt? Anyone who contributed code to the Linux-NTFS drivers under GPL, thinking that their contributions would only be licensed for use by those who agree to reciprocate and give back additions.

Having the code relicensed would violate the project's contributors' expectations and would be "stealing" contributor's code for use in a close-source, commercial product for some [monetary] "benefit" to Apple and its licensees.

Besides theft of the original contributors work, piecemeal "disposal" of "GPL-assets" harms the entire "GPL community" via:
diminished martketshare and demand for GPL licensed products; and
(if changes are not returned) lost opportunity in a reduced, GPL-licensed codebase.

Disposition of all GPL contributors' rights should not be considered casually if at all. There is tangible harm that is likely in proportion to the amount of code (or work) you have donated to the GPL-licensed codebase.

People who have not contributed to the GPL-licensed codebase or have little investment in it would be less likely to feel upset or annoyed about such losses.

-l

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[jbolden]

Apple doesn't have to GPL their whole kernel. They have a sort of micro-kernel. They take the Linux-NTFS code and modify it to create a GPLed module. The module links with the kernel. Apple has enough standing with regard to the module not to sue themselves for the module -> kernel link and the NTFS guys can't sue Apple since the module is GPLed.

The only real problem is this does create obligations for stores selling OSX and other outside distributors. But think Apple is fine here.

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[Overly Critical Guy]

The lack of 64-bit GUI frameworks is a valid point. OS X supports 64-bit, but you have to spawn the 64-bit process in the background as a console process and communicate with it in your GUI, since the windowing libraries are currently not 64-bit. Hopefully, we'll see that change in OS X Leopard.

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[Anonymous Coward]

What We Can Learn From BSD

Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[fishbot]

I love the sentiment in this sentence:

"Are the Linux-NTFS developers admitting that Apple can do things that they themselves are too dumb to figure out? "

In other words, getting help on a project or, heaven forbid, allowing someone develop a project down a path you didn't originally intend, is a sign of stupidity? Should every coder be so filled with hubris that they should actively deny access to code by others in case they look 'dumb'?

This whole 'you only use GPL because you are selfish' nonsense really gets on my nerves, although not quite as much as closed-source advocates. A software world in which everyone can wantonly hide, close or subvert software because there is nothing to stop them is inevitable without some kind of protection.

The fact is, and this may come as a shock, not everybody is a lovely, cuddly person who only wants the best for the world. In fact, most people are money grabbing, self-satisfying, low-morality morons who'll make a quick buck of you as fast as they can and screw you in the process.

But of course, that's fine. By stopping them you only stand to make yourself look stupid, right?

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[node 3]

I never understood this. What part of the BSD license does not ensure that MY code remains free.

It doesn't, but that's not what I said. The code on your hard drive is still free (if you want it to be).

As I look at it, once someone modifies / changes /derrives my code, it's no longer exclusively MY code and therefore does not have to be free.

Then the BSD license would be a good match for you. Like I said, it all depends on what you want.

Furthermore, even if that remains my code, my code is still free because I provide it under BSD and people still have access to MY code, just not the my code that someone else has.

The code you are making available is still freely available from you, but your code which is now being included in some proprietary program is not free. It's up to you whether that's what you want.

This essentially is a restatement of my previous post. If you want to promote and protect the freedom of your code, use the GPL. If you want your code to be used, free or not, use the BSD license. One fundamentally promotes use, the other fundamentally promotes freedom.

For an analogy, imagine two free countries. In one, people are free to become slaves, the other they are forbidden to do so. Which is more free? In one, the people have one extra freedom, but that freedom can be used to subvert freedom. The other has one extra restriction, but that restriction promotes/protects freedom.

It's somewhat ironic that in order to promote freedom, one must limit freedom, but that's reality, and reality is always right, ironic or not.

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 95 OSR2 (theres no "c" or "b" thing), released in 1997, worked fine with the USB standard of that time.

What an incredible Troll

[DesScorp]

The GPL creates freedom for users of software by putting restrictions on developers. The BSD license destroys freedoms for users because it wants to empower second generation developers. Very different purpose.

How the hell does the BSD license "destroy freedom"? It's not like code released under the BSD license can be hijacked and and the original source kept from the public once released. You're free to fork it and do whatever you want with it, but the original stays available. In no way can that be called "destroying freedom". You can call it an affront to RMS, but your statement was rediculous. Back under the bridge with thee...

Re:What an incredible Troll

[jbolden]

Its often not the original source that's of any importance, its the source as it being used today. The application as it evolves that's important. So under BSD licenses what happens is that software products evolve from the open source product that are closed source. Users can either then:

-- downgrade to the open source product if they want to excercise any freedoms
-- utilize a fully commercial product

The clasic example was X. The MIT X source code and all the specification were open and freely available. It did users no good whatsoever since the X servers and clients in use on their machines still couldn't be changed and they would lose all compatability as if they tried using something like the MIT version. X all throughout the late 80's-early 90's was a propietery product for roughly 100% of its ueers.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Grail]

Licencing under the APL licence for inclusion in Mac OS X means that Apple can contribute their patches back to the OSS community, without being obliged to make their operating system open source.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Anonymous Dork]

So by your own explanation I take it you are agreement with the parent post then.

For the reasons you give, the GPL _is_ therefore as the parent puts it, a more "selfish" license and not as free.

This whole resentment for others "getting a free leg up" is what I find most odourous in the GPL camp.
We all "get a leg up" from both GPL and non GPL software, software is a tool... thats what it is supposed to do.
Why the sour grapes then when your aim under the GPL is to share it ?

Lets be honest here, the GPL is a great tool for "selfish" organisations to release code with strings attached, but still hold the rights to distribute under other license terms (possibly for additional fee), see TrollTech/Qt for an example. Using a BSD style license would not be as revenue friendly to organisations like TrollTech because they really would be giving anyone the freedom to compete directly with them, the freedom to not have to pay for commercial use, the freedom to do what they want.

To clarify, I have no problem with anyone using the license of their choice for code they write, at the end of the day it is their right to choose. I just find the GPL less pragmatic, and brings with it unwanted philosophical baggage which *I* personally would rather avoid. The GPL also has some very difficult to answer technical areas.

One of these technial areas is the GPL special exception clause regarding not having to provide source code for major components of the base operating system or other binary components, unless those compoenents normally accompany the executable. So if I ship a binary operating system image inside an appliance (eg a Mac) that contains both GPL and non GPL code, am I forced to release my code (and potentially other third party code which I have may not have source or permission) under the GPL because the GPL executables "normally accompany" the said operating system and other proprietry software ?

Does everyone just turn a blind eye in the embedded GNU/Linux world ?

Does this lack of enforcement after "due time", translate to some kind of legal right/permission ? eg I believe that property law requires that you enforce your borders, otherwise after some sufficient amount of time any encroachment is deemed the new boundary.

Re:But it's still just Linux with a better UI, rig

[jrockway]

> First of all, it is not "crippled" to disable "certain core UNIX functionality" for Apple's DRM "apps".

Every other UNIX I've ever used -- Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, AIX, and Solaris -- has ptrace setup this way: when the super user requests that the kernel ptrace a process, the kernel ptraces that process -- no questions asked. The point of being the superuser is that YOU control the computer, not the other way around. So in this case, "Darwin" is in the wrong -- it has no right to tell me what to do with MY computer running MY process. If I want to ptrace iTunes, I'm going to ptrace iTunes. (Fortunately, Apple's crippled software calls ptrace via a library call, which is trivial to rewrite to ignore PT_DENY_ATTACH. Doing this was a complete waste of my time, though.)

> (there's only one, and it's iTunes).

And the entire QuickTime library. Would you like to debug a program that uses QuickTime? Fuck you -- the RIAA doesn't approve of that. Why program when you could just download a nice TV show from iTunes and watch that instead?

> Second, it's called P_DENY_ATTACH

When correcting someone else's typo, don't make one yourself. It's PT_DENY_ATTACH.

> fully documented in the ptrace man page, which allows a process to avoid being debugged

Okay then, this makes it fine. Microsoft's EULA says they don't have to worry about Windows being secure, so they should just release some viruses. Sony's rootkit man page says that they will be spying on any and all personal information on your machine -- if it's documented it must be OK!

> Third, this flag isn't set in the OS X kernel, it's set in the application.

But the kernel is crippled in the sense that it grants the application the flawed request. Other kernels would return EFUCKYOU or perhaps terminate the application outright.

> Fourth, Darwin is open source, so you only have to remove the if statement in ptrace().

Where's the source for the Intel version? "Darwin"/OS X is not open source, it's proprietary crippleware / malware. But hey... at least it has widgets and iChat!

> Next time, get a little informed before passing along what someone told you was true on the Internet.

Next time, pull the stick out of your ass before posting... and be sure not to get a splinter. :)

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Eivind Eklund]

No, the GPL is not APL compatible.

It is the GPL that is being heavy handed. The GPL is, from what I can tell, not compatible with *anything*, and a lot of BSD licensed code (without advertising clauses) is brought under the GPL in violation.

This is based on my experience with how onerous the reproduction clauses of the BSD license actually can be. It is an extra restriction, with actual impact. Ask anybody that has done embedded systems based on the BSD codebases.

Eivind.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Eivind Eklund]

What is 100% certain now is that the Linux NTFS code will not get any changes back from Apple.

If Apple had used that code, there would be X chance of Linux NTFS getting changes back, where X is larger than 0. Now that Apple has to use another codebase, the chance of Linux NTFS getting changes back is 0.

Of course, it may be emotionally satisfying to say "Screw you" - whether that momentary feeling is worth it compared to throwing away the chance of getting fixes and improvements is up to each developer to decide.

Eivind.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Anonymous Coward]

What if they improve the code? Under GPL, they are forced to share the modifications. Under BSD, they are not.
      Maybe for NTFS there is a change that needs one year of full time to implement (or test, or find). The original developer, working 2 hours a day, can find it/implement it in 4 years. Apple, dedicating 15 men will make it in a month. So, you wrote your code, that still has a problem you'll fix it in 4 years. Apple will have it patched in one month, and you (that wrote 90%+ of the work) have a less usable product than Apple that did only 10%. You end up doing 90% of work for little nothing, and Apple doing 10% of work and having everything

I would never give you a job

[theolein]

It is why I think Apple is doomed longterm. Because the users subconsciously believe it and they are closest to the situation. For some reason computing platforms create a LOT passion.

You're a fucking idiot. That translates into brand loyalty, which is worth more than its weight in gold because you can't buy it. All manufacturers of any product would kill for this type of loyalty. But I sure as shit wouldn't give you a job if you didn't even realise something as simple as that.

Re:I would never give you a job

[Budenny]

He is making a valid point, and you have just illustrated it perfectly.

How many people do you think will read this comment, and say to themselves, yes, these Mac people are my kind of folks, I must check it out?

How many will read it and say, got to stay well away from this craziness?

Do you really not understand the effect these kinds of assaults have on people's perceptions of Apple?

Re:I would never give you a job

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the poster made no assertions about Apple themselves, he simply indicated that "brand loyalty" is a highly coveted prize in any industry.

How is it that you know the poster is an Apple fanboi, based on that comment alone?

Sure, the comment was a flame and didn't contribute anything to the discussion. That's not my point though, my point is that everyone in these threads is just assuming and assuming and ASSuming.

I'm getting tired of all the assumption in this thread. Anyone who takes any position to defend Apple is being called a Zealot and a danger to Apple's potential customers.

Because I'm sure there's a whole fucking whack of these 'potential customers' just reading fwapdash comments and waiting to base their computing platform on them.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[alphamugwump]

"The pain that apple is experiencing is deliberate"

Ya feel that, Steve? Thats what ya get for trying to put one over on the Penguin. Keep those thumbscrews nice and tight.

Seriously, I would probably feel a lot more charitable towards Apple if they weren't in direct competition with Linux. And yes, Red Hat makes money off of Linux, but they also pay developers to work on it. And, because of the GPL, those changes must be given back to the community.

Apple, on the other hand, hasn't given us much of anything.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[jschottm]

So by your own explanation I take it you are agreement with the parent post then.

Try reading my post again. I clearly say there is room, appropriateness, and personalities that match both. It's not a dichotomy - I don't have to only agree with one. I'm hoping to get some of my work code GPLed and some of my work code BSD licensed, depending on which I feel is more appropriate. I also want to keep some of it closed and proprietary.

This whole resentment for others "getting a free leg up" is what I find most odourous in the GPL camp.

What's so difficult to understand? If I donate something to the general public, I expect them to share it with other people if I put it out under the GPL. Other people can choose to accept my terms - they have no inherent "right" to my work. How many BSD developers were paid anything when MS used various parts of the BSD networking tools? What benefit (bug testing, etc.) went back into the community? How many BSD based companies have been squeezed out of business by MS? Why not just go scrub Bill Gate's bathroom on the weekends? Or my car could use a good wash.

Linux having NTFS write capability means that users in developing countries using old computers have one more potential benefit. OS X having NTFS write capability means that some guy in a coffee shop sipping an expresso that costs a week's wages in a developing country has one more thing to feel smug about. As I noted, Apple has not been friendly to Linux in the past. When you were a kid, did you share your candy with the bully that punched you in the arm when the teacher wasn't looking?

We all "get a leg up" from both GPL and non GPL software,

I pay for all my tools that require fiscal payment and even some that don't. That's the exchange for that leg up. In the case of the GPL, it's accepting the terms on redistributing the code. Like it says, there's nothing that forces you to accept the terms of the GPL.

Using a BSD style license would not be as revenue friendly to organisations like TrollTech because they really would be giving anyone the freedom to compete directly with them, the freedom to not have to pay for commercial use, the freedom to do what they want.

OMG!!!1!! In the real world, people need to be able to do things like pay bills and eat. Alert the news corp! Stop the presses!

I just find the GPL less pragmatic, and brings with it unwanted philosophical baggage which *I* personally would rather avoid.

Good on you. If you want, you can write NTFS code for Apple in your spare time. I'm sure they'd appreciate it. But don't complain that other people don't share your view. It's part of being human.

One of these technial areas is the GPL special exception clause regarding not having to provide source code for major components of the base operating system or other binary components, unless those compoenents normally accompany the executable.

You're misunderstanding the clause. It immediately follows the part that says you have to include all make/installation files required to build the executable. The exception says you don't have to bundle the OS and compiler with those makefiles.

So if I ship a binary operating system image inside an appliance (eg a Mac) that contains both GPL and non GPL code, am I forced to release my code (and potentially other third party code which I have may not have source or permission) under the GPL because the GPL executables "normally accompany" the said operating system and other proprietry software ?

If Apple were to incorporate GPL code into the kernel, they would be legally liable. The whole issue could be made go away if they GPLed the whole thing. If they could not (3rd party source) or would not do so, then they would have to remove the code and would be liable in much the same way that they would be liable if one of their employees had intergrated MS code (or even BSD code, without attribution). In all likelyhood, i

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Grab]

You don't want to aid anybody else around you unless they give you something in return. Is that it?

Aiding individuals is just fine and dandy. Aiding multi-million dollar companies is another matter. If they want me to work for them, they can hire me, but I'm not doing their work for free. This doesn't make be a greedy bastard, simply a bastard who expects a return on the time I invest. That return may be monetary ("you pay me for writing your code") or it may be payment in kind ("you use my code, then you give me any new work you've done on it"). The only person who's a greedy bastard is the one who appropriates my work and represents it as all their own work, in order to make a large profit.

"Belongs to mankind" is certainly pitching it a bit strong. :-) But "may be used for the benefit of all computer owners worldwide" is 100% accurate and defensible.

Grab.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Grab]

Rethink your argument. RedHat makes the majority of its money from *support*.

I don't give a damn if people need training, or need hand-holding while they work on it, or if they're prepared to subcontract installation of software. They're making money in a market which has been *enabled* by the existence of this software, which is fine. However, they're not making a profit by directly selling software written by me as "their product". You don't find Ford complaining about the existence driving schools...

Grab.

Lots of the missing libs are useless

[Sulka]

The missing packages include a lot of support libraries for old hardware which are useless on the new platform.

Can you create a list of missing libraries that are useful and/or needed on x86 Macs?

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Daytona955i]

This is where I part ways with a lot of open source folks. What exactly does it HURT to let Apple use this code?

Apple can use the code, provided they release whatever changes they make to everyone. Or do you mean what does it hurt to let apple take the code and do with it whatever they want without giving anything back?

The code is for reading/writing NTFS, a specification which isn't officially available anyway and Apple has no control over. There is no risk of "embrace and extend" here. So what's the motivation for denying them?
It doesn't matter if apple has no control over the spec, it's about giving back to the community who created the code in the first place. Apple can use the code but for whatever reason they don't want to give any of their changes back to the community so they don't get to use it.

Who cares whether Apple gives you back their changes or not?
Well I'm sure you don't and I bet you didn't write any of the NTFS code. Apparently the linux NTFS guys do care and since it's their code, it matters more than your opinion.

Could they actually make a significant improvement to Linux-NTFS?
They could.

Are the Linux-NTFS developers admitting that Apple can do things that they themselves are too dumb to figure out?
You do realize Apple is asking them for code right? Besides, it's not like you can say, I know how to improve the code 100% and implement it overnight. It takes a lot of time to develop code especially when the spec isn't available and you have to reverse engineer it.

And anyway, why would a developer in Apple's position start making wanton changes to the code when they already know that it works?
Then why not just use the code as GPL? If they don't make any changes to it, they don't have to release any code.

The whole thing basically boils down to the fact that apple wants to take the developers hard work and give nothing in return. That's not nice and the developers have a right to say "No, I don't want you to do that, that's why it's GPLed."

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[jbolden]

Actually they've given back some work on KHTML, and in fact webcore is really good open source library that is used by non apple open source apps (very few work under Linux but that's not AFAIKT Apple's fault). With Darwinports (which they funded) they ended up doing a lot of patch work for getting apps to run on PPC (which does effect LinuxPPC). They've contributed to CUPS in two ways: one they paid a lot to have rights to it, and two they give all their changes back (in particular GIMP print is mostly their's). They made contribution to SQLite.

Apple's getting better. Its taking time but they are becoming a valuable member of the open source community. All I was saying above is that things like the Linux-NTFS are how that happened.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[John Jamieson]

The GPL people WANT Apple to use the code, but when they closed source individuals make improvements and don't disclose it, everyone suffers. The whole concept of progress is each of us standing on the shoulders of giants(the pioneers before us) and making our own contribution. Then other people build on our work.
BUT IF YOU BREAK THE CHAIN, the whole inverted pyramid structure breaks down, and progress grinds to a halt.

The developers never asked Appl to start "GPLing their whole damn project". When comments like this are used, it is too often just fanboy deceit. (building a straw man)
I hope your mistake is sincere.

Anyway, you are right that Apple cannot keep mankind from using the software, but they can hold back progress.

Note, I am not an opensource GPL developer, but it is tiring to see people who cannot grasp the very simple concepts they live by. I do not code outside of work, but at least I realize no matter how I rationalize it, they owe me NOTHING, and I have NO RIGHT to criticize what they have chosen to do, or they license they use.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you are "using" the work of the NTFS developers. How about giving them some cash then?

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Mr. Underbridge]

Yes they give the changes back, but they still make money FROM YOUR WORK WITHOUT PAYING YOU.

Well, that's kind of the point. I don't mind doing a "trade" - I get their software, they get mine - but I'll be damned if I'm doing that work for absolutely no compensation of any kind for a for-profit company.

By the way, caps are annoying, you're not on an AOL chatroom.

Apple has got to ask itself a tough question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple has to ask themselves: "What makes a Macintosh a Macintosh? Is it the hardware or is it the software?" If they answer "hardware", then they should continue in the direction they are apparently headed.

IMHO though (and apparently many others), the answer to this question is simply "Mac OS X" regardless of what hardware it is running on. So as long as Apple says "hardware" and users are saying "OS X"...well we'll be seeing a lot more of this and hacked Mac OS X images floating around.

Apart from the spelling mistake...

[argent]

Did you bother actually looking at the license on the code you're referring to?

What's GPL3 got to do with code that's never been under the GPL?

Correction, this is not a false alarm...

[argent]

I wrote: I'm glad to hear that my prediction has not in fact come true...

It does in fact appear that there IS missing code in the x86 kernel.

Apple is entitled to withhold that code, just as they're entitled to switch to the x86 platform, and as I've previously noted the latter does tend to imply the former would happen.

I'm more concerned about what the missing kernel may contain to allow Apple to implement strong DRM in OS X intel, and possibly even allow Microsoft to port their strong DRM to OS X. Though Microsoft dropping Windows Media Player for Mac OS X makes that nasty scenario seem more remote... let's pray Microsoft doesn't wise up, bring it back using Apple's TPM support, and produce a genuinely universal and unfractured DRM for both Windows and Mac OS.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Chreo]

But "may be used for the benefit of all computer owners worldwide" is 100% accurate and defensible.

but only as long as they comply with YOUR rules i.e. give away THEIR code. Freedom my ...

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Scudsucker]

I suppose you think the Red Cross, Salvation Army, etc. (name your favorite charitable organization) consist of a bunch greedy wankers because they only give to the "needy".

Except for your analogy to be accurate, the Red Cross and Salvation Army would need to pass out food and clothes with a pedantic list of restrictions on how and what to do with them, while at the same time crowing about how it's all in the name of "freedom".

Please show me the xnu source tree for x86

[argent]

If it's a mistake you shouldn't have any problem finding the x86 xnu source tree for 10.4.5 on opensource.apple.com.

Re:Please show me the xnu source tree for x86

[javaxman]

If it's a mistake you shouldn't have any problem finding the x86 xnu source tree for 10.4.5 on opensource.apple.com.

Well now, that is interesting... it isn't there for 10.4.4 either, though... and I see it's still there for OS X PPC. Just not x86.

Disappointing. Not necessarily taking anything away from us there, I suppose, but still disappointing.

Previously, you could compile the source for either PPC or x86. Does the source listed under PPC not compile for x86 ? Perhaps we're just not seeing the xnu source in the x86 listing because it's not x86 specific ? yea, I know... grasping at straws, I have no idea what's going on here, I'm not even seriously remotely interested in diving that far down... if I were to run a *nix on Intel, it'd be Linux, BSD, or Solaris ( probably in that order ), and GNUStep will compile on any of those, so no real interest in Darwin here, except as an academic exercise.

I was actually talking about the cctools thing being a mistake, though, in my defense. The xnu bit... well, I certainly wouldn't be shocked that Apple might hold back some of the 'real' guts they use there, even if they do release something usable as a kernel in source eventually... still sad, though. It'd be best if Apple felt they could let ( and even help ) people build Darwin on a generic machine similar to their own x86 machines.

Re:Please show me the xnu source tree for x86

[argent]

Previously, you could compile the source for either PPC or x86. Does the source listed under PPC not compile for x86 ?

As near as I can tell from the article, no.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Scudsucker]

When free software resources are used to make proprietary software stonger it certainly hurts.

That's RIAA logic. Failure to gain is not a loss, nor does it "hurt".

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Grab]

We have mutual freedoms. You have the freedom to reuse *my* code, so long as I have the freedom to reuse *yours*. Yes, it's only as long as they comply with the rules - in other words, just like everything else in the rest of the world. Example: you have the freedom to get as drunk as you like, *so long as* you're not becoming abusive to the people around you and thereby preventing them having a good time.

Every freedom carries responsibilities. If you're not mature enough to handle the responsibilities, you're not prepared to have that freedom. A few companies to date have proved themselves immature in that sense. So far, they've all settled rather than fight...

Grab.

Are you illiterate or what?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Now it seems they are no longer releasing the source to OS X's xnu kernel." - does that mean ANYTHING to you? That's the issue, and that has not been fixed. Stupid apologists.

http://www.opendarwin.org/~bbraun/slashdot_respons e.html

Re:Are you illiterate or what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you a fucking whiny bitch? Yes. Does that mean ANYTHING to you?

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Chreo]

I know very well how "it works", but for me the idea of maximum freedom and maximum joy is important. That means that I'm free to pursue happiness and freedom in any way as long as I make sure that your freedom and happiness is not changed for the worse (and I'm not the one to judge if that is so, you are). That puts upon me the responsibility to think through what I do and how that may affect you.

In that same line GPL makes no sense to me. You say, "this code is free BUT not completely because if you use it your code will have to carry the SAME restrictions". "Freedom" for code but not for the user -> which probably makes me less happy but no less free as long as I decide NOT to use your code.

I prefer freedom for the user and that is why I use a BSD like license. You are free to use my code in any way you damn well please and if you decide to use that code in something that is not "free" (gratis) then that does not change the fact that my code still is free for me and others to use as we choose -> I'm free and no less happy, you're free and probably more happy because you get to use my code in any way you see fit. Maximum freedom and maximum happiness.
br> There is just too much egoism in the world already

"I give if you give" - GPL
"I give, enjoy!" - BSD and others like it

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[arose]

So Apple do not lose anything by not gaining access to the code in the way they would like, right?

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[ldj]

Sorry, but the analogy is accurate enough to make my point. At least as accurate as most analogies comparing software and physical items get. The point that I was making is that it's rather silly to complain about volunteers placing restrictions on their products when the only signicant restriction is that of keeping others (mostly big companies) from making a profit off of their work without giving anything back.

Anyone who knows much about the GPL also knows that the freedom that it offers is meant primarily for the end user, not for developers who don't share their code. As others have said, no one is arm-twisting the proprietary software firms to open their code. But they certainly shouldn't come looking for free labor either.

If all you can do is argue details of an analogy, I guess you missed the real issue. If you don't agree with the purpose or reasons for the GPL, that's your choice. But don't try to make the developers who choose the GPL out to be somehow disingenuous. People who do so only show their lack of understanding the GPL and its purpose.

If Apple kills Open Source versions...

[proberts]

...of Darwin, will that be Darwinism, or will we have to wait until Apple killing Open Source kills Apple?

Paul

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Swift2001]

Gee, worried about "market share" and "being ripped off." Sounds like good ol' capitalism to me.

GNU-Darwin saves the day

[proclus]

Buy Darwin-x86 OS plus source code at GNU-Darwin.org. It is free software, forever.

kernel included for nothin

Regards,
proclus

http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

Re:OSX86 Piracy =/= increased market share

[Slithe]

>> How about suggesting something that hasn't failed spectularly EVERY TIME IT WAS TRIED?

Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD.

I understand your point. I am just being a troll. :)

X11

[idlake]

Everybody's X came from MIT. What is means to write an X is to implement MIT's code for your platform. That is the definition and its been the definition of 20 years.

You don't know what you're talking about. X11 is a protocol, not a piece of software. The definition of X11 is the protocol, nothing else. There are probably dozens of implementations by now, many of which share little more than the definitions of data structures, and some of which don't share a line of code with any of the others.

The concept of a window system standard independent of an implementation may be hard to grasp for people like you, who have grown up at the mercy of a vendor that changes interfaces and codebases every couple of years, but it's a good concept and it works. It's why X11 is still going strong, while Apple and Microsoft have had to throw out their window systems several times, and will probably have to do so again in the next few years.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Anonymous Dork]

Don't get me wrong, I see the benefit of the GPL, and the problems. I don't have an agenda or religion to push here.

But you still evaded the assertion that GPL is "selfish" compared so other licenses such as for example, the BSD license. That was the major thrust of the parent post, and based on the evidence presented by yourself in your initial post and your follow-up would seem to back up the "selfish" claim.

In fact every part of your reply seems to assert yet again, that the GPL is "selfish". Like I said earlier I have no problem at all with whatever license someone chooses, its their choice.

Could I ask you to read that GPL exception clause again ?

The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.

The nexus is "accompanies". By having GPL executables "accompany" other components seems to very clearly require the "accompanying" code to also be released under the GPL. This would appear to rope in every component of a binary distribution, would it not ?

Good on you. If you want, you can write NTFS code for Apple in your spare time. I'm sure they'd appreciate it. But don't complain that other people don't share your view. It's part of being human.

But again, there is this "selfish" notion arising again. The GPL is really all about NOT letting people do as they please with the code. I undertand the motivations and intention of the GPL to promote sharing and openess, and according to the GPL doctrine it requires sacrificing some rights, to protect some others. However I find it quite ironic that the GPL has been turned around and used as a (quite nifty) tool to prevent open competition by commercial companies.

The GPL is very useful when you want to be "selfish". And btw I don't have a problem with the "selfish" notion, I just wish the GPL crowd would fess up and admit that, "No, the GPL is not as free as other alternatives and thats the way we like it. It works for us."

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[bursch-X]

As long as you say "I want this or that" even if your desires might benefit others it's all about you and what you want. It's not about sharing, it's about you WANTING to share. Selfish. Talk about what others want and how you can help them to achieve that. Then you're (maybe) not selfish.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Sancho]

That means that I'm free to pursue happiness and freedom in any way as long as I make sure that your freedom and happiness is not changed for the worse (and I'm not the one to judge if that is so, you are). That puts upon me the responsibility to think through what I do and how that may affect you.

Without a qualifier, that's one of the most absurd statements I've ever heard. Taken as written, we could never put people in prison for crimes. Worse, we could never really express our own opinions--they might make someone else sad.

In that same line GPL makes no sense to me. You say, "this code is free BUT not completely because if you use it your code will have to carry the SAME restrictions". "Freedom" for code but not for the user -> which probably makes me less happy but no less free as long as I decide NOT to use your code.

Lots of people spout the "This code is free under the GPL" line or something similar. They probably don't know what they're talking about.

You are mostly correct here. The software is "free" in that, barring government exceptions, anyone in the world is allowed to download and use the software. Further, they can distribute the source code 100% for free and without restriction (again, barring certain government exceptions). Even modifying the code is free and acceptable, and you don't have get anyone's permission to do so. The only thing you can't do is redistribute your modified version under a non-GPL'd license.

So there are a lot of things you can do with GPL software that are free. A whole lot. But no, not everything is.

I prefer freedom for the user and that is why I use a BSD like license.

Most people distinguish between "user" and "developer". The GPL has freedom for the user.

You are free to use my code in any way you damn well please and if you decide to use that code in something that is not "free" (gratis) then that does not change the fact that my code still is free for me and others to use as we choose

But the BSD license has restrictions, too. Specifically:

        * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
        * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
        * Neither the name of the nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

As found on http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php

The only totally free way to give out your code is to put it in the public domain.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Chreo]

Taken as written, we could never put people in prison for crimes. Worse, we could never really express our own opinions--they might make someone else sad.

Not at all. If you take away my freedom then I'm perfectly fine to let you take responsibility for that and put you in jail. I'm the one to judge if my freedom is taken away, not you. If I feel I have been wronged then I'm within my rights to complain and try to make sure you think twice before doing it to someone else. If everyone thought that way, prisons would not be an issue (utopia indeed but one has to believe in the better part of humanity). Same with feelings, if I feel that I have to make sure you know how I feel then I will do so unless I feel that the end result will only make everyone feel worse.

You have to think about that statment quite some time before you understand all the consequences and then it will make more sense and not seem as absurd.

Most people distinguish between "user" and "developer". The GPL has freedom for the user.

Quite true. I omitted that distinction based upon what we were discussing and what website it is on ;) I will do better.

The only totally free way to give out your code is to put it in the public domain.

Quite right, however by using the BSD license I can take some accountability for the software (i.e. correct bugs that are pointed ut to me) because they know who wrote it. And ofc the "fame (shame?) makes e happier also =)

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Sancho]

Not at all. If you take away my freedom then I'm perfectly fine to let you take responsibility for that and put you in jail. I'm the one to judge if my freedom is taken away, not you. If I feel I have been wronged then I'm within my rights to complain and try to make sure you think twice before doing it to someone else. If everyone thought that way, prisons would not be an issue (utopia indeed but one has to believe in the better part of humanity). Same with feelings, if I feel that I have to make sure you know how I feel then I will do so unless I feel that the end result will only make everyone feel worse.

You didn't make that exception in your original statement. You stated merely that you should be able to do anything you want as long as it doesn't make others unhappy. You gave no indication that retaliation or a reaction which might cause that person unhappiness would be acceptable. By your initial wording, you shouldn't tell the authorities if someone does something bad to you because your action might cause them unhappiness.

Of course, we're talking about a hypothetical reality, because the government places restrictions on what we can do, even when the actions we take may not adversely affect anyone. Furthermore, the government allows us to do things which reduce the happiness of others, and without recompense to the person we have "injured".

Quite right, however by using the BSD license I can take some accountability for the software (i.e. correct bugs that are pointed ut to me) because they know who wrote it. And ofc the "fame (shame?) makes e happier also =)

Definitely a good reason to keep your name on it :)

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[Chreo]

You didn't make that exception in your original statement.

Well to be honest I did tho perhaps not as clearly. I wrote:
That puts upon me the responsibility to think through what I do and how that may affect you.
Responsibility, I'm responisible for my actions. If I deprive others of their freedom then I have to take responsibility for that and cannot expect to enjoy my given freedom until I've been "rehabilitated" and can respect the freedom of others again.

Of course, we're talking about a hypothetical reality, because the government places restrictions on what we can do, even when the actions we take may not adversely affect anyone. Furthermore, the government allows us to do things which reduce the happiness of others, and without recompense to the person we have "injured".

Well what can you expect from people that barely knows how to take responsibility for the decisions they make. They want us to be accountable for what we do but, oy wey, if the pendule swings ;)

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[IvanXQZ]

I'm an Apple fanboy, and not at all a GNU/Linux person, but I see the point of view of the GPL developers. I think it's a red herring to get into whether GPL is "selfish" or not. As I understand it, GPL concretizes the values that existed in early hacker/coder culture -- namely, that source code (as a manifestation of knowledge) is a shared resource, and does not belong to any one individual, and it is for the overall good of the code (and, by extension, humanity) that it be that way. (My primary source for this understanding is Steven Levy's "Hackers," right or wrong.)

You may or may not agree, but that's the philosophy behind the GPL. In the world of the GPL, user=developer, and a developer can't very well "use" a program if the source code isn't readily at hand to modify. Thus the GPL enforces that the source code always be readily at hand, so that all developers can benefit from that code. The GPL enforces sharing of knowledge.

That's why I think it's a little meaningless to get hung up on whether BSD-style licenses or GPL licences are "selfish" or not. It depends upon your perception. A simple reading says GPL might be more selfish because it imposes more restrictions; the developer is expecting something in return for their effort. But to the GPL developer, the license promotes the greater development of humanity by requiring that knowledge be shared. That is a highly idealistic aim. You might not agree with it, but it's certainly unselfish in the mind of the GPL developer.

What about BSD (which I think the APSL derives from)? If BSD licenses are "here, enjoy," that's certainly unselfish at an individual level. But by permitting others to keep their knowledge to themselves, when it was derived from the knowledge they received, the GPL developer sees selfishness in the BSD license.

A counterargument would be that BSD, by being more corporate-friendly, actually get useful things into the hands of more people, e.g. NTFS filesystems. But then a countercounterargument comes down to a question of values, and in the GPL universe, there is no value higher than knowledge (made flesh in source code). Stuff is ephemeral, knowledge is eternal.

I admire the idealism of the GPL. It's idealistic and communistic (in a good way). I also have no problems with businesses wanting to make money from their intellectual property by keeping it secret. Therefore, I don't see either the ntfsprogs developers or Apple being in the wrong here -- they each have their own prerogatives, and Apple wanted to see if they'd be willing to change their license so that Apple could use their code for their own purposes. That's not unreasonable. The developers said no, and that's not unreasonable either.

Whether or not the sharing of knowledge is the most important thing about software development is the sort of thing that will be argued forever, but in the end, it's just that -- a question of values, and that's all it is.

Re:Apple wants to use closed-source Linux-NTFS dri

[node 3]

As long as you say "I want this or that" even if your desires might benefit others it's all about you and what you want. It's not about sharing, it's about you WANTING to share. Selfish.

When your mother said, "I want you to eat your vegetables", was she being selfish? When your grandmother said, "Here, I want you to have this candy," was she being selfish? When your father wanted to get you what you wanted for Christmas? When your teacher helped you with a question above-and-beyond any employment obligation?

If you're as cynical as your post implies, then no, you know nothing about the words "generous" and "selfish".

"I want" is insufficient to make something selfish. "I want to take from you" is probably selfish, and "I want to give to you" is probably generous. (I qualify with "probably" because one could always come up with counterexamples, but the idea is true in general)

When someone chooses to license some software under an Open Source license, they are, probably, being generous. They could charge you for the software, but have chosen not to. Maybe they have some scheme to exploit the help of others, in which case it's probably selfish, maybe (like Sony with TiVo), they are doing it for expediency, in which case it's more ambivalent. But if it's because the coder wants to make sure the program gets out there and improved, or even more so, wants to help create an environment of openness and sharing, that person is being generous.

There are almost always selfish motivations in even the most generous act, but that does not make something that's overwhelmingly generous a purely selfish act.