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HP May Be Developing Its Own Version of Linux
vondiggity writes to tell us that HP is working on several different ways to make an end run around Vista. Among the plans is also a supposed rumor that certain factions within HP are developing their own flavor of Linux. Executives at HP deny that any meaningful amount of resources are being directed into plans for a mass-market operating system, stating their main goal is to innovate on top of Vista. "Still, the sources say employees in HP's PC division are exploring the possibility of building a mass-market operating system. HP's software would be based on Linux, the open-source operating system that is already widely available, but it would be simpler and easier for mainstream users, the sources say. The goal may be to make HP less dependent on Windows and to strengthen HP's hand against Apple (AAPL), which has gained market share in recent years by offering easy-to-use computers with its own operating system."
...stating their main goal is to innovate on top of Vista.
Could we please stop referring to programming as "innovating"? Not every single piece of code anyone writes is a breakthrough.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
If HP makes a decent version of Linux for their computers, even if it has system locks, could be an important introduction into the OS for many new users. A growth in the amount of users running Linux, or derivations thereof, could be good for Linux in general. Wider use = wider support. Not to mention that it could help to make porting games for Linux more lucrative.
The Long Now Foundation
If desktop linux is ever to be successful, there needs to be a standard and tightly integrated stack. The choice and openness that makes linux so great in the eyes of some is it's bane in the desktop market, and for software support as well.
Similes are like metaphors
The moment that major manufacturers stop preinstalling Windows is the day Windows officially starts dying.
Microsoft needs HP more.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
When the lease to the space the company I worked for was about two years away from expiring, there was a huge and fairly public campaign launched to 'find a new location'. The company wasn't the only in the building, but they did lease about 15% of the floors.
There was much excitement, employees were given surveys and polls. There were even a few... disagreements between people who were for locations closer to home that ended in one or the other no longer working for the company. The Business Journal even ran stories about it.
The company sold the idea heavy for almost the entire year, to the point where everyone was excited to find out where we would be moving to.
A year away from the date the lease was going to expire, the company announced that after exhausive study, it was determined that our current location was the best suited site, and that we had signed a new lease with the building. In consideration for signing the lease early, the building announced that our company's logo would be on the building and the upper management would have reserved parking spaces near the garage elevators.
Take this for what you will.
Apple doesn't contribute code back to BSD
Yes they do, but since most of their improvements are in the Mach and IOKit layers, there aren't many improvements for them to give back. They give back huge amounts of code to LLVM, which has a similarly permissive license.
That's likely why Apple didn't use Linux
No, they didn't use Linux because it didn't exist in 1986 when they (they being NeXT, at the time) first released the OS that would later be re-branded as OS X. They didn't use Linux in 2000 after the Apple purchase because the internals of Linux and 4BSD are very different, while FreeBSD and NetBSD still retain a lot of overall structure inherited from early BSD releases, making it easier to import their code into the XNU kernel.
Apple released a lot of patches for Linux when they ported it to the PowerPC architecture in 1996 and ran it on top of the Mach microkernel. Apple even shipped a Linux distribution for a while, although it never came close to A/UX, their own UNIX (which only ran on m68k machines) in terms of user friendliness.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Just to go a little further, most people do not understand the concept of "operating system". I've tried talking to people about it before, and it's weird, but and I've even had to explain to people before that there's a difference between "the system" and "an application". In other words, not all computers have Microsoft Office, because that's an application that needs to be installed. Some people don't understand the difference between "the Internet" and a web browser.
When you talk about "the system", it can be pretty hard to explain to people what an operating system is, because they don't have a very good idea of what's done by the hardware and what's software. Some people think the "My Computer" icon is somewhere in the computer, almost physically, and they don't have a very good concept of how it can go away. Hell, in the early days of my desktop support, I had to explain to a couple people that "that box" was the computer, and without it "the computer" (i.e. the monitor) won't work.
I know it's sounds crazy to people here, but lots of people don't know and don't care. At most, they know how to use a computer for the things they want to use it for. At long as they can do that without too much hassle, you can give them any OS you want.