There's a lot of guesswork here about what providers may or may not be doing; are there any applications for actually testing ISPs? Such testing apps would discover traffic shaping, port filtering, connectivity, and other traffic modifications by the ISP. Something like a bandwidth tester on steroids.
If producing a good or service requires less input--fewer man hours, less energy, less raw materials--that's a good thing; and our free market economy is supposed to achieve exactly that.
In a few years, many small and medium sized businesses will probably be able to get by without IT staff altogether; they'll be using mostly web-based services and outsourced remote management.
Of course, this means that a lot of IT people will need to find new jobs. So what? IT itself eliminated many jobs: typists, secretaries, customer service, filing clerks, mail handlers, etc. IT professionals really have even less business complaining about this than other professions.
You know, there is no point in responding to all the bullshit you are writing about Gtk+, X11, or the FSF. You're wrong, you're misrepresenting the facts, and you're obviously some kind of corporate Troll Tech shill.
Pratt asks: "How did an argument containing such an elementary fallacy get through the filter?"
Proofs containing elementary errors are published all the time. Peer review is, and always has been, only a way of weeding out some percentage of bad submissions. Peer review that is strict enough to ensure that only correct papers get published would also result in the rejection of many good papers. In fact, some good papers that have advanced science have contained elementary errors.
And people who sit in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Looking through Pratt's publication list, the first two papers I came across on a topic that I know a lot about should never have passed peer review.
Everybody who publishes makes elementary mistakes and makes a fool of himself sometimes; one should respond kindly and gracefully.
GTK development is very slow in comparison to Qt because they have far less resources. You can't claim that GTK is the equivalent of Qt, it is far less featurefull.
You're woefully out of touch; the days where Qt was technically superior to Gtk+ are long over. These days, Gtk+ is a better and more versatile toolkit.
Since when does Qt have anything to do with people's ability to choose between Qt, GTK, Motif, TCL, Java Swing, SWT, or any of the other ways to make applications?
So, you basically admit that it would be bad if Qt became the primary toolkit on Linux. I'm glad we agree.
if you go by them, Qt should be GPL+linking exception
That is incredibly wrong. The FSF recommends against using the LGPL.
You're confusing the GPL+linking exception with the LGPL. Please inform yourself about free software licenses before you start making claims about them.
Furthermore, yes, the FSF prefers the GPL unless other licenses would be more conducive to the goals of free software. And the FSF prefers the GPL, they don't prefer GPL+commercial.
Firstly, commercial developers can use GPL. Commercial is not proprietary.
Well, so why does Troll Tech use dual licensing then? Let Troll Tech make Qt GPL-only and see how far they get.
The same is possible with Qt. You can fork Qt and compete with Trolltech if you like. Of course that would be very difficult, but it is possible and legal.
So we agree, then: forking Qt is only a theoretical possibility.
They ditched X11 because it isn't suited to low performance devices like phones. X11 is just now barely starting to become a feasible option
X11 historically has run on machines with as little as 1Mbyte of memory and 10MHz processors. There is no performance reason whatsoever not to use X11 on cell phones. Troll Tech knows this, so their claims to the contrary are nothing more than deliberate lies.
And secondly, why is it a problem that you can't realistically screw over Trolltech with their own product?
I don't consider forking an open source project "screwing" the original developers. Quite to the contrary: I think Troll Tech has been screwing open source developers for a decade.
Actually the statement about Nyquist's theorem is poppycock. This a mathematical fact, not some weird subjective result open to interpretation.
No, but its application is certainly not trivial since Nyquist's theorem requires specific conditions to be met and makes specific predictions. In practice, Nyquist's theorem ends up being little more than a rule of thumb for designing audio signal processing systems.
Isn't that an argument for dual-licensing, not against? If Trolltech is getting developers of proprietary software to fund the development of Free code
Such funding mechanisms are evidently not needed, since other toolkits have no problem getting funded without dual licensing.
Furthermore, if KDE and Qt were to become the standard environments on Linux, given Troll Tech's pricing, GUI development on Linux for commercial developers would be much more expensive than on Macintosh or Windows. This hurts the adoption of open source software rather than help it.
isn't that a win for Free as in Stallman?
No. Stallman has laid out his criteria for how to choose a license on his web site, and if you go by them, Qt should be GPL+linking exception; GPL+commercial is a bad license choice for Qt because it hurts free software by making it less attractive for large numbers of commercial developers to support free platforms.
In other words, Novell seems to me to control Mono like Trolltech controls Qt
The nature of the Mono project and its license permit people to develop commercial software with it and for it without paying Novell. The Mono licenses also make it feasible to fork Mono and compete with Novell.
Developers discontent with the FSF gcc team formed EGCS [...] Problem solved. This is the sort of thing projects run into when respected maintainers can't handle it anymore; the same thing happened to XFree86 (which doesn't require copyright reassignment).
Yes, and the same thing is not possible with Qt; if I fork Qt and build up a big developer base around it, I can't possibly compete with Troll Tech because my version, no matter how good it may be, wouldn't be usable by commercial developers.
What does a developer lose in Trolltech's model compared to GNOME's or whatever you think is preferable? What does a user lose?
Troll Tech makes decisions that are in their best business interest, not decisions that are in the best interests of users or developers. For example, for mobile GUIs, Troll Tech ditched X11 and created an embedded version of Qt that takes over the entire screen, thereby ensuring that no toolkit can compete with them.
True. So does the FSF, for several of their projects, such as gcc.
Correct, and that fact has caused problems for gcc over the years. Qt's problems are worse because it is dual-licensed by its owner and because it is a library (rather than a tool).
Mono, however, does not use any proprietary code, so none of those concerns apply.
You don't need to contribute back to Trolltech if the possibility of someone using your code under a non-GPL licence bothers you; the GPL lets you fork Qt any time you please.
You are a hypocrite; you know full well that a GPL-only version of Qt would not be sustainable.
Definition of proprietary: "Exclusively owned; private". None of which applies to Qt under the GPL. QED, you are a moron.
Qt is exclusively owned by Troll Tech. Troll Tech requires copyright assignment for contribution.
Mono is most definitely using a proprietary Microsoft interface. It's not code, but that makes it even MORE limiting than even access to proprietary code.
Mono is using no Microsoft-proprietary code, nor does it rely on Microsoft-proprietary interfaces.
If you choose to, you can use Microsoft proprietary interfaces from Mono, just like you can from any other language; few people do, and the corresponding packages aren't even installed by default in distributions like Ubuntu.
Go shill/troll/be a retard elsewhere
It's the KDE promoters that are the shills, trolls, and retards. They almost screwed the Linux desktop once by falling for Troll Tech's license, and now they are trying to screw the Linux world once more with their "but-it's-also-GPL-so-it's-good" idiocy and their "C++-is-good-enough" attitude. I don't care much whether Gnome or Mono win in the long term, but if KDE wins, the Linux desktop is dead, both technologically and commercially.
Your UNIX history is wrong, but that doesn't even matter.
and on the other hand we have a set of APIs that are actively controlled by a company that has a history of using submarine patents, and who is currently attempting to monetize them... with some success.
Mono applications on Linux only use the ECMA APIs, which are not covered by any patents and which are explicitly open. There is no reason whatsoever not to use them.
If you can't see there is a difference there you're deliberately not looking at it.
Sounds to me like you have some stake in making Mono look bad.
Miguel has stated why he likes OOXML: it's easy to take an existing Microsoft Word reader/writer and turn it into an OOXML reader/writer, because the file structures are so similar. That makes transitioning existing Microsoft-compatible software to OOXML much easier than transitioning to ODF.
That's a reasonable position. I still think it's wrong.
The purpose of an XML document format is to enable other people to do interesting things with the format, not to make life easy for the few people porting existing Microsoft Word compatible software. Furthermore, open source projects need to support ODF anyway because ODF is here and it's here to stay.
where he pushed the transition of Linux developers to a Microsoft technology for no reason.
There are excellent reasons to push Mono; in the long term, Linux needs something better than C/C++.
he spends more time pushing for more Microsoft stuff
And for the last two decades, people were pushing AT&T stuff, some of it patented. Free software has always skirted around patent mine fields of big corporations; it has to, there is no other way of writing useful free software. So far, there is no indication that there is any more risk to Mono from Microsoft than there was to Linux from AT&T.
Parent stated that all of Microsoft's web apps were abysmal failures.
GGP was talking about web app technologies (it was mis-stated as "web apps" but should have been clear from context), and how they were either failures or clones. OWA is just a clone of other people's technologies.
MS build XmlHttpRequest into IE for OWA (probably not exclusively, but to my knowledge it was the main reason they did it), so Google Maps, Youtube, the Firehose, Discussion2 and more or less everything else that calls itself "web app" is partially based on Microsoft's ingenuity. Sounds weird, is kinda true.
No, it's not true. Asynchronous communications in web apps predates XmlHttpRequest and people made do without it because most browsers didn't support it. The only thing Microsoft contributed is that they picked a method name and implemented it, in their usual proprietary way. There is no "ingenuity" there, and, in fact, Microsoft missed the boat on web apps, as usual.
Microsoft simply is not a driver of web applications technologies; web applications technologies are largely developed by smart little startups in Silicon Valley, and eventually they get adopted by companies like Microsoft.
Adobe is not going to ship Photoshop through a distro repository until someone like Amazon is doing their own distro with support for credit card payments in AZpkg,
Adobe could easily replace their current distribution with a repository with no change in their copy protection, payment, or other models. And, as a bonus, they'd get much easier software upgrades and maintenance. The reason they don't is simply that they haven't ported any of their for-pay software to Linux.
Keep playing with your toys, and leave discussions about professional imaging and IT to people who actually know something about it, OK?
You mean, both are jumping over a cliff and KDE is falling a bit faster?
With Gnome and Microsoft, the relationship is that Miguel has a bit too much appreciation for Microsoft's crap. With KDE and Troll Tech, parts of KDE are owned by Troll Tech. Thanks, even in terms of software freedom, I'll stick with Gnome until something better comes along.
That's wrong. If you commit patent infringement, of course, you have to pay damages; willful infringement just triples them.
If you're a non-commercial open source developer we won't sue you if you use anything in it, but that's not going to stop us from using your package to beat up on any distros that use it, and you better not make any money from it yourself."
If it's patented, distros won't incorporate it. And if you manage to sneak a patented algorithm into the distro without their knowledge, they won't be guilty of willful infringement (and may even hold you liable).
The only reason this isn't an issue on Linux is that there isn't any ecosystem of commercial software...
If you want to install commercial software, you subscribe to it through the package manager, just like anything else.
And it's that commercial ecosystem that really makes OSX worthwhile...
Maybe that's true for a small number of people who need specialty apps. Almost all the commercial apps I have ever bought for OS X turned out to be either useless or were there to fill in some functionality that is included for free in recent Linux distributions.
In different words, commercial software becomes less and less of a reason to choose OS X.
I have a Mac; I speak from experience. Sounds like the problem is that you aren't really using your Mac very much (if you have one at all).
Since the majority of OS X applications are really nothing more than special folders
I wasn't talking just about applications, I was talking about preference panes, drivers, codecs, bundles, and all that other stuff.
you can drag and drop them to the new system as fast as you can copy them
Yes, after you find the latest version on some web site, maybe figure out how to log into the web site, download it, figure out how to unpack it (zip, dmg, other), find the thing you actually need to install, figure out how to install it, and then sit through some wizard, either during install or next time you start the application or both.
you don't spend hours reinstalling apps off of CD's and looking for obtuse serial numbers.
Funny, I distinctly remember using "obtuse serial numbers" for several of the i-apps and Microsoft Office.
Are you sure you have ever even used a Mac?
Hell Linux you can do something similar most of the time.
There is no comparison: installing software on Linux is much easier.
In other words, it changes the executable code in memory of a running application. Gee, what are the odds that changing the underlying application would cause such a module to *not* wreak havoc on a system?
Redefining the "minimize window action" or "customizing the standard Apple menu" should not require "moifying the executable code of a running application".
The fact that on OS X, utilities like APE have to do this is indicative of bad underlying software design.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a lot of guesswork here about what providers may or may not be doing; are there any applications for actually testing ISPs? Such testing apps would discover traffic shaping, port filtering, connectivity, and other traffic modifications by the ISP. Something like a bandwidth tester on steroids.
If producing a good or service requires less input--fewer man hours, less energy, less raw materials--that's a good thing; and our free market economy is supposed to achieve exactly that.
In a few years, many small and medium sized businesses will probably be able to get by without IT staff altogether; they'll be using mostly web-based services and outsourced remote management.
Of course, this means that a lot of IT people will need to find new jobs. So what? IT itself eliminated many jobs: typists, secretaries, customer service, filing clerks, mail handlers, etc. IT professionals really have even less business complaining about this than other professions.
You know, there is no point in responding to all the bullshit you are writing about Gtk+, X11, or the FSF. You're wrong, you're misrepresenting the facts, and you're obviously some kind of corporate Troll Tech shill.
Pratt asks: "How did an argument containing such an elementary fallacy get through
the filter?"
Proofs containing elementary errors are published all the time. Peer review is, and always has been, only a way of weeding out some percentage of bad submissions. Peer review that is strict enough to ensure that only correct papers get published would also result in the rejection of many good papers. In fact, some good papers that have advanced science have contained elementary errors.
And people who sit in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Looking through Pratt's publication list, the first two papers I came across on a topic that I know a lot about should never have passed peer review.
Everybody who publishes makes elementary mistakes and makes a fool of himself sometimes; one should respond kindly and gracefully.
You're woefully out of touch; the days where Qt was technically superior to Gtk+ are long over. These days, Gtk+ is a better and more versatile toolkit.
Since when does Qt have anything to do with people's ability to choose between Qt, GTK, Motif, TCL, Java Swing, SWT, or any of the other ways to make applications?
So, you basically admit that it would be bad if Qt became the primary toolkit on Linux. I'm glad we agree.
That is incredibly wrong. The FSF recommends against using the LGPL.
You're confusing the GPL+linking exception with the LGPL. Please inform yourself about free software licenses before you start making claims about them.
Furthermore, yes, the FSF prefers the GPL unless other licenses would be more conducive to the goals of free software. And the FSF prefers the GPL, they don't prefer GPL+commercial.
Firstly, commercial developers can use GPL. Commercial is not proprietary.
Well, so why does Troll Tech use dual licensing then? Let Troll Tech make Qt GPL-only and see how far they get.
The same is possible with Qt. You can fork Qt and compete with Trolltech if you like. Of course that would be very difficult, but it is possible and legal.
So we agree, then: forking Qt is only a theoretical possibility.
They ditched X11 because it isn't suited to low performance devices like phones. X11 is just now barely starting to become a feasible option
X11 historically has run on machines with as little as 1Mbyte of memory and 10MHz processors. There is no performance reason whatsoever not to use X11 on cell phones. Troll Tech knows this, so their claims to the contrary are nothing more than deliberate lies.
And secondly, why is it a problem that you can't realistically screw over Trolltech with their own product?
I don't consider forking an open source project "screwing" the original developers. Quite to the contrary: I think Troll Tech has been screwing open source developers for a decade.
Actually the statement about Nyquist's theorem is poppycock. This a mathematical fact, not some weird subjective result open to interpretation.
No, but its application is certainly not trivial since Nyquist's theorem requires specific conditions to be met and makes specific predictions. In practice, Nyquist's theorem ends up being little more than a rule of thumb for designing audio signal processing systems.
Isn't that an argument for dual-licensing, not against? If Trolltech is getting developers of proprietary software to fund the development of Free code
Such funding mechanisms are evidently not needed, since other toolkits have no problem getting funded without dual licensing.
Furthermore, if KDE and Qt were to become the standard environments on Linux, given Troll Tech's pricing, GUI development on Linux for commercial developers would be much more expensive than on Macintosh or Windows. This hurts the adoption of open source software rather than help it.
isn't that a win for Free as in Stallman?
No. Stallman has laid out his criteria for how to choose a license on his web site, and if you go by them, Qt should be GPL+linking exception; GPL+commercial is a bad license choice for Qt because it hurts free software by making it less attractive for large numbers of commercial developers to support free platforms.
In other words, Novell seems to me to control Mono like Trolltech controls Qt
The nature of the Mono project and its license permit people to develop commercial software with it and for it without paying Novell. The Mono licenses also make it feasible to fork Mono and compete with Novell.
Developers discontent with the FSF gcc team formed EGCS [...] Problem solved. This is the sort of thing projects run into when respected maintainers can't handle it anymore; the same thing happened to XFree86 (which doesn't require copyright reassignment).
Yes, and the same thing is not possible with Qt; if I fork Qt and build up a big developer base around it, I can't possibly compete with Troll Tech because my version, no matter how good it may be, wouldn't be usable by commercial developers.
What does a developer lose in Trolltech's model compared to GNOME's or whatever you think is preferable? What does a user lose?
Troll Tech makes decisions that are in their best business interest, not decisions that are in the best interests of users or developers. For example, for mobile GUIs, Troll Tech ditched X11 and created an embedded version of Qt that takes over the entire screen, thereby ensuring that no toolkit can compete with them.
There are entire distributions for kids and schools. One of them is Edubuntu; there are many others.
Typing tutors have been available on Linux since before Windows or Macintosh even existed.
The biggest problem systems like Linux have is prejudice and ignorance from people like you.
True. So does the FSF, for several of their projects, such as gcc.
Correct, and that fact has caused problems for gcc over the years. Qt's problems are worse because it is dual-licensed by its owner and because it is a library (rather than a tool).
Mono, however, does not use any proprietary code, so none of those concerns apply.
You don't need to contribute back to Trolltech if the possibility of someone using your code under a non-GPL licence bothers you; the GPL lets you fork Qt any time you please.
You are a hypocrite; you know full well that a GPL-only version of Qt would not be sustainable.
Actually, you are either a troll or a shill.
Definition of proprietary: "Exclusively owned; private". None of which applies to Qt under the GPL. QED, you are a moron.
Qt is exclusively owned by Troll Tech. Troll Tech requires copyright assignment for contribution.
Mono is most definitely using a proprietary Microsoft interface. It's not code, but that makes it even MORE limiting than even access to proprietary code.
Mono is using no Microsoft-proprietary code, nor does it rely on Microsoft-proprietary interfaces.
If you choose to, you can use Microsoft proprietary interfaces from Mono, just like you can from any other language; few people do, and the corresponding packages aren't even installed by default in distributions like Ubuntu.
Go shill/troll/be a retard elsewhere
It's the KDE promoters that are the shills, trolls, and retards. They almost screwed the Linux desktop once by falling for Troll Tech's license, and now they are trying to screw the Linux world once more with their "but-it's-also-GPL-so-it's-good" idiocy and their "C++-is-good-enough" attitude. I don't care much whether Gnome or Mono win in the long term, but if KDE wins, the Linux desktop is dead, both technologically and commercially.
Your UNIX history is wrong, but that doesn't even matter.
and on the other hand we have a set of APIs that are actively controlled by a company that has a history of using submarine patents, and who is currently attempting to monetize them... with some success.
Mono applications on Linux only use the ECMA APIs, which are not covered by any patents and which are explicitly open. There is no reason whatsoever not to use them.
If you can't see there is a difference there you're deliberately not looking at it.
Sounds to me like you have some stake in making Mono look bad.
Python is a nice language but no replacement for Mono. Java is a disaster and hardly used on the Linux desktop.
Trolltech releases their code under GPL.
Of course they do. But their code is still proprietary, i.e., owned and controlled by Troll Tech. And that proprietary code is incorporated into KDE.
Last time I checked, Microsoft didn't.
Gnome isn't using proprietary Microsoft code.
KDE uses Trolltech's Qt toolkit that is LICENSED UNDER THE GPL and (in version 4)
Yes, Qt is licensed under the GPL; however, it is owned by Troll Tech.
(unless you're interested in a proprietary license, you can buy one from them too)
See, you understand yourself that the software is proprietary, you simply try to pretend that it isn't.
People say things like "it's Apple's right" and "good for them". Of course, it's Apple's right to do those deals.
Nevertheless, where do you think this money is coming from? Do you think that AT&T is giving that to Apple because they are such good buddies?
No, you are paying for it one way or another (e.g., by paying a premium for their sluggish EDGE service).
Miguel has stated why he likes OOXML: it's easy to take an existing Microsoft Word reader/writer and turn it into an OOXML reader/writer, because the file structures are so similar. That makes transitioning existing Microsoft-compatible software to OOXML much easier than transitioning to ODF.
That's a reasonable position. I still think it's wrong.
The purpose of an XML document format is to enable other people to do interesting things with the format, not to make life easy for the few people porting existing Microsoft Word compatible software. Furthermore, open source projects need to support ODF anyway because ODF is here and it's here to stay.
where he pushed the transition of Linux developers to a Microsoft technology for no reason.
There are excellent reasons to push Mono; in the long term, Linux needs something better than C/C++.
he spends more time pushing for more Microsoft stuff
And for the last two decades, people were pushing AT&T stuff, some of it patented. Free software has always skirted around patent mine fields of big corporations; it has to, there is no other way of writing useful free software. So far, there is no indication that there is any more risk to Mono from Microsoft than there was to Linux from AT&T.
Parent stated that all of Microsoft's web apps were abysmal failures.
GGP was talking about web app technologies (it was mis-stated as "web apps" but should have been clear from context), and how they were either failures or clones. OWA is just a clone of other people's technologies.
MS build XmlHttpRequest into IE for OWA (probably not exclusively, but to my knowledge it was the main reason they did it), so Google Maps, Youtube, the Firehose, Discussion2 and more or less everything else that calls itself "web app" is partially based on Microsoft's ingenuity. Sounds weird, is kinda true.
No, it's not true. Asynchronous communications in web apps predates XmlHttpRequest and people made do without it because most browsers didn't support it. The only thing Microsoft contributed is that they picked a method name and implemented it, in their usual proprietary way. There is no "ingenuity" there, and, in fact, Microsoft missed the boat on web apps, as usual.
Microsoft simply is not a driver of web applications technologies; web applications technologies are largely developed by smart little startups in Silicon Valley, and eventually they get adopted by companies like Microsoft.
Adobe is not going to ship Photoshop through a distro repository until someone like Amazon is doing their own distro with support for credit card payments in AZpkg,
Adobe could easily replace their current distribution with a repository with no change in their copy protection, payment, or other models. And, as a bonus, they'd get much easier software upgrades and maintenance. The reason they don't is simply that they haven't ported any of their for-pay software to Linux.
Keep playing with your toys, and leave discussions about professional imaging and IT to people who actually know something about it, OK?
I think KDE is pulling away from gnome anywhere.
You mean, both are jumping over a cliff and KDE is falling a bit faster?
With Gnome and Microsoft, the relationship is that Miguel has a bit too much appreciation for Microsoft's crap. With KDE and Troll Tech, parts of KDE are owned by Troll Tech. Thanks, even in terms of software freedom, I'll stick with Gnome until something better comes along.
There's no damages without willful infringement.
That's wrong. If you commit patent infringement, of course, you have to pay damages; willful infringement just triples them.
If you're a non-commercial open source developer we won't sue you if you use anything in it, but that's not going to stop us from using your package to beat up on any distros that use it, and you better not make any money from it yourself."
If it's patented, distros won't incorporate it. And if you manage to sneak a patented algorithm into the distro without their knowledge, they won't be guilty of willful infringement (and may even hold you liable).
no, it's reflective of the fact that Apple doesn't provide any APIs for accomplishing those tasks.
That is the same thing in this case.
But I'm sure the code that MS programmers work on is reasonably modular
No, it's not; both Apple and Microsoft suffer from the same problem.
The only reason this isn't an issue on Linux is that there isn't any ecosystem of commercial software...
If you want to install commercial software, you subscribe to it through the package manager, just like anything else.
And it's that commercial ecosystem that really makes OSX worthwhile...
Maybe that's true for a small number of people who need specialty apps. Almost all the commercial apps I have ever bought for OS X turned out to be either useless or were there to fill in some functionality that is included for free in recent Linux distributions.
In different words, commercial software becomes less and less of a reason to choose OS X.
go get a Mac and learn the easy way of life.
I have a Mac; I speak from experience. Sounds like the problem is that you aren't really using your Mac very much (if you have one at all).
Since the majority of OS X applications are really nothing more than special folders
I wasn't talking just about applications, I was talking about preference panes, drivers, codecs, bundles, and all that other stuff.
you can drag and drop them to the new system as fast as you can copy them
Yes, after you find the latest version on some web site, maybe figure out how to log into the web site, download it, figure out how to unpack it (zip, dmg, other), find the thing you actually need to install, figure out how to install it, and then sit through some wizard, either during install or next time you start the application or both.
you don't spend hours reinstalling apps off of CD's and looking for obtuse serial numbers.
Funny, I distinctly remember using "obtuse serial numbers" for several of the i-apps and Microsoft Office.
Are you sure you have ever even used a Mac?
Hell Linux you can do something similar most of the time.
There is no comparison: installing software on Linux is much easier.
In other words, it changes the executable code in memory of a running application. Gee, what are the odds that changing the underlying application would cause such a module to *not* wreak havoc on a system?
Redefining the "minimize window action" or "customizing the standard Apple menu" should not require "moifying the executable code of a running application".
The fact that on OS X, utilities like APE have to do this is indicative of bad underlying software design.