By forcing Apple to issue updates specifically disable their device, Palm is capitalizing on the media hype maelstrom that is lavished on Apple, keeping the name "Pre" on the lips of people who would normally only ever talk about the iPhone. So when the media covers this "war", they are in effect establishing the idea of comparability between the products that would have been hard to get through had they just gone with traditional advertising and promotions. Between this and the new Microsoft ads, it is interesting to see Apple's competitors finally starting to ratchet up their competition with a brilliant marketing company.
It's great that Apple gives a little back to the command line code they lifted wholesale from NetBSD, but why no iTunes for NetBSD users? Why no Quicktime for NetBSD users? And why is it that there is this absolutely HUGE development community around OS X, but almost nothing that comes out of is ever written portably? The mailing lists for long standing Linux and BSD Open Source projects everywhere are full of requests to port code to OS X. The vast majority of projects are able to satisfy those requests because, as I pointed out, OS X is designed as a roach motel for code: Open Source checks in, but it doesn't check out. By comparison, the list of *novel* Open Source desktop software written originally on OS X and ported to Linux or BSD can be counted on one hand. Let's see, there's Transmission, and... ?
Apple took good advantage of the portability and generous licensing of open source software and based huge swaths of OS X on long established projects such as BSD and Mach. Then by grafting on a tightly controlled series of entirely proprietary application interfaces, they were able to ensure that while code flows easily and readily from Linux and FreeBSD to OS X, it is almost impossible for them to flow back. That is why you see so few truly cross platform open source desktop applications that originated on OS X but also run on other platforms. It also explains the plethora of OS X-only forks of popular open source applications such as Firefox and OpenOffice.
Slashdot Mirror
By forcing Apple to issue updates specifically disable their device, Palm is capitalizing on the media hype maelstrom that is lavished on Apple, keeping the name "Pre" on the lips of people who would normally only ever talk about the iPhone. So when the media covers this "war", they are in effect establishing the idea of comparability between the products that would have been hard to get through had they just gone with traditional advertising and promotions. Between this and the new Microsoft ads, it is interesting to see Apple's competitors finally starting to ratchet up their competition with a brilliant marketing company.
It's great that Apple gives a little back to the command line code they lifted wholesale from NetBSD, but why no iTunes for NetBSD users? Why no Quicktime for NetBSD users? And why is it that there is this absolutely HUGE development community around OS X, but almost nothing that comes out of is ever written portably? The mailing lists for long standing Linux and BSD Open Source projects everywhere are full of requests to port code to OS X. The vast majority of projects are able to satisfy those requests because, as I pointed out, OS X is designed as a roach motel for code: Open Source checks in, but it doesn't check out. By comparison, the list of *novel* Open Source desktop software written originally on OS X and ported to Linux or BSD can be counted on one hand. Let's see, there's Transmission, and ... ?
Apple took good advantage of the portability and generous licensing of open source software and based huge swaths of OS X on long established projects such as BSD and Mach. Then by grafting on a tightly controlled series of entirely proprietary application interfaces, they were able to ensure that while code flows easily and readily from Linux and FreeBSD to OS X, it is almost impossible for them to flow back. That is why you see so few truly cross platform open source desktop applications that originated on OS X but also run on other platforms. It also explains the plethora of OS X-only forks of popular open source applications such as Firefox and OpenOffice.