last time I checked, Apple users weren't using commodity parts like PCs do for one thing, so they'd not be made on the same assembly line.
Most major components are commodity items and are made on the same assembly lines. And the same factories that produce PCs produce Apples. Honest to God. Straight Up. The Real Deal. (etc) Apple outsources manufacture of its machines, and, trust me, there are no businessmen in South East Asia who think that specialising in consumer-grade PowerPC hardware is a great way to become profitable.
This is one reason why Apple's machines have been steadily more standards compliant over the last few years. Remember Apple's switch from SCSI to IDE/Firewire (and how, really, this was a switch to IDE)? Don't just think it was because they wanted cheaper disk drives, it also enabled use of standard controller parts and designs, and a shift towards more and more standard motherboards. That particular shift, of course, hasn't been as dramatic as it could have been with so much stuff being integrated into single chips these days, but don't think it didn't make a difference.
Open your Mac and you'll find dozens of components you could find in any low budget (or high budget, there's not a lot of difference save for the marketing and the quantities of RAM, bus speed, etc) PC. Other than the motherboard itself, the PowerPC, and two or three custom IBM/Motorola/Apple ASICs, pretty much everything in there, from the diodes to the disk drives, were made for everyone, not just Apple.
I'm 90% convinced you're wrong about the 5.25" floppy, IIRC Wozniak's main claim to fame with that was that he redesigned the controller to be much, much, cheaper. 5.25" were invented and put on the market in 1976. It's hard to believe that nobody bought them until after Wozniak put together a controller card for a computer released in 1977...
Oh yeah, except Apple uses REAL video chipsets and separate RAM even in their low-end systems, while low-end PCs have shared video memory and this "Intel Extreme" graphics nonsense that is a far cry short of anything I'd consider extreme. I can't quite see how that's generic.
You could also throw in how Apple produces machines that white and silver, and how they all have real Firewire ports, and it'd be just as irrelevent. I said hardware quality! I'm very glad Apple includes accelerated video chipsets with all of their machines these days, but do you think it makes a blind bit of difference when it comes to the reliability of the machine? (And if the complaint was that video on Macs isn't generic, video is almost never generic, any more than CPUs are generic)
I have yet to see this and I deal with a family who buys cheap PCs from Wal-mart [aside from my mother, who bought herself a Dell for some ungodly reason]. The PCs are all dead/dying and being replaced, yet again with fucking Wal-mart purchased PCs. A Mac that I got from my campus newspaper lab after it had been replaced was made well before any of those machines, and it is still working beautifully
All I can say is my personal experience contradicts this. The Microtel machine I mentioned earlier remains rock solid to this day and has gone from being a system intended for experimenting with to the GNU/Linux box in my household. The Macs... well, I remain amazed at what Apple users put up with without considering it to be beyond the pale.
I've also simply not had the experience many people claim to have had where they have to replace PCs every two years. Further, most people I've talked to who've claimed this have turned out to have had issues more related to spyware or just Windows DLL hell than any issue with hardware quality (which is what the discussion is about, after all.) A simple re-install of Windows, 90% of the time, is enough to make that five year old PC work like new. A "hardware problem", in my PC experience, means "a PC whose memory can't be upgraded beyond 16Mb", not "a PC that sporadically crashes regardless of what software it's running."
I think the nearest thing I have to a solid Mac in my collection (there are five) is a very old Beige PowerMac G3, and occasionally it will not reboot. I'm fortunate the one I use at work seems generally ok these days.
And that's the fundamental thing: I'm sure Apple fans will jump in and argue that Macs are more reliable anyway because they use OS X and Windows doesn't cut it, etc, and, for now, they're probably right. But the discussion was about hardware quality, and, from experience, I'm telling you, it's just not true Apple makes higher quality hardware than anyone else. Five Macs and a multitude of PCs has taught me that at least. I've had funky Thinkpads and a funky PowerBook. I've had nasty ASUS motherboards and Mac desktops that will not boot up on the first go or that crash unexpectedly.
I love OS X. I think Macs look fairly elegant. I think it's absurd to expect machines being spat out from the same assembly lines with the same quality control people from companies that may not care about their customer's reputations but certainly care about their own to differ significantly in quality control simply because one customer has Apple logos on their products and the others may end up anywhere.
Sure, Bill Gates brought BASIC to this thing, but I dare you to try running a spreadsheet where all of your results come back as an array of blinking lights.
The original comparison was with the Apple I, which the GGP argued was the first "PC" (though I'd counter this and say PC != Personal Computer, for a long time PC has been associated with IBM's implementation and its clones. But, whatever, that's semantics, even if it's kind of the point. Who cares, right? Not me. No no no. BTW does anal retentive have a hyphen in it? I've always wanted to know. I lay awake worrying about that kind of thing you know), and while the I had, at least, the benefit of video output, it lacked a keyboard (you had to buy one with particular serial characteristics, and it was pretty much non-functional without one), and the display was a bizarre buffered thing which, functionally, was identical to a scrolling terminal. You might, in some ways, have been better off with a printer.
I won't even bother to go into how wrong you are about Apple being "rarely first at anything," as a simple Google search will reveal the inaccuracy of that statement.
I think it's safe to say you don't actually know of any examples other than the ones mentioned, otherwise you'd quote them, rather than hurling insults without justification. In terms of major steps forward, the first colour computer, and the first mass market computer with a WIMP GUI, are the only two I can think of. I'm sure you can think of minor things they've done first, but if we get to that level, we can all think of a million and one minor things they didn't do first. What, at the same level as colour and WIMPs, are you thinking of?
The $200 Microtel ("Wal*Mart") PC I bought to just play with occasionally turned out to be a completely solid, reliable, nice machine. It's a little underpowered, adding a PCI nVidea graphics card made a massive difference (despite the native graphics chipset being AGP), but it's actually a good machine.
Every Mac I've ever bought has had a host of quirks, varying from problems getting them to boot (I mean, not even getting as far as the big gray Apple) to heat related crashes.
Please, can we put the "cheap PCs are made from second grade parts and design when Apple uses quality parts and design" myth to rest? I'm sure that in practice, Apple is comparable, crash-for-crash, with Dell or HP, and I've simply had poor experiences, but I don't seriously believe the chips or manufacturing they use is significantly higher in quality than anyone else's, and they have a history of having major design issues in many of their systems.
When you buy Apple, you're buying nice design, not solid design. You're buying OS X, and an elegant container. You're buying a clean IBM POWER-inspired PowerPC, not a messy legacy-obsessed 8008 based Pentium. You're buying something that includes the best features of modern computing that's not afraid to drop the legacy features of the embarassing past.
But you're also buying a machine the majority of whose parts came from the same factories, the same QA processes, the same materials, and often the same assembly lines and crates, as your generic PC, whether it be from Dell or Microtel. You're buying from a hardware manufacturer that has regularly overclocked its CPUs through necessity to close the gap between what's manufactured for it and what the market demands. You're buying from a company that has to design its own motherboards and can't simply choose the most reliable off-the-shelf design from the competitive market that exists in the PC industry.
For close to the same price you can get a similar performance system but it comes with a 17" CRT monitor, but not with firewire.
Similar performance. You get a monitor with Wal*Mart which is probably something you already have. You get a version of GNU/Linux, be it Linspire or whateverthatotherwindowslikeone is, and whatever software you get with that.
You don't, however, get Mac OS X. You can get everything that came with the distro that works on the Wal*Mart box for OS X (in practice), but you can't get many of the software tools from the OS X box on the Wal*Mart box.
Seriously, I don't think it's much of a contest either, the Mac "wins" that particular round for most people. There are a handful who will want the Wal*Mart box because they're big time GNU/Linux users, or because they intend to install a copy of Windows on it. And maybe if you're on an ultra-tight budget and really are one of the 7% of people in the US who do not have a spare VGA monitor floating around, it'll be fractionally cheaper to buy it as an entry level system.
I don't think the Wal*Mart comparison, myself, makes Wal*Mart PCs look any better. Indeed, I have my doubts about Apple pricing this at $500, if it even exists, for precisely this reason. They've never competed at such a low price before.
Altair's 8800 was "first" in that respect. Apple came up with some good, popular, systems early in the market, but it was rarely first at anything. I think their two major "first"s were the first computer to support colour graphics, the Apple II, and the first mass market machine to support a WIMP GUI, the Macintosh (the Lisa, the the Star machines that preceeded that and inspired it somewhat, were not mass market)
You know, the Macs Apple does make aren't exactly the world's most reliable computers either. I've had a variety of Macs in my life, and each has had its little "quirks". The most "reliable" one of the bunch is probably the old B&W PowerMac G3 on my desk right now, and it has its little issues of occasionally not booting at all in a way I've never seen from any PC I've owned. My PowerBook is great unless it gets warm enough to have to run the fans, then the clock starts ticking and I know it's going to crash - not right away perhaps, but it will crash.
And, truth be told, I've bought $200 PCs (yes, I got a Wal*Mart box for playing around with) that were fine - completely solid, yet made from entirely generic components.
None of which is surprising. Apple makes machines using largely generic components, usually built (the entire machines, not just the components) by the same group of far eastern manufacturers who regularly churn out PCs, PCs that get badged by everyone from Dell to Microtel. It's not as if Apple is going through each chip giving it some quality test that the other manufacturers aren't, or that Apple is saying "Ok, we're only buying from QualChipCo because our experience with CrapFabInc was terrible" while Dell says "Hey, CrapFabInc may make unreliable chips, but who cares when they're 1c cheaper!"
I think there's a little too much snobbery in Apple enthusiast circles. Yes, you're paying a premium for Apple hardware, but that money is going into neat looking and feeling design and a quality operating system, not in hardware quality. Hardware quality is roughly the same with Apple as it is with everyone else. And some "cheap" companies seem to do better, more solid, more reliable, PCs - in my experience - than Apple anyway.
Nope, while the FSF has "defined free software", this doesn't mean they don't manage projects and occasionally inflict pain on people who do not follow particular policies that have nothing to do with free software. This has little to do with the origins of either movement.
The history of the whole XEmacs vs GNU EMACS thing is a little absurd anyway. RMS was unhappy with the idea of XEmacs forking because he felt that legally it would be easier for the FSF to protect the project if the FSF owned the copyright to the entire thing. He tried to persuade the XEmacs people of this, and to get them to switch over the copyrights for the code they'd contributed to the forks. The XEmacs people refused, so GNU EMACS and XEmacs went their seperate ways.
I'm sure a lot of people want to use this as evidence that RMS is an eye-swiveling loony, but actually, again, this was a request made, orignally, for practical reasons. I don't necessarily blame the XEmacs people for forking, and think the fact it got petty from there on is largely the fault of RMS.
So they're fighting over documentation now? That's not right. If what you're saying is true, then RMS needs a little reminder of what Free Software is. He's made the point, time and time again, that Free Software isn't Free unless the documentation is too.
Please be aware that the phrase "free software" means something other than "free" software. "Free software" was the original term used by the FSF to describe software where the user has certain rights that include the ability to modify and redistribute. The phrase in the write-up refers to this, not freeware. The examples you list are not "Free software", at least, not within the context of this article.
That's why this is a matter of politics. To those who proposed "Open Source", the position at the time was that "Open Source" was a more marketing friendly term. However, ironically, given the critics, Open Source actually has a lot of additional political baggage over Free Software, and it could be argued that this is precisely because of the reason for its creation, where much of the complaining was that "Free Software", as then expounded by RMS and others, was "too political" - ie not populist enough.
To sell it, Open Source was touted as, essentially, a development model, not merely a set of rights. Organizations are encouraged to contribute to Free Software, in the knowledge that the more people who get involved, the better it is for everyone. The GPL is good for Open Source because it promotes a level playing field, where an organization can feel that it can contribute without the risk of some rival organization taking the code and using it against them - any improvements the rival makes will be accessable to the original. Make no mistake, the model was advertised as having a price, that in order to participate and take advantage of the model, the core software would have to give all those involved access, but essentially, that was the difference.
Free Software, by comparison, is merely the set of rights. Nothing more. And has always only meant the set of rights. Nobody has ever proposed free software was a model.
In other words, Open Source is project centric. Free Software is user centric. They may both rely upon the same thing, but I seriously don't think they mean the same thing any more, if they ever did.
Personally, I'm not overly hung up on OSS. But Free Software, to me, is something I consider fairly important. I want to be able to support my stuff, even when nobody else does.
He's posted 1,068 (at the last count) postings on Slashdot. He's posted a lot today which is why the "Latest 24 of 1068 Comments" are mostly on this subject.
He may or may not be a kook, but this kind of incorrect ad-hominem doesn't exactly help rational discourse. Unfortunately, while he may have a "persecution complex", he does represent a significant minority in the US. Blame it on two things - the fact that most ordinary Americans do have pure motives when it comes to supporting their countries "foreign interventions" and are prone to confuse their wish for good with the real causes and effects of their administration's actions; and the fact that much of (not all, but a signficant amount) the criticism of the US from outside the US is obnoxious, unfair, and absurd.
I was refering to the whole operating system, not just the kernel. If I wanted to write "Linux" I'd have had to say "run xnu, Linux, nu, and the PowerPC version of ntkrnl.sys" for consistance, and I can bet 90% of Slashbots who express concerns about GNU being mentioned with Linux wouldn't have understood a word of that.
I actually meant my comment more generally, eg I don't see a reason for a system to be discounted simply because it's not a POSIX system.
Personally, I doubt I'll use ReactOS, part of my interest in GNU/Linux from the start was that I liked the whole Unix thing better than I did Windows, and there are a multitude of environments I prefer to Windows.
But good luck to them, I know a lot of people who like the way Windows works.
I didn't say opposition to an FOSS license constitutes hysteria, I said that, in the particular case of SkyOS, the SkyOS authors and supporters are hysterical in their opposition.
And they are. Sorry, but I've been flamed too often by them for saying that I, personally, don't plan to use it unless it either gets much stronger commercial backing or switches to a FOSS license. That position isn't extreme, it's practical, but according to SkyOS fans it makes me an "open source zealot".
The ironic part of this is that I compared VI to Word precisely because they're totally different applications doing completely different jobs, just as Windows Paint and The GIMP are totally unrelated and one is not a substitute for the other. That was the whole point.
So the "No, you meant eMacs" comment was dumb on so many levels. Sure, ok, it's just as valid if you say eMacs, or EMACS, but the point isn't as clear as if I compare a text editor (EMACS being more than a text editor) to a word processor.
I'd be happy with something not Unix based, as long as it's an open system - open in the sense of being open source/free software, expandable, etc. It needs to support TCP/IP, and it has to be mainstream enough to not cause massive problems with the concept of porting software. If AROS had more drivers and had memory protection, I'd be tempted by it because the UI works the way I want a computer to work.
But SkyOS isn't really it. It's a nice design, apparently, and it's got a mainstream enough design to make porting far from impossible (as this article shows), but it's proprietary (I can't make modifications to it or support myself) and it doesn't have the support of a large organization that'll be around for years.
The SkyOS fan club might want to look at Atheos. There, again, was an operating system developed by a single individual to furfill his vision. He then, for reasons unknown, dropped out of sight.
Thankfully, for Atheos users, he'd taken the precaution of GPL'ing the system. So Atheos users were able to support themselves, eventually making an official fork of the no-longer-maintained system, and continue development.
I use Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and OpenBSD. The former is proprietary but supported by a group that's not going to go away. The latter two are open and support for either's not going to go away. I have moral issues with the former, but for now, it's a good system and from a practical perspective, there's no issue with continuing to use it. SkyOS doesn't really fit as either, and past experience of pointing this out shows that, by and large, SkyOS's major online advocates are a bunch of loud-mouthed jerks who'll accuse anyone of being a free software "zealot" for pointing out the obvious (even when, as I did then and continue to do now, I said it was a choice between having major, guaranteed, commercial support or making it free software.)
So I can't really use it in the hope that if something goes wrong the SkyOS people will do the right thing and find a way to get users the support they need. I don't think they will, they're ideologically opposed to doing so. And because of that, they've created practical barriers to anyone who wants to use it for anything but the most trivial purposes.
That's ironic really, isn't it? The authors (and supporters) of SkyOS are hysterically opposed to FOSS, yet SkyOS wouldn't even be credible to them if it wasn't for the work done by the Free Software and Open Source communities to create cross platform applications that provide certain critical features.
It's a written-from-the-ground-up proprietary operating system in the Windows/MacOS tradition. Kind of like both of them, only smaller and with less support. The advantage is supposedly it's more efficient than Windows.
Personally I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole, being burnt with too many obscure proprietary systems (and some not so obscure ones that died anyway - too bad Commodore went bust before the whole "If we're dying we'll try a last minute boost and make our software open source" craze kicked in) in the formative years of my programming life, but YMMV.
It sucks to be on the receiving end of a subpoena, or any legal demand where a failure to comply has major legal consequences, when you yourself have done nothing wrong.
If AppleInsider et al are not on trial, they can't, unfortunately, plea the fifth. The fifth is a defense against self-incrimination. So, unfortunately, yes they can be compelled to reveal any evidence they may have in their possession that'll help Apple find the leaker.
Sucks, doesn't it?
And you can trust me, I'm the judge in this trial, at least the responders to this post seem to think so...;)
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Apple lawyers? I've been sitting here in my courtroom in front of a Mac lawyer (an intellectual property specialist w/64 subpoenas against AppleInsider.com) for about 20 minutes now while he attempts to read a 17 Meg server log file into the record. 20 minutes. On a different case with a dumb hick with a law degree, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this lawyer, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, while this lawyer argues his case, the Jury sits around restless. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even the court recorder is straining to keep awake as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working with Apple lawyers, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen an Apple lawyer that has made a more reasonable case than its opposition counterpart, despite the Apple lawyer's superior training. My Real Estate Attorney with an Associate's Degree from New England Tech works better than this $3,000 per hour machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that Apple has superior lawyers.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to have Apple sue them over other faster, cheaper, more stable individuals.
Ah, ok, this starts to make a little more sense now. So this is the firewall failing when the user has said "I want these resources to be accessable, but not if someone's accessing my machine via my firewall".
Slashdot Mirror
They are. "One hundred percent of your donation will go to the Red Cross."
This is one reason why Apple's machines have been steadily more standards compliant over the last few years. Remember Apple's switch from SCSI to IDE/Firewire (and how, really, this was a switch to IDE)? Don't just think it was because they wanted cheaper disk drives, it also enabled use of standard controller parts and designs, and a shift towards more and more standard motherboards. That particular shift, of course, hasn't been as dramatic as it could have been with so much stuff being integrated into single chips these days, but don't think it didn't make a difference.
Open your Mac and you'll find dozens of components you could find in any low budget (or high budget, there's not a lot of difference save for the marketing and the quantities of RAM, bus speed, etc) PC. Other than the motherboard itself, the PowerPC, and two or three custom IBM/Motorola/Apple ASICs, pretty much everything in there, from the diodes to the disk drives, were made for everyone, not just Apple.
The HP Laserjet came out in 1984, a year before the Apple Laserwriter. It was the first mass market laser printer.
I've also simply not had the experience many people claim to have had where they have to replace PCs every two years. Further, most people I've talked to who've claimed this have turned out to have had issues more related to spyware or just Windows DLL hell than any issue with hardware quality (which is what the discussion is about, after all.) A simple re-install of Windows, 90% of the time, is enough to make that five year old PC work like new. A "hardware problem", in my PC experience, means "a PC whose memory can't be upgraded beyond 16Mb", not "a PC that sporadically crashes regardless of what software it's running."
I think the nearest thing I have to a solid Mac in my collection (there are five) is a very old Beige PowerMac G3, and occasionally it will not reboot. I'm fortunate the one I use at work seems generally ok these days.
And that's the fundamental thing: I'm sure Apple fans will jump in and argue that Macs are more reliable anyway because they use OS X and Windows doesn't cut it, etc, and, for now, they're probably right. But the discussion was about hardware quality, and, from experience, I'm telling you, it's just not true Apple makes higher quality hardware than anyone else. Five Macs and a multitude of PCs has taught me that at least. I've had funky Thinkpads and a funky PowerBook. I've had nasty ASUS motherboards and Mac desktops that will not boot up on the first go or that crash unexpectedly.
I love OS X. I think Macs look fairly elegant. I think it's absurd to expect machines being spat out from the same assembly lines with the same quality control people from companies that may not care about their customer's reputations but certainly care about their own to differ significantly in quality control simply because one customer has Apple logos on their products and the others may end up anywhere.
Every Mac I've ever bought has had a host of quirks, varying from problems getting them to boot (I mean, not even getting as far as the big gray Apple) to heat related crashes.
Please, can we put the "cheap PCs are made from second grade parts and design when Apple uses quality parts and design" myth to rest? I'm sure that in practice, Apple is comparable, crash-for-crash, with Dell or HP, and I've simply had poor experiences, but I don't seriously believe the chips or manufacturing they use is significantly higher in quality than anyone else's, and they have a history of having major design issues in many of their systems.
When you buy Apple, you're buying nice design, not solid design. You're buying OS X, and an elegant container. You're buying a clean IBM POWER-inspired PowerPC, not a messy legacy-obsessed 8008 based Pentium. You're buying something that includes the best features of modern computing that's not afraid to drop the legacy features of the embarassing past.
But you're also buying a machine the majority of whose parts came from the same factories, the same QA processes, the same materials, and often the same assembly lines and crates, as your generic PC, whether it be from Dell or Microtel. You're buying from a hardware manufacturer that has regularly overclocked its CPUs through necessity to close the gap between what's manufactured for it and what the market demands. You're buying from a company that has to design its own motherboards and can't simply choose the most reliable off-the-shelf design from the competitive market that exists in the PC industry.
You don't, however, get Mac OS X. You can get everything that came with the distro that works on the Wal*Mart box for OS X (in practice), but you can't get many of the software tools from the OS X box on the Wal*Mart box.
Seriously, I don't think it's much of a contest either, the Mac "wins" that particular round for most people. There are a handful who will want the Wal*Mart box because they're big time GNU/Linux users, or because they intend to install a copy of Windows on it. And maybe if you're on an ultra-tight budget and really are one of the 7% of people in the US who do not have a spare VGA monitor floating around, it'll be fractionally cheaper to buy it as an entry level system.
I don't think the Wal*Mart comparison, myself, makes Wal*Mart PCs look any better. Indeed, I have my doubts about Apple pricing this at $500, if it even exists, for precisely this reason. They've never competed at such a low price before.
Altair's 8800 was "first" in that respect. Apple came up with some good, popular, systems early in the market, but it was rarely first at anything. I think their two major "first"s were the first computer to support colour graphics, the Apple II, and the first mass market machine to support a WIMP GUI, the Macintosh (the Lisa, the the Star machines that preceeded that and inspired it somewhat, were not mass market)
And, truth be told, I've bought $200 PCs (yes, I got a Wal*Mart box for playing around with) that were fine - completely solid, yet made from entirely generic components.
None of which is surprising. Apple makes machines using largely generic components, usually built (the entire machines, not just the components) by the same group of far eastern manufacturers who regularly churn out PCs, PCs that get badged by everyone from Dell to Microtel. It's not as if Apple is going through each chip giving it some quality test that the other manufacturers aren't, or that Apple is saying "Ok, we're only buying from QualChipCo because our experience with CrapFabInc was terrible" while Dell says "Hey, CrapFabInc may make unreliable chips, but who cares when they're 1c cheaper!"
I think there's a little too much snobbery in Apple enthusiast circles. Yes, you're paying a premium for Apple hardware, but that money is going into neat looking and feeling design and a quality operating system, not in hardware quality. Hardware quality is roughly the same with Apple as it is with everyone else. And some "cheap" companies seem to do better, more solid, more reliable, PCs - in my experience - than Apple anyway.
The history of the whole XEmacs vs GNU EMACS thing is a little absurd anyway. RMS was unhappy with the idea of XEmacs forking because he felt that legally it would be easier for the FSF to protect the project if the FSF owned the copyright to the entire thing. He tried to persuade the XEmacs people of this, and to get them to switch over the copyrights for the code they'd contributed to the forks. The XEmacs people refused, so GNU EMACS and XEmacs went their seperate ways.
I'm sure a lot of people want to use this as evidence that RMS is an eye-swiveling loony, but actually, again, this was a request made, orignally, for practical reasons. I don't necessarily blame the XEmacs people for forking, and think the fact it got petty from there on is largely the fault of RMS.
So they're fighting over documentation now? That's not right. If what you're saying is true, then RMS needs a little reminder of what Free Software is. He's made the point, time and time again, that Free Software isn't Free unless the documentation is too.
That's why this is a matter of politics. To those who proposed "Open Source", the position at the time was that "Open Source" was a more marketing friendly term. However, ironically, given the critics, Open Source actually has a lot of additional political baggage over Free Software, and it could be argued that this is precisely because of the reason for its creation, where much of the complaining was that "Free Software", as then expounded by RMS and others, was "too political" - ie not populist enough.
To sell it, Open Source was touted as, essentially, a development model, not merely a set of rights. Organizations are encouraged to contribute to Free Software, in the knowledge that the more people who get involved, the better it is for everyone. The GPL is good for Open Source because it promotes a level playing field, where an organization can feel that it can contribute without the risk of some rival organization taking the code and using it against them - any improvements the rival makes will be accessable to the original. Make no mistake, the model was advertised as having a price, that in order to participate and take advantage of the model, the core software would have to give all those involved access, but essentially, that was the difference.
Free Software, by comparison, is merely the set of rights. Nothing more. And has always only meant the set of rights. Nobody has ever proposed free software was a model.
In other words, Open Source is project centric. Free Software is user centric. They may both rely upon the same thing, but I seriously don't think they mean the same thing any more, if they ever did.
Personally, I'm not overly hung up on OSS. But Free Software, to me, is something I consider fairly important. I want to be able to support my stuff, even when nobody else does.
He may or may not be a kook, but this kind of incorrect ad-hominem doesn't exactly help rational discourse. Unfortunately, while he may have a "persecution complex", he does represent a significant minority in the US. Blame it on two things - the fact that most ordinary Americans do have pure motives when it comes to supporting their countries "foreign interventions" and are prone to confuse their wish for good with the real causes and effects of their administration's actions; and the fact that much of (not all, but a signficant amount) the criticism of the US from outside the US is obnoxious, unfair, and absurd.
I was refering to the whole operating system, not just the kernel. If I wanted to write "Linux" I'd have had to say "run xnu, Linux, nu, and the PowerPC version of ntkrnl.sys" for consistance, and I can bet 90% of Slashbots who express concerns about GNU being mentioned with Linux wouldn't have understood a word of that.
Personally, I doubt I'll use ReactOS, part of my interest in GNU/Linux from the start was that I liked the whole Unix thing better than I did Windows, and there are a multitude of environments I prefer to Windows. But good luck to them, I know a lot of people who like the way Windows works.
And they are. Sorry, but I've been flamed too often by them for saying that I, personally, don't plan to use it unless it either gets much stronger commercial backing or switches to a FOSS license. That position isn't extreme, it's practical, but according to SkyOS fans it makes me an "open source zealot".
And stop trying to be clever. Everyone, including the GP, knows exactly what the GP meant when the word "theft" was used.
So the "No, you meant eMacs" comment was dumb on so many levels. Sure, ok, it's just as valid if you say eMacs, or EMACS, but the point isn't as clear as if I compare a text editor (EMACS being more than a text editor) to a word processor.
But SkyOS isn't really it. It's a nice design, apparently, and it's got a mainstream enough design to make porting far from impossible (as this article shows), but it's proprietary (I can't make modifications to it or support myself) and it doesn't have the support of a large organization that'll be around for years.
The SkyOS fan club might want to look at Atheos. There, again, was an operating system developed by a single individual to furfill his vision. He then, for reasons unknown, dropped out of sight.
Thankfully, for Atheos users, he'd taken the precaution of GPL'ing the system. So Atheos users were able to support themselves, eventually making an official fork of the no-longer-maintained system, and continue development.
I use Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and OpenBSD. The former is proprietary but supported by a group that's not going to go away. The latter two are open and support for either's not going to go away. I have moral issues with the former, but for now, it's a good system and from a practical perspective, there's no issue with continuing to use it. SkyOS doesn't really fit as either, and past experience of pointing this out shows that, by and large, SkyOS's major online advocates are a bunch of loud-mouthed jerks who'll accuse anyone of being a free software "zealot" for pointing out the obvious (even when, as I did then and continue to do now, I said it was a choice between having major, guaranteed, commercial support or making it free software.)
So I can't really use it in the hope that if something goes wrong the SkyOS people will do the right thing and find a way to get users the support they need. I don't think they will, they're ideologically opposed to doing so. And because of that, they've created practical barriers to anyone who wants to use it for anything but the most trivial purposes.
That's ironic really, isn't it? The authors (and supporters) of SkyOS are hysterically opposed to FOSS, yet SkyOS wouldn't even be credible to them if it wasn't for the work done by the Free Software and Open Source communities to create cross platform applications that provide certain critical features.
Personally I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole, being burnt with too many obscure proprietary systems (and some not so obscure ones that died anyway - too bad Commodore went bust before the whole "If we're dying we'll try a last minute boost and make our software open source" craze kicked in) in the formative years of my programming life, but YMMV.
It sucks to be on the receiving end of a subpoena, or any legal demand where a failure to comply has major legal consequences, when you yourself have done nothing wrong.
Either way, it's a little odd, though maybe in a context where some of the replies assume I'm really the trial judge, it isn't that odd...
Sucks, doesn't it?
And you can trust me, I'm the judge in this trial, at least the responders to this post seem to think so... ;)
In addition, while this lawyer argues his case, the Jury sits around restless. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even the court recorder is straining to keep awake as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working with Apple lawyers, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen an Apple lawyer that has made a more reasonable case than its opposition counterpart, despite the Apple lawyer's superior training. My Real Estate Attorney with an Associate's Degree from New England Tech works better than this $3,000 per hour machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that Apple has superior lawyers.
Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to have Apple sue them over other faster, cheaper, more stable individuals.
Ok. I'm fine with that.