Apple produce desktops, laptops and various other consumer devices, they do not make servers any more and only ever had a very limited range of lowend servers when they did. It stands to reason that they would need to get their servers from somewhere else.
That would be like saying MS don't build their own company cars...
Windows was always marketed as "you don't need expensive highly skilled admins to run this"... The problem is, that although someone with limited skills can get a windows network limping along, the end result will be neither stable nor secure, so the marketing has helped them earn a bad reputation.
Only when it comes to their customers, MS will try to push you into using their products across the board wether they are the best tool for the job or not... Yet internally they take a more pragmatic approach.
Software as a product will come and go, were it not for lock-in and inertia it would have already for all but niche markets...
If you look at the price/performance of hardware over the years, where there is fierce competition... The same level of competition in software would ultimately end with everyone giving it away free and trying to make money via other means.
Software too, unlike hardware, has a very low barrier to entry and with the sharing nature of open source its much easier to get a customised fully working product ready to go quickly than it would be to develop your whole stack from scratch.
Take the web browser market, all the major browsers are given away free and very few people would ever consider paying for one now.
They only even acknowledge the existence of linux when they are still at the "embrace" stage, in markets where ms is already dominant they never even acknowledge that linux exists at all...
ODBC driver for mssql - ms do not dominate the database market, oracle are still huge, mysql and db2 are well known too hyper-v drivers - ms are nothing in the virtualization market, having been very late to the party and already released and subsequently dropped a previous virtualization product (ms virtual server) frontpage extensions - again, apache is still the biggest player in webhosting
They don't even attempt to make linux ports of any of their desktop apps, nor do they make it easy for linux users to connect to their more widespread server products like exchange
Having superior technology and then hobbling it so that its no better (or even inferior) to the competition is not good business...
If they built ARM chips on the smaller fab process they would be able to easily lead the market. With Atom they are barely competitive, while also being incompatible with everyone else.
Aren't Motorola acting in self defense? As i understand it, MS has been trying to shake down android handset manufacturers for a while and motorola are one of the few that refused to give in to their demands.
A while ago Intel stated they were intending to keep at least one process shrink ahead of everyone else because it was the only way they could compete with ARM...
Personally i find this despicable and extremely arrogant, pushing their own inferior architecture and holding everyone back when they could be making ARM chips that were superior to everyone else's. Recent benchmarks show their latest low power atom chips are barely competitive with last year's ARM designs (and wouldnt be competitive at all if built on the same process)...
There are open source drivers for radeon too, they might not perform as well as the closed drivers but they still outperform most intel cards while being just as convenient, plus you have the option of using closed drivers if you want the extra performance.
People will claim windows knowledge based on the most high level of exposure, many such people are utterly useless and would resort to a reinstall for all but the simplest of problems (and then might botch the reinstall due to not installing proper drivers etc)...
People often don't claim linux knowledge unless they actually have a fairly decent level of competence.
Most users never install an OS, and would hate to do so. iOS, OSX, Android (and other embedded linuxes) and Windows all come preinstalled. Only those wanting to try desktop Linux ever need to perform an install...
For Linux to really take off, it has to be offered preinstalled, and the vendors need to promote it and advertise its strengths.
So far, whenever linux has been offered its been marketed as "cheap" and people complain that they cant buy boxed software for it, no attempt has been made to promote the repository system (which people clearly love on android and ios), or the lack of malware etc.
The problem here is that people are too used to the commercial way of doing things, where reporting bugs is completely fruitless (if even possible) without an extremely expensive support contract. So users are in the habit of not reporting bugs or trying to get them fixed, and just going to complain about them. And then, most of the windows bugs are well known and workarounds have been memorised, so they often get overlooked.
And then there's the problem of distros breaking on upgrades,
Something windows is also famous for, so much so that most people recommend a from scratch install instead of upgrading.
and the prevalent WORKS_FOR_ME && WONT_FIX responses towards bugs,
Ever tried reporting a bug to microsoft? If they even acknowledge your report at all, they still might never fix it.
the really lousy bug-reporting scheme (I tried it with KDE, my cpu went to 100% and never even loaded the desktop, requiring a reinstall from scratch).
Not requiring, you chose to take that path. Someone with greater knowledge or time could have fixed it manually.
Then there's the lack of social skills among the "self-anointed." Plus their childish insistence on labeling it GNU/linux (do you call it a Firestone/Mustang)? Or M$. Yes, we see what you did there, and no, after the 5,000th time, it's just stupid.
There are plenty of such people willing to promote any viewpoint..
One thing to consider, why is exploiting loopholes in program code (ie hacking) illegal, while exploiting similar loopholes in law is not?
They are basically doing exactly the same thing, a set of instructions which are being followed to the letter have an unintended bug that can be exploited to carry out actions which were never intended by the author of those instructions.
Either way, the given instructions are still being carried out to the letter but you are going against the intent for which those instructions were written.
Why should exploiting bugs in a computer program be treated more harshly than exploiting bugs in the law?
Corporations always act in self interest, and doing so is always self destructive in the long term...
Think of it this way, corporations cut jobs and outsource to reduce costs, if every other corporation does the same sooner or later there will be so many people unemployed that there are few or no customers for your products.
Areas with lower taxes are generally able to offer lower taxes because they don't have the same level of overheads as larger places... Look at the tiny taxhaven countries, each one is basically a city with a much higher population density than any larger country, so more taxpayers in a smaller space combined with far less things to pay for. On the other hand, these tax havens are very bad customers for your business, due to the small population..
"more likely" != "always", there are always exceptions.
And the fact that you pirate software for which you don't have the source just goes to show that releasing sourcecode isn't going to have any impact on piracy.
The mere fact that a book written by someone nearly 70 years ago is still under copyright is ridiculous... The only reason there is any interest in this book at all is because it was written by possibly the most well known and infamous man in history.
How many other works were written during the same time period, which have become completely lost to history due to excessively long copyrights?
Also by keeping a work like mein kampf under wraps for so long, they have created a taboo subject around it, which will actually result in more people wanting to read it. In many other countries where talk of hitler and nazis is not restricted, hitler is considered a joke and is openly mocked, hardly an image that's going to generate any support for his ideas.
And as someone else pointed out, suppressing books containing ideas they didn't agree with was something the nazis did.
You mean like trusting your customers to abide by the terms under which you distribute binaries to them?
Having the source spread is no worse than having the binaries spread. In either case pirates will redistribute it, and there are still customers who will pay. Most corporate customers for instance will not even consider using a pirate copy, and will buy your original no matter how widespread copies are on torrent sites.
Also most pirates won't care about the source, and will just continue pirating the binaries as they have done for years. People who are capable of compiling and/or modifying source are usually developers themselves and more likely to respect copyrights.
Never said it should be available for free, just that it should be available on equal terms for everyone. I would advocate that all paying customers receive (or have the right to receive) sourcecode, even if under non-open terms (ie no redistribution etc).
Only because the source code is leaked rather than open, white hat researchers won't touch it for reasons of legal liability... Thus, only black hats will be reading the source code looking for vulnerabilities, and then using those vulnerabilities for nefarious means rather than seeking to have them fixed.
Meanwhile, most of vmware's competitors have been open from the start so the low hanging fruit will have already been taken.
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Apple produce desktops, laptops and various other consumer devices, they do not make servers any more and only ever had a very limited range of lowend servers when they did. It stands to reason that they would need to get their servers from somewhere else.
That would be like saying MS don't build their own company cars...
Windows was always marketed as "you don't need expensive highly skilled admins to run this"...
The problem is, that although someone with limited skills can get a windows network limping along, the end result will be neither stable nor secure, so the marketing has helped them earn a bad reputation.
Only when it comes to their customers, MS will try to push you into using their products across the board wether they are the best tool for the job or not... Yet internally they take a more pragmatic approach.
Software as a product will come and go, were it not for lock-in and inertia it would have already for all but niche markets...
If you look at the price/performance of hardware over the years, where there is fierce competition... The same level of competition in software would ultimately end with everyone giving it away free and trying to make money via other means.
Software too, unlike hardware, has a very low barrier to entry and with the sharing nature of open source its much easier to get a customised fully working product ready to go quickly than it would be to develop your whole stack from scratch.
Take the web browser market, all the major browsers are given away free and very few people would ever consider paying for one now.
They only even acknowledge the existence of linux when they are still at the "embrace" stage, in markets where ms is already dominant they never even acknowledge that linux exists at all...
ODBC driver for mssql - ms do not dominate the database market, oracle are still huge, mysql and db2 are well known too
hyper-v drivers - ms are nothing in the virtualization market, having been very late to the party and already released and subsequently dropped a previous virtualization product (ms virtual server)
frontpage extensions - again, apache is still the biggest player in webhosting
They don't even attempt to make linux ports of any of their desktop apps, nor do they make it easy for linux users to connect to their more widespread server products like exchange
Mainly because they tried to migrate it to windows and the first attempt failed miserably, and they had to try again with a lot more hardware.
He never said xcode was any good, just that visual studio is useless for developer ios apps.
Well you could wait 2 months for a release candidate of an os that few people will touch before the first service pack...
Or you could use ZFS, which has had those features for years already and is supported on several stable tried and tested platforms.
Having superior technology and then hobbling it so that its no better (or even inferior) to the competition is not good business...
If they built ARM chips on the smaller fab process they would be able to easily lead the market.
With Atom they are barely competitive, while also being incompatible with everyone else.
Aren't Motorola acting in self defense? As i understand it, MS has been trying to shake down android handset manufacturers for a while and motorola are one of the few that refused to give in to their demands.
A while ago Intel stated they were intending to keep at least one process shrink ahead of everyone else because it was the only way they could compete with ARM...
Personally i find this despicable and extremely arrogant, pushing their own inferior architecture and holding everyone back when they could be making ARM chips that were superior to everyone else's. Recent benchmarks show their latest low power atom chips are barely competitive with last year's ARM designs (and wouldnt be competitive at all if built on the same process)...
There are open source drivers for radeon too, they might not perform as well as the closed drivers but they still outperform most intel cards while being just as convenient, plus you have the option of using closed drivers if you want the extra performance.
People will claim windows knowledge based on the most high level of exposure, many such people are utterly useless and would resort to a reinstall for all but the simplest of problems (and then might botch the reinstall due to not installing proper drivers etc)...
People often don't claim linux knowledge unless they actually have a fairly decent level of competence.
And Joe Average can take it down to $BigBoxComputerStore and get it fixed without having to worry about if they support his OS
For a fee, and that fix will probably amount to a reinstall which may wipe all his data.
And you do have to worry about os support, what if the local computer store is run by apple?
Most users never install an OS, and would hate to do so.
iOS, OSX, Android (and other embedded linuxes) and Windows all come preinstalled. Only those wanting to try desktop Linux ever need to perform an install...
For Linux to really take off, it has to be offered preinstalled, and the vendors need to promote it and advertise its strengths.
So far, whenever linux has been offered its been marketed as "cheap" and people complain that they cant buy boxed software for it, no attempt has been made to promote the repository system (which people clearly love on android and ios), or the lack of malware etc.
The problem here is that people are too used to the commercial way of doing things, where reporting bugs is completely fruitless (if even possible) without an extremely expensive support contract.
So users are in the habit of not reporting bugs or trying to get them fixed, and just going to complain about them.
And then, most of the windows bugs are well known and workarounds have been memorised, so they often get overlooked.
And then there's the problem of distros breaking on upgrades,
Something windows is also famous for, so much so that most people recommend a from scratch install instead of upgrading.
and the prevalent WORKS_FOR_ME && WONT_FIX responses towards bugs,
Ever tried reporting a bug to microsoft? If they even acknowledge your report at all, they still might never fix it.
the really lousy bug-reporting scheme (I tried it with KDE, my cpu went to 100% and never even loaded the desktop, requiring a reinstall from scratch).
Not requiring, you chose to take that path. Someone with greater knowledge or time could have fixed it manually.
Then there's the lack of social skills among the "self-anointed." Plus their childish insistence on labeling it GNU/linux (do you call it a Firestone/Mustang)? Or M$. Yes, we see what you did there, and no, after the 5,000th time, it's just stupid.
There are plenty of such people willing to promote any viewpoint..
Corporations are not ethical by any means...
One thing to consider, why is exploiting loopholes in program code (ie hacking) illegal, while exploiting similar loopholes in law is not?
They are basically doing exactly the same thing, a set of instructions which are being followed to the letter have an unintended bug that can be exploited to carry out actions which were never intended by the author of those instructions.
Either way, the given instructions are still being carried out to the letter but you are going against the intent for which those instructions were written.
Why should exploiting bugs in a computer program be treated more harshly than exploiting bugs in the law?
Corporations always act in self interest, and doing so is always self destructive in the long term...
Think of it this way, corporations cut jobs and outsource to reduce costs, if every other corporation does the same sooner or later there will be so many people unemployed that there are few or no customers for your products.
Areas with lower taxes are generally able to offer lower taxes because they don't have the same level of overheads as larger places... Look at the tiny taxhaven countries, each one is basically a city with a much higher population density than any larger country, so more taxpayers in a smaller space combined with far less things to pay for.
On the other hand, these tax havens are very bad customers for your business, due to the small population..
"more likely" != "always", there are always exceptions.
And the fact that you pirate software for which you don't have the source just goes to show that releasing sourcecode isn't going to have any impact on piracy.
The mere fact that a book written by someone nearly 70 years ago is still under copyright is ridiculous... The only reason there is any interest in this book at all is because it was written by possibly the most well known and infamous man in history.
How many other works were written during the same time period, which have become completely lost to history due to excessively long copyrights?
Also by keeping a work like mein kampf under wraps for so long, they have created a taboo subject around it, which will actually result in more people wanting to read it. In many other countries where talk of hitler and nazis is not restricted, hitler is considered a joke and is openly mocked, hardly an image that's going to generate any support for his ideas.
And as someone else pointed out, suppressing books containing ideas they didn't agree with was something the nazis did.
You mean like trusting your customers to abide by the terms under which you distribute binaries to them?
Having the source spread is no worse than having the binaries spread. In either case pirates will redistribute it, and there are still customers who will pay. Most corporate customers for instance will not even consider using a pirate copy, and will buy your original no matter how widespread copies are on torrent sites.
Also most pirates won't care about the source, and will just continue pirating the binaries as they have done for years. People who are capable of compiling and/or modifying source are usually developers themselves and more likely to respect copyrights.
Never said it should be available for free, just that it should be available on equal terms for everyone. I would advocate that all paying customers receive (or have the right to receive) sourcecode, even if under non-open terms (ie no redistribution etc).
Only because the source code is leaked rather than open, white hat researchers won't touch it for reasons of legal liability... Thus, only black hats will be reading the source code looking for vulnerabilities, and then using those vulnerabilities for nefarious means rather than seeking to have them fixed.
Meanwhile, most of vmware's competitors have been open from the start so the low hanging fruit will have already been taken.