Sure, but those aren't the products that are loved here. It's the Iphone and Ipad, which is the most closed (both in terms of source, and also control over who can develop for it) mobile platform.
Given the past focus of Linux, it's worth noting that Linux has a good presence on mobile devices, in the form of Android and Maemo, not to mention that the market leader, Symbian, is also open source. Rare to see stories about them here, though.
So ask yourself: who is the more pathetic--those who respond to people repeatedly insulting their intelligence, or those so insecure that they feel the need to attack users of a competing phone brand?
The latter. It's just that I see that far more from Iphone users putting down people because they use Symbian or Android, or perhaps (heaven forbid) a "feature" phone.
But that was all before the iPad. Whatever anyone thinks about the iPad, it changed how people view tablets. Now tablets are for consuming, rather than producing, content.
Computers for most people - be it desktops, laptops, netbooks, tablets, phones - have been primarily about consuming rather than producing for years.
Just look at what people do these days - everything from YouTube, Facebook, playing music, games. It's consuming, not producing content. It's absurd to say that this only happened with the Ipad.
Since when were tablets viewed as development tools? It's always been obvious that that would be the last form factor for doing development or production work; they've always been portrayed as things you'd use to read books or webpages, or watch videos.
No, they haven't took off. No doubt they will get more popular as time goes on, especially as the price comes down. And there are several tablets that use cut-down OSs designed for portable devices (Android, Maemo), so I do hope you're not just referring to one from Apple:)
The biggest most recent factor has probably been the widespread adoption of touchscreen technology.
The popularity of netbooks suggests your claim isn't right - evidently there are people who prefer full OSes on this level of portable devices. Indeed, I note that for years small PCs in that form factor failed, when they were running cut down OSs, yet took off when you could run full Windows or Linux OSs on them... Moreover, I believe netbooks with their full OSs still sell much more than tablets with cut down OSs. (I also suspect that a lot of people in the mainstream don't have a clue about what an operating system even is.)
Agnostics are still people who don't believe in God (and the distinction between "atheism" and "agnostic" is a matter of definitions that tells us little about a person's actual stance).
Deists don't believe in an interventionist god, and so would hardly be Creationists in the context being discussed here.
Which is indeed what Jobs and some people here no doubt believe, but remember it's not true. Tablets were around before the Islate or whatever they called it, and they're still not mainstream after Apple's tablet. No doubt they will become more popular in time, but this is a gradual change due to increased technology (hence things like touchscreens, prices falling, cheaper mobile Internet connections), and there is no reason to single out Apple as a sole cause.
What has happened is that we now have vast amounts of media hype over Apple's tablet. But this happened before it was even released - or even officially announced in fact. So had nothing to do with any success it did or didn't have (and indeed, the causative link would be the other way round - vast amounts of media hype leads to better sales, not vice versa).
If we're going to credit anyone with popularising tablets, thank the media. But it's still very rare for me to see anyone with a tablet (and when I have, it wasn't from Apple).
Apple entered the phone market after most other companies - so they had to wait until other companies told them it was okay to release a phone now...
(RIM still have higher market share in phones than Apple, don't they? Although they're still small compared to companies like Nokia, Samsung, Motorola).
Most people don't have a smartphone. Most people have a basic mobile where you press a few buttons and talk to people - that's all.
Note that a cheap supposedly non-smart phone (so called "feature" phone) these days let's you access the Internet, runs full web browsers, runs apps. In fact it's been that way since at least 2005, and these days such phones even have touchscreens. The distinction of "smartphone" today is really just to refer to "a high end phones" (e.g., faster processors, more features like wireless), or in some cases just a matter of marketing (e.g., Nokia label Symbian as "smartphone", S40 as "feature phone"; the original Iphone was a smartphone simply because Apple marketed it as such, despite it lacking many features).
I'm not sure if you can even get "dumb" phones that can only talk and text these days, but they'd be at the very cheapest end of the market.
Not that I disagree with your comment - I still dislike how most phones are locked down, which is why I'm glad of things like netbooks, where you can run full open source operating systems, rather than them being locked down toys.
If it's no different, I have to wonder why we have yet another Apple story about it.
Re:Confusing apps and network, with content
on
The End of Free
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Huh?
I don't really care whether it's LiveJournal or Livejournal; IPhone or Iphone. Where did I suggest that Livejournal was incorrect, or IPhone was incorrect?
If you mean I'm not writing "iPhone", I fail to see what that's got to do with LiveJournal, since I didn't write "liveJournal" (or "lIvejournal"). If I was in the business of writing trademarks, it would be "LiVEJOURNAL", by the way.
I apologise if everything I write doesn't seem completely consistent to you, I'll have to try better next time. I'm not the one going around moaning at how other people write, however.
(with your lame, intentional mistyping)
It's called English. "iPad" is the stylised trademark, which I don't write, anymore than you don't write "Toys R Us" with a backwards R; just as no one writes "Intel" or "Adidas" with a lower case capital, and just as you don't sing "ding-dong-ding-dong" when you write Intel.
All you're missing is a well-rounded, impotent M$
Why would I write "M$"? What have Microsoft got to do with anything here?
the Circle of Troll
If you're going to accuse me of inconsistency, shouldn't that be "cIrcle of tRoll", if you love capitalising second letters but not the first so much?
Indeed, and if we went by his reasoning, then phones in the UK are entirely "free" (since we don't pay for the phone if you're on a contract). $199 for an Iphone is looking rather expensive.
Although, since Iphone fans love to use the poor metric of Internet bandwidth to claim that the Iphone has the largest market share (not true by a long short), or make claims about how the Iphone magically makes people use the Internet because it's so good, I'm sure they'd love the idea of having yet more apps that do nothing but guzzle up bandwidth in the background, whilst the user does revolutionary things like run fart apps or shine a flashlight. It's great for the stats!
It's true that ads can be okay, I did use Opera years ago when it had a free ad version.
But I have to laugh - now, everytime there's a story about Opera, you always get the inevitable complaints of "Opera has ads!", despite the fact that they stopped doing that years ago. Similarly for any story about adverts on the Internet, there's loads of criticism. Yet, when Apple come along and support a programme of actively helping developers fill their apps up with ads, suddenly it's okay, and anyone criticising is getting modded down. Because it's Apple.
Or he could stick with his perfectly good N900, which does has software btw, just not ones covered in ads. You won't hear about it here though amongst the three stories we get a day from a company with far less market share than Nokia...
Are you seriously going to claim that developers can't put ads on Android?
So if ads can go on every other platform and this is no different, why do we have a story especially for Apple?
Either they're doing something to help this happen, or they're not. And if it's the former, if you're allowed to praise them for letting a small number of developers get rich quick on trivial applications, we're equally allowed to criticise a platform for becoming dominated with ads, and criticise the company that made this happen.
The OP is right. If Microsoft had a program to help push ads out to Windows PCs, there'd be no end of criticism. Saying "Oh, but look how money money this Windows developer is making from this trivial application" would hardly be much of a defence.
Confusing apps and network, with content
on
The End of Free
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone, where the app and the pricing plan now hold
The article confuses apps, Internet connections, with paying for media. On the desktop, it's long been the case that people pay for software (despite the useful presence of free software). And people pay for their Internet connection.
Similarly with phones - people pay for applications, they pay for their connection.
And the problem on the desktop isn't that people are unwilling to pay for media, it's that it often isn't available. Can I get TV on demand online for a charge? Not as far as I know in the UK. So I've no doubt that people will pay money for an app that gives them TV on a phone, but they would do so on the desktop too.
Where pay-for media is struggling is news. Are people more like to pay to read a newspaper on their 5800 than on their Intel Windows PC?
They are operating on the largely correct assumption that people will be more likely to pay for consumer-friendly apps via the iPad, and a multitude of competing devices due out this year
Ah yes, a multitude of computing devices (laptops, netbooks, tablets, PMPs, phones), but let's give the obligitary product placement to the Ipad. Do we really think that most people will be walking around with an Ipad? And are netbook users etc going to start paying for content?
And with Apple in the driver's seat
Hah. Thankfully - given the article's valid concerns about their closed policy - this isn't remotely true when we look in terms of things like market share. Though no doubt I predict plenty of replies arguing until they're blue in the face that they are (or redefining market share to use some arbitrary criteria where they are first).
Twitter, like other recent-vintage social networks, is barely bothering with its Web site; its smart-phone app is more fully featured. The independent TweetDeck, which collates feeds across multiple social networks, is not browser-based.
This sort of thing is hardly new, nor necessarily a bad thing. Years ago, people used Usenet clients. Many people still use email clients. Sites like LiveJournal have downloadable clients for desktop platforms. It goes without saying that the software versions are more featured - otherwise what would be the point of them. We didn't have hip names for them like "apps", but it's the same thing, long before people started using their phones.
But again, the article is conflating different issues - the technology (website versus software) with the idea of free content. Is anyone going to pay to read Twitter feeds, despite its use of apps?
Whilst online polls are obviously unreliable, I don't think that the existence of an obvious joke topic means that it's unreliable. Just because people are obviously giving a joke vote to an obvious joke entry doesn't mean that their other response to serious entries will be untrue.
And whilst the vote doesn't reflect what the population as a whole think, one can look at it in context: at least out of all the laws being proposed, this is a law that's near the top.
And never mind about accuracy, the point is that the Government is under more pressure to include a law that seems to be one of the most popular to repeal. They can't claim "But online polls are inaccurate", because in that case why did they launch the site in the first place?
Nearly every Apple story gets flooded with Apple haters
Classic tactic - if someone doesn't like or use Apple, it must be out of irrational "hatred".
for a company to approve what runs on its device (even though every console manufacturer does exactly the same thing).
If Apple wants to do that, it's fine. But it's also fair game for people to criticise that, just as other people criticise Windows for things. And if you're only response is to say it's like locked down toys and games machines, well that says it all about where the Ipad and Iphone fit in the scheme of things.
People don't hate these devices, they'd just rather use other products. Other products that hardly ever get coverage on the Slashdot that is allegedly biased against Apple (what with it's three stories a day on covering the Iphone/Ipad).
If that's true, I wonder why we need daily stories (or more) on the Iphone and Ipad, along with every possible rumour about Apple.
But you must be reading a different Slashdot to me. Any criticism of Apple almost always get modded down. The days when this was a site geared towards open source are long gone.
The reality I suspect is there's no bias against Apple, rather most people just don't care (again, it's the Apple spin that not liking Apple implies there must be some "bias" against them). But there's a vocal minority who think we need to hear endless news about what Apple do.
Yeah, I'm sure that the people who cause these wars will obviously realise their error when they receive your leaflet. I'm sure they wouldn't laugh and toss it in the bin at all.
And when the people suffering receive your leaflet, they'll obviously realise all they have to do is overturn Governments with a military, and then set up a working corrupt-free Government in its place. Obviously they were too stupid to realise the current situation was bad, until you pointed it out to them.
(And if you believe education and information is the way for long term benefit, sure, that's why it's good to give them computers!)
This is one of the nice things about resistive touch screens - you can have the advantage of touch, but you can also use a stylus to avoid smearing marks over your screen (as well as the advantages of extra precision when needed, and the screens also work with gloves etc). Capacitive touch is nice for my bedsite lamp, but for a phone/computer, I'd rather have something more practical.
I've yet to come across a case where I wished I had multitouch. One mouse button is simpler, remember? It's only getting hype as one of the few things that Apple did before some other companies. If the Iphone didn't have it, we'd be hearing "Why would I want that?"
Bullshit. In the first place, yes that is the full OS X in iPhone and iPad and iPod touch.
Not this myth again. No it isn't. They run the same kernel. OS X is more than a kernel, unless you want to claim that OS X is open source.
And the point still stands. Okay, it's possible for Apple to modify "OS X" and get it to run on low powered devices like the Ipad, but the point is that OLPC couldn't do that. If you mean they could build something on Darwin - sure, but that's clearly not what the conversation was about. And why waste time building on Darwin, when they could use something else?
Secondly, the core of OS X is open source.
So since you distinguish between OS X, and the core (kernel), obviously you really are claiming that an Iphone runs the full OS X just as runs in an Apple PC, albeit with a different UI, and not merely the kernel. Citation needed?
If Microsoft was offering to give away "free" licences, there'd be no end of criticism from people saying how this was simply in Microsoft's interest in that they'd get everyone using Windows and Windows software, which the recipients would later have to pay for when they want to upgrade.
Even if there is no benefit for Lib Dems in a coalition, I also see no loss.
But you're forgetting two things: * Even if no Lib Dem only policies were included, this means that some of the worse Tory policies can be avoided. * Moreover, it can be done whilst maintaining a stable Government, rather than simply voting against them, which risks a re-election.
And if hung Parliaments and coalitions get a bad name, and are unworkable, how much support are you ever going to see for PR? What good is PR, if people like you are dead against the Lib Dems working with anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
Supporting censorship is "liberal"? Not in my dictionary - seem rather the opposite of supporting freedom to me.
Sure, but those aren't the products that are loved here. It's the Iphone and Ipad, which is the most closed (both in terms of source, and also control over who can develop for it) mobile platform.
Given the past focus of Linux, it's worth noting that Linux has a good presence on mobile devices, in the form of Android and Maemo, not to mention that the market leader, Symbian, is also open source. Rare to see stories about them here, though.
So ask yourself: who is the more pathetic--those who respond to people repeatedly insulting their intelligence, or those so insecure that they feel the need to attack users of a competing phone brand?
The latter. It's just that I see that far more from Iphone users putting down people because they use Symbian or Android, or perhaps (heaven forbid) a "feature" phone.
But that was all before the iPad. Whatever anyone thinks about the iPad, it changed how people view tablets. Now tablets are for consuming, rather than producing, content.
Computers for most people - be it desktops, laptops, netbooks, tablets, phones - have been primarily about consuming rather than producing for years.
Just look at what people do these days - everything from YouTube, Facebook, playing music, games. It's consuming, not producing content. It's absurd to say that this only happened with the Ipad.
Since when were tablets viewed as development tools? It's always been obvious that that would be the last form factor for doing development or production work; they've always been portrayed as things you'd use to read books or webpages, or watch videos.
No, they haven't took off. No doubt they will get more popular as time goes on, especially as the price comes down. And there are several tablets that use cut-down OSs designed for portable devices (Android, Maemo), so I do hope you're not just referring to one from Apple :)
The biggest most recent factor has probably been the widespread adoption of touchscreen technology.
The popularity of netbooks suggests your claim isn't right - evidently there are people who prefer full OSes on this level of portable devices. Indeed, I note that for years small PCs in that form factor failed, when they were running cut down OSs, yet took off when you could run full Windows or Linux OSs on them... Moreover, I believe netbooks with their full OSs still sell much more than tablets with cut down OSs. (I also suspect that a lot of people in the mainstream don't have a clue about what an operating system even is.)
Yes, I did miss it - link?
Agnostics are still people who don't believe in God (and the distinction between "atheism" and "agnostic" is a matter of definitions that tells us little about a person's actual stance).
Deists don't believe in an interventionist god, and so would hardly be Creationists in the context being discussed here.
Which is indeed what Jobs and some people here no doubt believe, but remember it's not true. Tablets were around before the Islate or whatever they called it, and they're still not mainstream after Apple's tablet. No doubt they will become more popular in time, but this is a gradual change due to increased technology (hence things like touchscreens, prices falling, cheaper mobile Internet connections), and there is no reason to single out Apple as a sole cause.
What has happened is that we now have vast amounts of media hype over Apple's tablet. But this happened before it was even released - or even officially announced in fact. So had nothing to do with any success it did or didn't have (and indeed, the causative link would be the other way round - vast amounts of media hype leads to better sales, not vice versa).
If we're going to credit anyone with popularising tablets, thank the media. But it's still very rare for me to see anyone with a tablet (and when I have, it wasn't from Apple).
Apple entered the phone market after most other companies - so they had to wait until other companies told them it was okay to release a phone now...
(RIM still have higher market share in phones than Apple, don't they? Although they're still small compared to companies like Nokia, Samsung, Motorola).
Most people don't have a smartphone. Most people have a basic mobile where you press a few buttons and talk to people - that's all.
Note that a cheap supposedly non-smart phone (so called "feature" phone) these days let's you access the Internet, runs full web browsers, runs apps. In fact it's been that way since at least 2005, and these days such phones even have touchscreens. The distinction of "smartphone" today is really just to refer to "a high end phones" (e.g., faster processors, more features like wireless), or in some cases just a matter of marketing (e.g., Nokia label Symbian as "smartphone", S40 as "feature phone"; the original Iphone was a smartphone simply because Apple marketed it as such, despite it lacking many features).
I'm not sure if you can even get "dumb" phones that can only talk and text these days, but they'd be at the very cheapest end of the market.
Not that I disagree with your comment - I still dislike how most phones are locked down, which is why I'm glad of things like netbooks, where you can run full open source operating systems, rather than them being locked down toys.
If it's no different, I have to wonder why we have yet another Apple story about it.
Huh?
I don't really care whether it's LiveJournal or Livejournal; IPhone or Iphone. Where did I suggest that Livejournal was incorrect, or IPhone was incorrect?
If you mean I'm not writing "iPhone", I fail to see what that's got to do with LiveJournal, since I didn't write "liveJournal" (or "lIvejournal"). If I was in the business of writing trademarks, it would be "LiVEJOURNAL", by the way.
I apologise if everything I write doesn't seem completely consistent to you, I'll have to try better next time. I'm not the one going around moaning at how other people write, however.
(with your lame, intentional mistyping)
It's called English. "iPad" is the stylised trademark, which I don't write, anymore than you don't write "Toys R Us" with a backwards R; just as no one writes "Intel" or "Adidas" with a lower case capital, and just as you don't sing "ding-dong-ding-dong" when you write Intel.
All you're missing is a well-rounded, impotent M$
Why would I write "M$"? What have Microsoft got to do with anything here?
the Circle of Troll
If you're going to accuse me of inconsistency, shouldn't that be "cIrcle of tRoll", if you love capitalising second letters but not the first so much?
Indeed, and if we went by his reasoning, then phones in the UK are entirely "free" (since we don't pay for the phone if you're on a contract). $199 for an Iphone is looking rather expensive.
Although, since Iphone fans love to use the poor metric of Internet bandwidth to claim that the Iphone has the largest market share (not true by a long short), or make claims about how the Iphone magically makes people use the Internet because it's so good, I'm sure they'd love the idea of having yet more apps that do nothing but guzzle up bandwidth in the background, whilst the user does revolutionary things like run fart apps or shine a flashlight. It's great for the stats!
It's true that ads can be okay, I did use Opera years ago when it had a free ad version.
But I have to laugh - now, everytime there's a story about Opera, you always get the inevitable complaints of "Opera has ads!", despite the fact that they stopped doing that years ago. Similarly for any story about adverts on the Internet, there's loads of criticism. Yet, when Apple come along and support a programme of actively helping developers fill their apps up with ads, suddenly it's okay, and anyone criticising is getting modded down. Because it's Apple.
Or he could stick with his perfectly good N900, which does has software btw, just not ones covered in ads. You won't hear about it here though amongst the three stories we get a day from a company with far less market share than Nokia...
Are you seriously going to claim that developers can't put ads on Android?
So if ads can go on every other platform and this is no different, why do we have a story especially for Apple?
Either they're doing something to help this happen, or they're not. And if it's the former, if you're allowed to praise them for letting a small number of developers get rich quick on trivial applications, we're equally allowed to criticise a platform for becoming dominated with ads, and criticise the company that made this happen.
The OP is right. If Microsoft had a program to help push ads out to Windows PCs, there'd be no end of criticism. Saying "Oh, but look how money money this Windows developer is making from this trivial application" would hardly be much of a defence.
The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone, where the app and the pricing plan now hold
The article confuses apps, Internet connections, with paying for media. On the desktop, it's long been the case that people pay for software (despite the useful presence of free software). And people pay for their Internet connection.
Similarly with phones - people pay for applications, they pay for their connection.
And the problem on the desktop isn't that people are unwilling to pay for media, it's that it often isn't available. Can I get TV on demand online for a charge? Not as far as I know in the UK. So I've no doubt that people will pay money for an app that gives them TV on a phone, but they would do so on the desktop too.
Where pay-for media is struggling is news. Are people more like to pay to read a newspaper on their 5800 than on their Intel Windows PC?
They are operating on the largely correct assumption that people will be more likely to pay for consumer-friendly apps via the iPad, and a multitude of competing devices due out this year
Ah yes, a multitude of computing devices (laptops, netbooks, tablets, PMPs, phones), but let's give the obligitary product placement to the Ipad. Do we really think that most people will be walking around with an Ipad? And are netbook users etc going to start paying for content?
And with Apple in the driver's seat
Hah. Thankfully - given the article's valid concerns about their closed policy - this isn't remotely true when we look in terms of things like market share. Though no doubt I predict plenty of replies arguing until they're blue in the face that they are (or redefining market share to use some arbitrary criteria where they are first).
Twitter, like other recent-vintage social networks, is barely bothering with its Web site; its smart-phone app is more fully featured. The independent TweetDeck, which collates feeds across multiple social networks, is not browser-based.
This sort of thing is hardly new, nor necessarily a bad thing. Years ago, people used Usenet clients. Many people still use email clients. Sites like LiveJournal have downloadable clients for desktop platforms. It goes without saying that the software versions are more featured - otherwise what would be the point of them. We didn't have hip names for them like "apps", but it's the same thing, long before people started using their phones.
But again, the article is conflating different issues - the technology (website versus software) with the idea of free content. Is anyone going to pay to read Twitter feeds, despite its use of apps?
Whilst online polls are obviously unreliable, I don't think that the existence of an obvious joke topic means that it's unreliable. Just because people are obviously giving a joke vote to an obvious joke entry doesn't mean that their other response to serious entries will be untrue.
And whilst the vote doesn't reflect what the population as a whole think, one can look at it in context: at least out of all the laws being proposed, this is a law that's near the top.
And never mind about accuracy, the point is that the Government is under more pressure to include a law that seems to be one of the most popular to repeal. They can't claim "But online polls are inaccurate", because in that case why did they launch the site in the first place?
(PS, I can't find such an idea anyway - http://yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk/@@search?text=thermodynamics only shows ones with a small number of votes. Possibly the moderators remove the entry anyway.)
Nearly every Apple story gets flooded with Apple haters
Classic tactic - if someone doesn't like or use Apple, it must be out of irrational "hatred".
for a company to approve what runs on its device (even though every console manufacturer does exactly the same thing).
If Apple wants to do that, it's fine. But it's also fair game for people to criticise that, just as other people criticise Windows for things. And if you're only response is to say it's like locked down toys and games machines, well that says it all about where the Ipad and Iphone fit in the scheme of things.
People don't hate these devices, they'd just rather use other products. Other products that hardly ever get coverage on the Slashdot that is allegedly biased against Apple (what with it's three stories a day on covering the Iphone/Ipad).
If that's true, I wonder why we need daily stories (or more) on the Iphone and Ipad, along with every possible rumour about Apple.
But you must be reading a different Slashdot to me. Any criticism of Apple almost always get modded down. The days when this was a site geared towards open source are long gone.
The reality I suspect is there's no bias against Apple, rather most people just don't care (again, it's the Apple spin that not liking Apple implies there must be some "bias" against them). But there's a vocal minority who think we need to hear endless news about what Apple do.
Yeah, I'm sure that the people who cause these wars will obviously realise their error when they receive your leaflet. I'm sure they wouldn't laugh and toss it in the bin at all.
And when the people suffering receive your leaflet, they'll obviously realise all they have to do is overturn Governments with a military, and then set up a working corrupt-free Government in its place. Obviously they were too stupid to realise the current situation was bad, until you pointed it out to them.
(And if you believe education and information is the way for long term benefit, sure, that's why it's good to give them computers!)
This is one of the nice things about resistive touch screens - you can have the advantage of touch, but you can also use a stylus to avoid smearing marks over your screen (as well as the advantages of extra precision when needed, and the screens also work with gloves etc). Capacitive touch is nice for my bedsite lamp, but for a phone/computer, I'd rather have something more practical.
I've yet to come across a case where I wished I had multitouch. One mouse button is simpler, remember? It's only getting hype as one of the few things that Apple did before some other companies. If the Iphone didn't have it, we'd be hearing "Why would I want that?"
Bullshit. In the first place, yes that is the full OS X in iPhone and iPad and iPod touch.
Not this myth again. No it isn't. They run the same kernel. OS X is more than a kernel, unless you want to claim that OS X is open source.
And the point still stands. Okay, it's possible for Apple to modify "OS X" and get it to run on low powered devices like the Ipad, but the point is that OLPC couldn't do that. If you mean they could build something on Darwin - sure, but that's clearly not what the conversation was about. And why waste time building on Darwin, when they could use something else?
Secondly, the core of OS X is open source.
So since you distinguish between OS X, and the core (kernel), obviously you really are claiming that an Iphone runs the full OS X just as runs in an Apple PC, albeit with a different UI, and not merely the kernel. Citation needed?
If Microsoft was offering to give away "free" licences, there'd be no end of criticism from people saying how this was simply in Microsoft's interest in that they'd get everyone using Windows and Windows software, which the recipients would later have to pay for when they want to upgrade.
Oh wait, it's Apple, that's different.
Even if there is no benefit for Lib Dems in a coalition, I also see no loss.
But you're forgetting two things:
* Even if no Lib Dem only policies were included, this means that some of the worse Tory policies can be avoided.
* Moreover, it can be done whilst maintaining a stable Government, rather than simply voting against them, which risks a re-election.
And if hung Parliaments and coalitions get a bad name, and are unworkable, how much support are you ever going to see for PR? What good is PR, if people like you are dead against the Lib Dems working with anyone?
Put it the other way round - what Tory policies did the Lib Dems agree to, that were against fundamental Lib Dem principles?
Also remember what the share of the seats was - we'd expect that the resultant coalition would be split in the Tories' favour, and not split equally.