Except OpenOffice 2 uses a new format, and will automagically convert files to it when you save older documents in the newer version so they can't be opened in OO 1.x anymore.
Same old, same old. Notice that OO 2 uses the O2k3 toolbar styles. It's just a lame clone of the real thing. I use Abiword these days. It's not perfect, but it does what I need, looks nice and is well integrated with Linux.
Alternatively, if I need more I'll run MS Word XP on Linux using Crossover. That works pretty well.
That isn't at all unusual, unfortunately. Back in the days before Firefox or Thunderbird, I wrote a patch to let you password protect user profiles. That was very handy on Windows 98 systems which were often set up as single user systems (but actually weren't). The bug was pretty popular, at one point it had >300 votes, though it has fewer now. It also has almost 300 comments.
I actually worked with a Netscape engineer to write the patch. Unfortunately he then left Netscape to move onto better things and the patch then proceeded to bitrot. I needed review from Ben Gooder, who refused to look at it. Unfortunately their review/super-review system is a hangover from the first days of the project (and maybe the Netscape Navigator days) and simply doesn't scale down to the number of people working on Mozilla nowadays (which should be much larger for such a high-profile project)
The bug number is 16489 (copy/paste). Working on that pretty much wiped out any enthusiasm I once had for hacking on Mozilla.
Unfortunately, the Mozilla project is IMHO far, far too dependent on Bugzilla for interaction. There must be mailing lists, somewhere, but the newsgroups they used in the early days are sprawling and mostly abandoned. It looks like they have no good public discussion forums so the core Firefox developers retreated into a clique. Shame.
As long as it's a GConf only option you could probably write a patch to implement that mode. Or just use Sawfish with GNOME, there's nothing forcing you to use metacity after all.
Huh? You clearly never read the threads where they were considering writing their own multimedia framework from scratch because GStreamer wasn't written in C++.
I don't get where all this stuff about "KDE doing more with less" is coming from. When I see GNOME I see a polished desktop that I'd actually give my friends and family and not feel embarassed. It's slick, easy to use, and pretty fast. Frameworks and APIs are just means to an end: in this case, it seems KDE lost sight of that and put so much effort into the APIs that they became more important than the desktop did. I mean, look at the most recent releases - they've been talking about cleaning up the control center for years, longer than I've been using Linux in fact, yet it never gets done.
It used to be that "open source" desktops were missing a lot of functionality. As it was added to catch up with Windows/MacOS (and in some cases, exceed it) the resource requirements went up too.
It's not like the open source tooth fairy magically makes people write tighter code, after all.
It'll get better soon, as the most recent Linux desktops are getting pretty mature these days. While they still have issues with hardware/software compatibility, in the absolute modern GNOMEs are pretty good and the list of "Huge Must-Fix Problems" is vanishingly small. At that point polish and optimisation comes to the forefront.
Actually, most of the DCOM work Rob and I have been doing is done from scratch: only one part is based on Oves patch, though we did refer to it for guidance a few times.
Completely re-using TransGamings DCOM work was out of the question as since they forked Wine developed its own implementation that everyone was more familiar with, and it would not only have been incredibly obnoxious to just delete that code given the context it was developed in, but it would have prevented us evolving the code in a way that could check for regressions.
Yes, it's certainly possible. Right now quite a few copy protection tricks do work on Wine, unfortunately there aren't many people working on this area right now. We're somewhat limited by being an open source projec too: we can't do stuff that might violate the DMCA.
Hey, I don't mind:) This seems like a good discussion.
You're right that the GNU movement is based on the concept of free as in speech software, which implies free as in cost also. However, whilst the set of Linux users and members of the GNU movement certainly overlap, they aren't the same: there are lots of Linux users who do not perceive the freeness of the software they use to be the most important thing. If the sets were identical, then by definition nobody could make money selling software for Linux.
There are quite a few pro pieces of software available for Linux, at large expense. You could just as easily say that somebody who paid for Red Hat Enterprise Linux would not balk at the purchase of Resin or WebSphere. I'm not sure either count as facts, but they are equivalent anecdotes.
To be honest, yes, I think you'd be an unusual case. I don't know many people who are OK with buying non-free software for a Mac or Windows machine, but don't do so for a Linux machine. Typically either they don't use non-Free software at all, or they are ambivalent on the matter and are equally likely to purchase a program if it's useful to them whatever system they're running.
Now what is anecdotal, in a way, is my belief that the Linux userbase will grow rapidly in coming years but will grow to include people who are not also followers of the GNU belief system. I think that's already happened to some extent: lots of people seem to use proprietary 3D graphics drivers, for instance. And that'll become more the case in future as corporate rollouts pick up steam.
That comes back to my original statement, that Apple don't want to be number 3 psychologically, because if there were double the number of Linux users than Mac users, I doubt many companies would develop for the Mac anyway due to believing that Linux users don't buy software. I can't see that happening, especially given the lack of firm statistics.
It's not just about pretty fonts though, read my original post.
Font hinting is needed (as opposed to just being nice to have) in the following two situations:
International text. Now, this problem has sort of been hidden for a while because most Chinese/Japanese users were using bitmapped fonts, because there aren't many fonts which cover all the glyphs these languages use and they are mostly pretty old-skool, especially on Linux. But these days more TrueType fonts for non-Latin scripts are coming out and for these character sets real hinting (by which I mean, interpreting the TrueType VM opcodes) is essential. The auto-hinter mangles them. Or at least, this is what I have been told by somebody who knows.
Windows compatibility. There are two aspects to this. The first is being able to correctly import MS Office documents, which have a tendency to change size or lay out incorrectly if you are using the wrong fonts - or crucially, using the right fonts but without the same hinting engines. That's because the resulting rendered glyphs are not metrically compatible, which is just a fancy way of saying the letters are different sizes. Metric compatibility is a rather tough challenge, and the auto-hinter does not attempt to be compatible with real hinting metrically (indeed, I am not even sure it could be).
The other aspect is Win32 programs on Wine. Wine uses FreeType to render text, like nearly all Linux programs do, and because the Win32 widget toolkit is positional incorrect metrics can cause labels to be wrapped or clipped, causing GUI corruption. Therefore correct hinting is essential.
Hopefully you see now why it would be a useful ability to have, even though the work of David Turner on the auto-hinting algorithms is truly great.
For more information on the (complex) issues behind font rendering and hinting you can read about it here.
Well, I'm not sure how you define whether users are "pro-commercial" or not. How many people will choose to pay for something they can get elsewhere (of equal quality/usefulness etc) for free? None, right? Unless it's a charity or something.
I'm not sure what your anecdotal point about your own purchasing history is for. I have bought software and games for both platforms. I have bought more software for Windows because I have used it for longer, and because it's more necessary there as you don't have a huge library of free stuff (or rather, you never used to, these days there is a much greater freeware library available).
You seem to be trying to demonstrate, again, that Linux users are less likely to buy a given piece of software than Windows users are. I say, assuming all things are equal there is no discernable difference, and I've never seen any statistics that show there are.
By "unique software" yes I'm talking about Logic Audio type apps. I don't think you'd make much money trying to sell a programmers text editor to Linux users because there are already many available, most of them quite good. So if you are in the business of selling text editors you might conclude that Linux users are all cheapskates who never buy things, but you'd be wrong. Rather, you'd be complaining that the damn Arabs never buy any sand. You'd have more success selling software which isn't commodity. That's true of any market, and actually there are plenty of examples of Linux users paying for what they can get for free elsewhere if the commercial version has value-add.
I'd disagree actually, if a post is just factually wrong then you should reply pointing out why, not try and hide the original post. The moderation system was designed to highlight interesting posts and suppress the flood of garbage from trolls/automatic post bots etc. It's widely abused anyway, eg one of my other posts is now marked as Troll. Possibly there shouldn't be any negative mods at all.
OK, so hinting and anti-aliasing are different things. You can use both, or none, or one of either, it doesn't matter.
Hinting is about correctly grid fitting the pixels. It can (and should) be used at any size, but is most noticable at small sizes (which is most text on a computer screen). If you want to see text that isn't hinted, look at this.
So to say "hinting is ugly" is not correct: hinting by itself modifies glyph shapes, for the better (that's why people want it). As you can see from the picture, unhinted text is very ugly indeed - unpleasant to read in fact. What you probably mean is that some people don't like anti-aliasing. On Windows it's off by default,on Linux it's on but you can disable it globally very easily, and on MacOS X you cannot disable it without special purpose hacks that often break when you upgrade.
FreeType is capable of anti-aliasing and also using TrueType hinting, which it can do in one of two modes: automatic and by using the data embedded in the fonts. In automatic mode it tries to guess based on the shapes of the glyphs. The algorithms used are fascinating and developed specifically for FreeType, to work around the patent. However the autohinter doesn't always get it right so FreeType can also use the real hinting engine it is supposed to use, if you have a license.
"Font smoothing" is just another way of saying anti-aliasing, except in that thread you linked to where they appear to be using it to refer to what is normally known as sub-pixel anti-aliasing which exploits properties of how pixels are laid out on LCDs to make it look better. Microsoft calls this "ClearType". FreeType can do this too.
In short: hinting and anti-aliasing/smoothing are different things, which have different purposes. It's possible to have one without the other.
I would disagree. Do you have any hard evidence that given a unique piece of software, Linux users are less likely to pay for it than Windows or Mac users?
Note that I said "unique". So a word processor or music player is a bad example, because there are many free alternatives which come already loaded. Games would be a good example.
Given that my job is to write commercial software for Linux, I don't think it's any harder than it would be writing for Windows or the Mac market. We certainly have no issues with people expecting things to be free (or at least, no worse than the typical warez kiddies you get on every platform).
So, I stand by my statement about 1st, 2nd, 3rd positions. There is much more software out there that targets "Windows and Mac" than "Windows and Mac and Linux", and virtually none which supports >3 desktop operating systems. I think usage is very much related to the size of the market.
then over few days you'll get modded down with 'overrated'. why? because apple zealots read the stories even when they're old, normal people that would agree with your valid points don't read old apple stories.
A few days? I should be so lucky. That post went from +5 Insightful to +0 Redundant in about 20 minutes. That sort of thing does not make these discussions more interesting.
I'd like to say that's unusual, but it's not. I've had "-1 Insightful" posts on Apple stories before (but nothing else). If people are going to moderate, they should read the moderation guidelines: mod up the good posts, don't mod down unless it's clearly noise (GNAA posts etc).
Let's see about that page: OpenPlay is something they have themselves abandoned, and nobody uses it. Microsoft open sourced WiX too, does that mean they're suddenly supporting open source? No.
Darwin is mostly made up stuff that was already open source, and the parts that are new aren't generally useful as they're inferior to what's already available (eg compare performance of Darwin to Linux on POSIX benchmarks sometime).
The Rendezvous code they released consisted of a 350kb piece of C, the largest comment in which was attempting to justify the indentation style in use. It does not compile, out of the box, on anything apart from MacOS X due to missing code. Rather than try and reuse such an opaque file, people tend to use Howl instead. Apparently even Apple don't use it as their implementation differs from the one they released.
Finally Chess.app is open source because it's based on GNU Chess which is GPLd, ie they had no choice in the matter.
Not impressive.
Quartz does use it, the whole point of hinting is because you can't scale fonts down like that. See here for a quick discussion of that.
The "beautiful font engine" you are referring to is FreeType which has indeed worked around this patent. The auto-hinter unfortunately does not work correctly for non-Latin fonts as it relies upon aspects of the geometry. Hinting is still required if you wish to display vector based non-Western glyphs, and it's also required to produce metrically compatible glyphs with systems that are hinted.
I always post non positive Apple comments as AC because more often then not, the Apple biased moderators will mod things they do not agree with as troll or off topic instead of trying to reply with a logical rebuttal.
I don't blame you. Already that fairly innocent post has had 4 overrated mods, which can only have come from Apple apologists who can't quite identify what about my comment detracts from the discussion but don't want people to see it anyway.
Overrated is a stupid mod, it's not meta-moderated and some people have clearly figured that out. They're now using it to push an agenda without fear of being excluded from the moderation system. Quite why Taco lets this huge hole persist is beyond me, but a "+2 Insightful" post from somebody with the karma bonus is unfortunately something I only ever see on Apple related stories. Shame.
Fortunately I have excellent karma and have had forever, so I'm not bothered by posting.
They would not, as that'd be equivalent to licensing it for free to everybody (otherwise it would not be Free software, natch). They still make money from it: they charged at least one well known Linux-based based company a pretty penny for the use of that patent, so if they won't even give discounts for commercial Linux developers the chances of them licensing any of their patents for free is nil.
Anyway, the same answer is derivable via logic. Linux is a direct competitor to MacOS X. They are both vying for second place in the market, and history has shown that while most companies write for the top OS, a few write for both the first and second place OSs, but virtually none write for the top 3. Therefore it's of vital importance that they remain (psychologically if not statistically) in 2nd place.
Linux is rapidly taking over that spot, according to IDC it already has in fact, therefore anything they can do to hinder adoption of Linux is a good move from the perspective of their business model. Therefore they have no incentive to de-license these patents.
Apple may have the largest market share of the music downloads, but there is no evidence to support that they are a monopoly or are doing anything particular to try to become one
They're tying products together artificially, that's normally a pretty good sign.
Since you've clearly forgotten, Apple has contributed enormously to the Open Source movement.
Have they? The only project I can think of where Apple engineers have actually submitted a non-trivial number of patches is GCC, and they maintain their own private fork with many patches not available upstream. Their patches are not available in discrete form anywhere, if you want to get them you have to scrub them out of their own tree.
And that's the best example! The KHTML changes are returned in the form of a massive undocumented patch dump, which makes them extremely hard to use. Note that the latest KDE/KHTML release does not seem to contain many improvements from Apple: that's why. FreeBSD got a few test suites out of it, iirc, and not much else. GNU Binutils is still waiting for many of the patches Apple wrote to be made available in a useful form, etc etc.
Basically Apple have perfected the art of releasing [L]GPLd software they use back to the community in a useless fashion. That's their biggest contribution.
As for the first "large corportation" to embrace open source, I wonder how you can ignore IBM even if you have arbitrarily ruled that Red Hat and other such companies are not "large".
That's clearly rubbish, I can think of lots of businesses that don't go around doing the things Apple do. Most of them are small, a few are large (think Google, Red Hat etc).
Saying "it's OK because everybody does it" isn't any kind of moral or legal argument at all - even if you were correct, it wouldn't make it right. At best, it indicates a serious problem with the system. At worst, it indicates that Apple is run by ego-centered millionaires who want to model the world in their image.
Well, by the same reasoning all a company that is engaging in some unethical behaviour (polluting the environment etc) has to do is make all their employees sign an NDA before joining. Now they can do whatever they like and nobody will blow the whistle because they know they can't do it anonymously, and the companies lawyers will chase them to hell and back.
There are reasons journalists try and protect their sources, indeed, there are official systems in some countries for whistleblowers. By all means prosecute the people who violated the NDA, if you can find them. Forcing news sites to reveal sources sets a very dangerous precedent though.
Ah, but it was not always so. When Windows 95 came out, a lot of people left the Mac platform because - though it's hard to believe now - it was in many ways better than the MacOS of the time. What makes you think Apple would have done what it's done today, or continue to do that, if it was dominant?
Uh, no. If you actually read up on Adam and Eve it seems to be some kind of widget library abstraction with a generic data engine behind it - a bit like what XUL/RDF Templates were supposed to be back in the early days of Mozilla.
Slashdot Mirror
Same old, same old. Notice that OO 2 uses the O2k3 toolbar styles. It's just a lame clone of the real thing. I use Abiword these days. It's not perfect, but it does what I need, looks nice and is well integrated with Linux.
Alternatively, if I need more I'll run MS Word XP on Linux using Crossover. That works pretty well.
I actually worked with a Netscape engineer to write the patch. Unfortunately he then left Netscape to move onto better things and the patch then proceeded to bitrot. I needed review from Ben Gooder, who refused to look at it. Unfortunately their review/super-review system is a hangover from the first days of the project (and maybe the Netscape Navigator days) and simply doesn't scale down to the number of people working on Mozilla nowadays (which should be much larger for such a high-profile project)
The bug number is 16489 (copy/paste). Working on that pretty much wiped out any enthusiasm I once had for hacking on Mozilla.
Unfortunately, the Mozilla project is IMHO far, far too dependent on Bugzilla for interaction. There must be mailing lists, somewhere, but the newsgroups they used in the early days are sprawling and mostly abandoned. It looks like they have no good public discussion forums so the core Firefox developers retreated into a clique. Shame.
As long as it's a GConf only option you could probably write a patch to implement that mode. Or just use Sawfish with GNOME, there's nothing forcing you to use metacity after all.
I don't get where all this stuff about "KDE doing more with less" is coming from. When I see GNOME I see a polished desktop that I'd actually give my friends and family and not feel embarassed. It's slick, easy to use, and pretty fast. Frameworks and APIs are just means to an end: in this case, it seems KDE lost sight of that and put so much effort into the APIs that they became more important than the desktop did. I mean, look at the most recent releases - they've been talking about cleaning up the control center for years, longer than I've been using Linux in fact, yet it never gets done.
It's not like the open source tooth fairy magically makes people write tighter code, after all.
It'll get better soon, as the most recent Linux desktops are getting pretty mature these days. While they still have issues with hardware/software compatibility, in the absolute modern GNOMEs are pretty good and the list of "Huge Must-Fix Problems" is vanishingly small. At that point polish and optimisation comes to the forefront.
Completely re-using TransGamings DCOM work was out of the question as since they forked Wine developed its own implementation that everyone was more familiar with, and it would not only have been incredibly obnoxious to just delete that code given the context it was developed in, but it would have prevented us evolving the code in a way that could check for regressions.
Yes, it's certainly possible. Right now quite a few copy protection tricks do work on Wine, unfortunately there aren't many people working on this area right now. We're somewhat limited by being an open source projec too: we can't do stuff that might violate the DMCA.
You're right that the GNU movement is based on the concept of free as in speech software, which implies free as in cost also. However, whilst the set of Linux users and members of the GNU movement certainly overlap, they aren't the same: there are lots of Linux users who do not perceive the freeness of the software they use to be the most important thing. If the sets were identical, then by definition nobody could make money selling software for Linux.
There are quite a few pro pieces of software available for Linux, at large expense. You could just as easily say that somebody who paid for Red Hat Enterprise Linux would not balk at the purchase of Resin or WebSphere. I'm not sure either count as facts, but they are equivalent anecdotes.
To be honest, yes, I think you'd be an unusual case. I don't know many people who are OK with buying non-free software for a Mac or Windows machine, but don't do so for a Linux machine. Typically either they don't use non-Free software at all, or they are ambivalent on the matter and are equally likely to purchase a program if it's useful to them whatever system they're running.
Now what is anecdotal, in a way, is my belief that the Linux userbase will grow rapidly in coming years but will grow to include people who are not also followers of the GNU belief system. I think that's already happened to some extent: lots of people seem to use proprietary 3D graphics drivers, for instance. And that'll become more the case in future as corporate rollouts pick up steam.
That comes back to my original statement, that Apple don't want to be number 3 psychologically, because if there were double the number of Linux users than Mac users, I doubt many companies would develop for the Mac anyway due to believing that Linux users don't buy software. I can't see that happening, especially given the lack of firm statistics.
Font hinting is needed (as opposed to just being nice to have) in the following two situations:
The other aspect is Win32 programs on Wine. Wine uses FreeType to render text, like nearly all Linux programs do, and because the Win32 widget toolkit is positional incorrect metrics can cause labels to be wrapped or clipped, causing GUI corruption. Therefore correct hinting is essential.
Hopefully you see now why it would be a useful ability to have, even though the work of David Turner on the auto-hinting algorithms is truly great.
For more information on the (complex) issues behind font rendering and hinting you can read about it here.
I'm not sure what your anecdotal point about your own purchasing history is for. I have bought software and games for both platforms. I have bought more software for Windows because I have used it for longer, and because it's more necessary there as you don't have a huge library of free stuff (or rather, you never used to, these days there is a much greater freeware library available).
You seem to be trying to demonstrate, again, that Linux users are less likely to buy a given piece of software than Windows users are. I say, assuming all things are equal there is no discernable difference, and I've never seen any statistics that show there are.
By "unique software" yes I'm talking about Logic Audio type apps. I don't think you'd make much money trying to sell a programmers text editor to Linux users because there are already many available, most of them quite good. So if you are in the business of selling text editors you might conclude that Linux users are all cheapskates who never buy things, but you'd be wrong. Rather, you'd be complaining that the damn Arabs never buy any sand. You'd have more success selling software which isn't commodity. That's true of any market, and actually there are plenty of examples of Linux users paying for what they can get for free elsewhere if the commercial version has value-add.
I'd disagree actually, if a post is just factually wrong then you should reply pointing out why, not try and hide the original post. The moderation system was designed to highlight interesting posts and suppress the flood of garbage from trolls/automatic post bots etc. It's widely abused anyway, eg one of my other posts is now marked as Troll. Possibly there shouldn't be any negative mods at all.
OK, so hinting and anti-aliasing are different things. You can use both, or none, or one of either, it doesn't matter.
Hinting is about correctly grid fitting the pixels. It can (and should) be used at any size, but is most noticable at small sizes (which is most text on a computer screen). If you want to see text that isn't hinted, look at this.
So to say "hinting is ugly" is not correct: hinting by itself modifies glyph shapes, for the better (that's why people want it). As you can see from the picture, unhinted text is very ugly indeed - unpleasant to read in fact. What you probably mean is that some people don't like anti-aliasing. On Windows it's off by default,on Linux it's on but you can disable it globally very easily, and on MacOS X you cannot disable it without special purpose hacks that often break when you upgrade.
FreeType is capable of anti-aliasing and also using TrueType hinting, which it can do in one of two modes: automatic and by using the data embedded in the fonts. In automatic mode it tries to guess based on the shapes of the glyphs. The algorithms used are fascinating and developed specifically for FreeType, to work around the patent. However the autohinter doesn't always get it right so FreeType can also use the real hinting engine it is supposed to use, if you have a license.
"Font smoothing" is just another way of saying anti-aliasing, except in that thread you linked to where they appear to be using it to refer to what is normally known as sub-pixel anti-aliasing which exploits properties of how pixels are laid out on LCDs to make it look better. Microsoft calls this "ClearType". FreeType can do this too.
In short: hinting and anti-aliasing/smoothing are different things, which have different purposes. It's possible to have one without the other.
Note that I said "unique". So a word processor or music player is a bad example, because there are many free alternatives which come already loaded. Games would be a good example.
Given that my job is to write commercial software for Linux, I don't think it's any harder than it would be writing for Windows or the Mac market. We certainly have no issues with people expecting things to be free (or at least, no worse than the typical warez kiddies you get on every platform).
So, I stand by my statement about 1st, 2nd, 3rd positions. There is much more software out there that targets "Windows and Mac" than "Windows and Mac and Linux", and virtually none which supports >3 desktop operating systems. I think usage is very much related to the size of the market.
A few days? I should be so lucky. That post went from +5 Insightful to +0 Redundant in about 20 minutes. That sort of thing does not make these discussions more interesting.
I'd like to say that's unusual, but it's not. I've had "-1 Insightful" posts on Apple stories before (but nothing else). If people are going to moderate, they should read the moderation guidelines: mod up the good posts, don't mod down unless it's clearly noise (GNAA posts etc).
Let's see about that page: OpenPlay is something they have themselves abandoned, and nobody uses it. Microsoft open sourced WiX too, does that mean they're suddenly supporting open source? No.
Darwin is mostly made up stuff that was already open source, and the parts that are new aren't generally useful as they're inferior to what's already available (eg compare performance of Darwin to Linux on POSIX benchmarks sometime).
The Rendezvous code they released consisted of a 350kb piece of C, the largest comment in which was attempting to justify the indentation style in use. It does not compile, out of the box, on anything apart from MacOS X due to missing code. Rather than try and reuse such an opaque file, people tend to use Howl instead. Apparently even Apple don't use it as their implementation differs from the one they released.
Finally Chess.app is open source because it's based on GNU Chess which is GPLd, ie they had no choice in the matter. Not impressive.
The "beautiful font engine" you are referring to is FreeType which has indeed worked around this patent. The auto-hinter unfortunately does not work correctly for non-Latin fonts as it relies upon aspects of the geometry. Hinting is still required if you wish to display vector based non-Western glyphs, and it's also required to produce metrically compatible glyphs with systems that are hinted.
I don't blame you. Already that fairly innocent post has had 4 overrated mods, which can only have come from Apple apologists who can't quite identify what about my comment detracts from the discussion but don't want people to see it anyway.
Overrated is a stupid mod, it's not meta-moderated and some people have clearly figured that out. They're now using it to push an agenda without fear of being excluded from the moderation system. Quite why Taco lets this huge hole persist is beyond me, but a "+2 Insightful" post from somebody with the karma bonus is unfortunately something I only ever see on Apple related stories. Shame.
Fortunately I have excellent karma and have had forever, so I'm not bothered by posting.
Anyway, the same answer is derivable via logic. Linux is a direct competitor to MacOS X. They are both vying for second place in the market, and history has shown that while most companies write for the top OS, a few write for both the first and second place OSs, but virtually none write for the top 3. Therefore it's of vital importance that they remain (psychologically if not statistically) in 2nd place.
Linux is rapidly taking over that spot, according to IDC it already has in fact, therefore anything they can do to hinder adoption of Linux is a good move from the perspective of their business model. Therefore they have no incentive to de-license these patents.
They're tying products together artificially, that's normally a pretty good sign.
Since you've clearly forgotten, Apple has contributed enormously to the Open Source movement.
Have they? The only project I can think of where Apple engineers have actually submitted a non-trivial number of patches is GCC, and they maintain their own private fork with many patches not available upstream. Their patches are not available in discrete form anywhere, if you want to get them you have to scrub them out of their own tree.
And that's the best example! The KHTML changes are returned in the form of a massive undocumented patch dump, which makes them extremely hard to use. Note that the latest KDE/KHTML release does not seem to contain many improvements from Apple: that's why. FreeBSD got a few test suites out of it, iirc, and not much else. GNU Binutils is still waiting for many of the patches Apple wrote to be made available in a useful form, etc etc.
Basically Apple have perfected the art of releasing [L]GPLd software they use back to the community in a useless fashion. That's their biggest contribution.
As for the first "large corportation" to embrace open source, I wonder how you can ignore IBM even if you have arbitrarily ruled that Red Hat and other such companies are not "large".
Saying "it's OK because everybody does it" isn't any kind of moral or legal argument at all - even if you were correct, it wouldn't make it right. At best, it indicates a serious problem with the system. At worst, it indicates that Apple is run by ego-centered millionaires who want to model the world in their image.
There are reasons journalists try and protect their sources, indeed, there are official systems in some countries for whistleblowers. By all means prosecute the people who violated the NDA, if you can find them. Forcing news sites to reveal sources sets a very dangerous precedent though.
Ah, but it was not always so. When Windows 95 came out, a lot of people left the Mac platform because - though it's hard to believe now - it was in many ways better than the MacOS of the time. What makes you think Apple would have done what it's done today, or continue to do that, if it was dominant?
By that logic they shouldn't produce iTunes for the Mac either, as it has such a tiny market share.
Where do you think their electricty comes from? That's a lot of bio-fuel right there.
Uh, no. If you actually read up on Adam and Eve it seems to be some kind of widget library abstraction with a generic data engine behind it - a bit like what XUL/RDF Templates were supposed to be back in the early days of Mozilla.