Maybe it's just them covering their own asses against the lawsuits and public backlash that might come if a widespread virus ever does hit OSX.
Whatever the reason, they've been selling AV software in their stores for years now, and even included an antivirus with.Mac subscriptions for a couple years, in spite of these programs essentially not doing anything.
I'll go out on a limb here, though, and I'll advise that you don't install any of Apple's recommended Antivirus packages. They're resource hogs that don't really help you. YMMV.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure the best programmers are those geniuses who make lots of mistakes and then throw hissy fits when management creates procedures to find and fix those mistakes. Now that I've I know, I'm going to dismantle all my QA procedures and hire the sloppiest programmers I can find!
Personally I like root being God as an option of last resort. I don't use root for everyday things, but prefer to have limited sudoers who can only do certain things. But if I really get stuck, it's nice to have God in your back pocket.
In fact, it really frustrates me that Windows has moved away from this. I hate being "Administrator" and still having the OS tell me I can't do things, with no option to override.
What I really want is an OS that rarely forces me to be root, but if I do log in as root, it gets out of my way and lets me do things.
Please leave me out of this. I'll have you know I'm never "out of ten".
(No, I didn't choose the name in order to make that joke. If I had, I would have picked a better joke.)
But ok, more seriously, I really wish more hardware vendors would provide open source drivers and tools. Dell, for example, will sometimes come close to denying support unless you run their diagnostic software (OpenManage and such), but then they provide closed-source packages for a couple specific distros, and nothing else.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they're supporting Linux at all, and I don't expect them to support every single distribution out there. On the other hand, if they'd just release the source under an open source license, then other people could put in the work of supporting other distros. Are their drivers and tools really doing anything so super-secret that releasing the source would threaten their business? Is HP going to steal OpenManage or something?
You have a decent point, but I don't fully agree. If "beating Microsoft" involved making a viable alternative to Windows/Office that I can actually use instead of Windows/Office for my real-life job, than I'd say the goal of "beating Microsoft" has done a lot of promote Linux and other open source products.
Being able to stick Windows users (which have been the majority of computer users) in front of a computer running Linux and expect them to be productive without a steep learning curve has helped win converts. A bigger user base and greater business viability means more funding. More funding means more developers.
Now I wouldn't claim that user base is everything, nor would I want Linux developers to aim for a Windows clone. Still, making a system that people want to use isn't a waste of time, and having money and developers hasn't hampered the progress of Linux.
Yes, I said "once", and that was because I was relaying a specific anecdote about how a college degrees and certs aren't everything. A college education can give you a depth of understanding that isn't otherwise available. Notice I said (and emphasized) "can". It can help you develop that understanding, but only if you're a smart person who pays attention and works at it. Lots of people aren't.
Like I said, lots of people skate by and come out learning some things, but still being inferior to someone with a little common sense, a little experience, and a half-decent work ethic.
I will note, however, that a formal CompSci degree seems to be far more helpful in producing good programmers than good support people and sysadmins. My theory is that being a good programmer involves much more knowledge about how things ideally should work, whereas support/administration is often more about knowing how things tend to break when they don't work the way they ideally should. Knowing how things break in the real world tends to be something you can learn a little more easily from experience.
Qualifications aren't just for show, they mean that you've extended your knowledge in the area and that someone has verified it.
But the question is often, "how well did anyone verify it?" There are lots of people who just barely squeaked by through college or their certifications, and so sometimes those qualifications don't mean as much as they're intended to.
I had a boss once who hired two college drop-outs and a guy with a CompSci degree and certs out the ying-yang all for the same job. Within a couple years, he'd promoted the two drop-outs and was busy looking for justification to fire the CompSci major because he was sloppy, slow, and had a bad attitude. These things happen.
What's more, I'd say that a lot of time, education is a poor band-aid to cover lack of experience. I don't mean to argue that education isn't important, but I've had a regular problem with computer science majors fresh out of college who are to focused on how things are "supposed to work". Like something breaks, and it's sitting there broken, and the recent grad sits there and tells me, "it's not supposed to do that!" So I'm thinking, "no shit, sherlock, if it was doing what it was supposed to, it wouldn't be 'broken', would it?"
This is what I came in here to say. You can get into IT without a degree, but expect to start at the bottom. Being interested, motivated, ready to learn, ready to work hard, and pleasant to be around can get you a job at the bottom, but no one with sense will hire someone to a more senior position without training or experience.
Some people do base their hires on things that can be put on resumes. They're looking for education, certs, years of experience, etc. Other people are looking for someone that they like, who they think they can work with, and who they expect will work hard, almost regardless of the resume.
So there's hope, but like I said, show that you're interested and motivated, willing to start at the bottom and work your way up, learning the job as you go.
There's a problem with your logic in that some books really are simply "out of print". The publisher isn't printing more, and has no intention of ever doing so. They're not going to print a whole new run just because 1 person wants to read the book.
In fact, lots of books and music have gone "out of print" and essentially been lost. They just don't exist and aren't available unless some collector has a copy somewhere. We might find one day that there are works that would have been completely lost if not for piracy.
I think you're close to something here, but not quite there. When you buy a used book, there's not a clear way in which you're supporting the new book, and supporting the copyright holder of that original book is even more indirect.
In response to issue #2, no one is saying that used book resellers deserve to starve, but they really aren't the issue. Used book resellers don't own the copyright to the books they're selling, so when you copy those books, those resellers aren't being wronged morally/ethically/legally. Even if their business model becomes obsolete, that's not really my problem to solve. You know, the whole thing about buggy-whip makers...
Even point #3, which seems the most sensible to me, doesn't quite hold up. There are a variety of reasons that things go out of print, and it's not clear how to get them back in print. Again, you might have something, but it's pretty unclear, indirect, and uncertain.
I guess what I'm saying is, I would agree with you that the situation it more complicated than whether the original creator gets directly compensated. At the same time, I feel like your arguments might be a little too complicated, a little too much of a stretch.
I think part of the problem is that people are feeling like businesses aren't really providing the things they want. Lots of people think it's all about "free". The ebook is free, so greedy people will just get it. But often it's about availability and a sense of fairness, and people feeling like they don't want to have to search around for rare out of print books in order to read something, only for the purpose of propping up a secondary market.
I think if you want to make an argument here, the only real angle I can see is that, if you destroy the secondary market for a book, you're also diminishing the value of new books (i.e. if I can't resell my books, then the price I'm willing to pay for new books is less). However, that issue is complicated by the fact that the book is out of print. lessening the market for out of print books isn't going to retroactively decrease the price of the book when it was new, taking money out of the pocket of the author.
You could argue that declaring "open season" on all out of print books makes it less likely for people to buy new books, because if the books goes out of print then its value drops. But that seems to assume that speculative book collectors who buy books new, hoping they'll go out of print and become rare, are a significant part of the book-buying market. If that were the case, these books probably wouldn't go out of print, since there'd be such high demand.
Some developers are using CIDER to bring games to OSX, and I'm afraid I don't really see the problem with that. Whether or not it's "native" is somewhat a matter of what you mean by "native", since it's certainly not emulation. Relying on WINE isn't too far different from relying on a set of libraries that happen to not be installed by default.
And when you run things on WINE, they run pretty fast and stable. You don't need to rely on Codeweavers, since they could simply test to make sure their software runs on the default install of WINE. It'd be one option for developers to provide cross-platform compatibility even if their primary development platform is Windows.
Now I agree that, ideally, everyone would do real cross-platform development and make their games completely native on Linux and OSX as well. I'm just saying that if software developers are finding that it requires too much additional resources to do that outright, developing with WINE compatibility in mind might be a good middle-ground.
So why would you want to force it to run using something like wine, when it would be less painful to reboot into Windows and run it natively?
I guess it depends on whether you really think it's less painful to do that. You have to close all your applications and everything you're doing, reboot, run the game, and then reboot again to get back to everything else.
And that even ignores the fact that you have to set aside disk space to install a whole other OS, buy that other OS, install it, hunt down drivers, process the updates, and potentially worry about system security and system optimization for a whole other OS. And then if you've miscalculated the amount of hard drive space that you'll need for that second OS, you have to deal with that.
WINE isn't that hard to install these days, and it's not hard to install and run programs in WINE, assuming they work. The integration into your Linux system isn't quite seamless, but it's pretty good.
But the real issue with WINE these days is the part where I said "assuming they work". You can get lots of applications running in WINE pretty smoothly, but you can't count on all your applications to run in WINE. However, if developers set WINE compatibility as a goal it might be a real alternative to using Windows.
You can already run Steam and some games on OSX and Linux. I've played Portal and Half Life 2 on my Mac using Codweavers' software. It played pretty well.
I wonder how much work it would really take to get more games running in WINE or some derivative, assuming that was a goal of the game developers.
are we really sure that management and the "sales drones" are fundamentally incompetent, and that we are fundamentally better?
I would even ask, are these programmers really making the product they think they are? I've seen it happen before that a bunch of developers complain about their sales people, essentially that they were selling it wrong. The salespeople kept focussing on feature set A, while the developers thought feature set B was much more important.
And the problem there was that the customers cared about feature set A, and the salespeople knew it because they were the ones talking to the customers. The developers seemed to be more interested in developing what was fun/interesting to develop, while the customers just wanted certain specific functionality.
You're going to have to offer some support for your claims. I think I've shown pretty clearly how Apple benefits from open source.
Tell me how much it would have cost, exactly, for Apple to build all the pieces of OSX that are from open source projects. Tell me exactly how long it would have taken, in comparison to how long it took. And then explain why it is that Apple would be just as well off to be without that extra time and money.
And keep in mind that you entered into a conversation on a question about whether open source software could ever "catch up" with proprietary software. This wasn't some hypothetical about whether Apple is theoretically awesome enough in your opinion that they could have written a Unix all by themselves, but apparently you're dead set on turning it into one. So tell me, exactly what are the costs of this sort of project.
While you're at it, give me a rundown of the marketing difference that Apple would have to deal with if their OS weren't open source, and statistics on how much popular support they would gain/lose, whether it makes a difference on pricing, how relationships with partners and developers would be different, etc. Let's really run this hypothetical out.
But you're forgetting that this is an "in case I die" file, not "in case of fire" file. Building a flaming safe-launcher in your house may actually increase the likelihood of death.
Ideally, you want to keep the events of jeopardizing your "in case I die" file and your death as separate events.
You've ignored the essential point...the open sourceness has nothing to do with your argument, except that they elected to go with certain elements based on open source projects (along with quite a few from proprietary development).
No, open source has a lot to do with my argument. If the software had come from non-open proprietary projects, then (a) they would have had to pay for them; and (b) they wouldn't benefit from continued community support.
I'm not saying Apple didn't do anything or doesn't deserve credit for their own success. On the other hand, when giving them credit, talking about the good decisions they've made, one should definitely include, "using open source projects heavily" as one of their very good decisions. It allows them, to some extent, to focus on developing things like Aqua, CoreAudio, CoreImage, etc. as well as *targeted* improvements to the underlying OS instead of worrying about the whole underlying OS all the time.
I think you missed my point. Of course I'm not under the impression that everyone with a copyright makes money from it. Notice I said, "to have done some valuable work at some point".
Yeah, GTA sold staggering number of copies, and so have lots of other games. They made their money, and shouldn't have to be collecting royalties on those same games in 50 years in order to stay afloat. Hopefully they'll write a few more games between now and then.
Most of OS X was written in house or brought over from NeXT.
Would you like to offer some support for that... perhaps talk about what parts of the OS are completely original or NeXT creations?
The kernel is Mach, and most of the rest of the OS (Darwin) is derived from FreeBSD and NetBSD. The web server is Apache. Their remote desktop is based on VNC. Their remote access is SSH. The webmail on their server line is Squirrelmail. They use SAMBA for Windows file/print sharing. Safari is from KHTML.
No doubt they bough/produced from good applications, and the GUI is theirs, but it would have been far more expensive and would have taken them far longer to write the OS from scratch.
Whether or not you like Mach is irrelevant to my point. My point was that OSX is open source software with a proprietary GUI layer on top. The reason Apple has gotten as far as it has with OSX as quickly as it has was because they drew from a reserve of open source.
I don't see a particular reason to drag OSX into this, but fine, it only goes to illustrate the point. Apple was able to make OSX such a successful OS as quickly as it did only because it was able to build off of an open source base. Darwin is based on BSD Unix, Webkit is based on KHTML, and OSX is packed full of GNU tools.
But also I think Linux has become very competitive with both OSX and Windows. It seems like it supports a greater variety of hardware then either, it's just as easy to install, and it really is easy to use and attractive. The major downside to Linux that I see is still application availability, but I think that will only last for so long.
Irrelevance? By what standard? Red Hat has a market capitalization of $1.64 billion.
Right now, if I go to download any enterprise-level Linux product or any proprietary Linux product, I'll definitely be able to find RPMs for RHEL. No doubt. I'll probably also be able to find packages for SuSE, and maybe some other distros, but probably not Debian or Ubuntu.
Until that changes, I don't think anyone can claim that Red Hat is irrelevant.
I think you're right, and the idea of "copyright" in general is headed towards some kind of reform over the long term. Eventually we'll find ourselves in a world where it's not sufficient to have done some valuable work at some point, and then sit around and collect money for the rest of your life.
Now I don't know how long people will be able to hold that off, but I think it's just a matter of time. I don't think copyright is going away, but it's either going to be restructured or it's going to be ignored, as it's already starting to be ignored.
Lots of people used to ask whether FOSS could compete with proprietary software. I remember reading lots of people ask, "Will Linux be able to catch up to Windows?" I haven't seen that in a while, and for good reason. I think the fact that lots of people can contribute and no one ever really has to start from scratch means more consistent progress. So if you're a developer and your livelihood is based around building a highly in-demand software and sitting on old innovations, while hoping that FOSS won't catch up, you'll eventually find yourself in trouble.
So now to the big worry-- how are developers going to make money? I'm not sure. There will be demand for software development, and where there's demand, there's money to be made. I don't know if it's through support and services alone, or if there's something else. Maybe you just have a shorter term to make your money, and that term starts when you offer a new innovation first, and ends when other people get around to offering it.
...will eat your metaphorical lunch.
I thought we were drinking metaphorical milkshakes now.
IE7 is definately a standard-ignoring bastard. And assuming you're an FF advocate, remember it didnt pass Acid2 until FF3. And IE8 is shipping in a standard-complaint mode by default, which should help all browsers out.
Complaining that Firefox didn't pass Acid2 until v3 doesn't make a lot of sense if you understand why the test was made. No browsers adhere to all standards 100%, but all the browsers except IE do a fairly decent job of rendering pages the way they're supposed to. So when Acid2 was created, the idea (AFAIK) was to put together a complex rendering that would expose a selection of bugs that would cause every major browser to fail it. It was supposed to be a sort of test that said, "even if your browser is doing a pretty good job, here are some places where it might fall apart."
So it's not supposed to be the end-all be-all test of standards compliance. You can pass the Acid2 test but still not render normal pages properly, or you could generally do a good job rendering pages but fail the test. The fact that it took Firefox some time to pass isn't an indication that it took them a long time to figure it out, but rather that they fixed in in their new rendering engine and took a while to put that rendering engine into their release version of the browser. There wasn't much reason to rush because it wasn't terribly urgent.
But the question is still whether the browser will generally render pages according to the HTML and CSS standards. Most browsers do far better than IE. As for "standard-compliant mode", I still wonder how standard-compliant it will be. Right now, if I make a page, I generally have to design it to the standards, which will make it run in most browsers, and then figure out how to make it display properly in IE. If IE8 makes it so I don't have to do that anymore, a lot of my complaints will go away.
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Maybe it's just them covering their own asses against the lawsuits and public backlash that might come if a widespread virus ever does hit OSX.
Whatever the reason, they've been selling AV software in their stores for years now, and even included an antivirus with .Mac subscriptions for a couple years, in spite of these programs essentially not doing anything.
I'll go out on a limb here, though, and I'll advise that you don't install any of Apple's recommended Antivirus packages. They're resource hogs that don't really help you. YMMV.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure the best programmers are those geniuses who make lots of mistakes and then throw hissy fits when management creates procedures to find and fix those mistakes. Now that I've I know, I'm going to dismantle all my QA procedures and hire the sloppiest programmers I can find!
Personally I like root being God as an option of last resort. I don't use root for everyday things, but prefer to have limited sudoers who can only do certain things. But if I really get stuck, it's nice to have God in your back pocket.
In fact, it really frustrates me that Windows has moved away from this. I hate being "Administrator" and still having the OS tell me I can't do things, with no option to override.
What I really want is an OS that rarely forces me to be root, but if I do log in as root, it gets out of my way and lets me do things.
nine times out of ten this problem is caused
Please leave me out of this. I'll have you know I'm never "out of ten".
(No, I didn't choose the name in order to make that joke. If I had, I would have picked a better joke.)
But ok, more seriously, I really wish more hardware vendors would provide open source drivers and tools. Dell, for example, will sometimes come close to denying support unless you run their diagnostic software (OpenManage and such), but then they provide closed-source packages for a couple specific distros, and nothing else.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they're supporting Linux at all, and I don't expect them to support every single distribution out there. On the other hand, if they'd just release the source under an open source license, then other people could put in the work of supporting other distros. Are their drivers and tools really doing anything so super-secret that releasing the source would threaten their business? Is HP going to steal OpenManage or something?
You have a decent point, but I don't fully agree. If "beating Microsoft" involved making a viable alternative to Windows/Office that I can actually use instead of Windows/Office for my real-life job, than I'd say the goal of "beating Microsoft" has done a lot of promote Linux and other open source products.
Being able to stick Windows users (which have been the majority of computer users) in front of a computer running Linux and expect them to be productive without a steep learning curve has helped win converts. A bigger user base and greater business viability means more funding. More funding means more developers.
Now I wouldn't claim that user base is everything, nor would I want Linux developers to aim for a Windows clone. Still, making a system that people want to use isn't a waste of time, and having money and developers hasn't hampered the progress of Linux.
Yes, I said "once", and that was because I was relaying a specific anecdote about how a college degrees and certs aren't everything. A college education can give you a depth of understanding that isn't otherwise available. Notice I said (and emphasized) "can". It can help you develop that understanding, but only if you're a smart person who pays attention and works at it. Lots of people aren't.
Like I said, lots of people skate by and come out learning some things, but still being inferior to someone with a little common sense, a little experience, and a half-decent work ethic.
I will note, however, that a formal CompSci degree seems to be far more helpful in producing good programmers than good support people and sysadmins. My theory is that being a good programmer involves much more knowledge about how things ideally should work, whereas support/administration is often more about knowing how things tend to break when they don't work the way they ideally should. Knowing how things break in the real world tends to be something you can learn a little more easily from experience.
Qualifications aren't just for show, they mean that you've extended your knowledge in the area and that someone has verified it.
But the question is often, "how well did anyone verify it?" There are lots of people who just barely squeaked by through college or their certifications, and so sometimes those qualifications don't mean as much as they're intended to.
I had a boss once who hired two college drop-outs and a guy with a CompSci degree and certs out the ying-yang all for the same job. Within a couple years, he'd promoted the two drop-outs and was busy looking for justification to fire the CompSci major because he was sloppy, slow, and had a bad attitude. These things happen.
What's more, I'd say that a lot of time, education is a poor band-aid to cover lack of experience. I don't mean to argue that education isn't important, but I've had a regular problem with computer science majors fresh out of college who are to focused on how things are "supposed to work". Like something breaks, and it's sitting there broken, and the recent grad sits there and tells me, "it's not supposed to do that!" So I'm thinking, "no shit, sherlock, if it was doing what it was supposed to, it wouldn't be 'broken', would it?"
I'd suggest starting at a lower level
This is what I came in here to say. You can get into IT without a degree, but expect to start at the bottom. Being interested, motivated, ready to learn, ready to work hard, and pleasant to be around can get you a job at the bottom, but no one with sense will hire someone to a more senior position without training or experience.
Some people do base their hires on things that can be put on resumes. They're looking for education, certs, years of experience, etc. Other people are looking for someone that they like, who they think they can work with, and who they expect will work hard, almost regardless of the resume.
So there's hope, but like I said, show that you're interested and motivated, willing to start at the bottom and work your way up, learning the job as you go.
There's a problem with your logic in that some books really are simply "out of print". The publisher isn't printing more, and has no intention of ever doing so. They're not going to print a whole new run just because 1 person wants to read the book.
In fact, lots of books and music have gone "out of print" and essentially been lost. They just don't exist and aren't available unless some collector has a copy somewhere. We might find one day that there are works that would have been completely lost if not for piracy.
I think you're close to something here, but not quite there. When you buy a used book, there's not a clear way in which you're supporting the new book, and supporting the copyright holder of that original book is even more indirect.
In response to issue #2, no one is saying that used book resellers deserve to starve, but they really aren't the issue. Used book resellers don't own the copyright to the books they're selling, so when you copy those books, those resellers aren't being wronged morally/ethically/legally. Even if their business model becomes obsolete, that's not really my problem to solve. You know, the whole thing about buggy-whip makers...
Even point #3, which seems the most sensible to me, doesn't quite hold up. There are a variety of reasons that things go out of print, and it's not clear how to get them back in print. Again, you might have something, but it's pretty unclear, indirect, and uncertain.
I guess what I'm saying is, I would agree with you that the situation it more complicated than whether the original creator gets directly compensated. At the same time, I feel like your arguments might be a little too complicated, a little too much of a stretch.
I think part of the problem is that people are feeling like businesses aren't really providing the things they want. Lots of people think it's all about "free". The ebook is free, so greedy people will just get it. But often it's about availability and a sense of fairness, and people feeling like they don't want to have to search around for rare out of print books in order to read something, only for the purpose of propping up a secondary market.
I think if you want to make an argument here, the only real angle I can see is that, if you destroy the secondary market for a book, you're also diminishing the value of new books (i.e. if I can't resell my books, then the price I'm willing to pay for new books is less). However, that issue is complicated by the fact that the book is out of print. lessening the market for out of print books isn't going to retroactively decrease the price of the book when it was new, taking money out of the pocket of the author.
You could argue that declaring "open season" on all out of print books makes it less likely for people to buy new books, because if the books goes out of print then its value drops. But that seems to assume that speculative book collectors who buy books new, hoping they'll go out of print and become rare, are a significant part of the book-buying market. If that were the case, these books probably wouldn't go out of print, since there'd be such high demand.
Some developers are using CIDER to bring games to OSX, and I'm afraid I don't really see the problem with that. Whether or not it's "native" is somewhat a matter of what you mean by "native", since it's certainly not emulation. Relying on WINE isn't too far different from relying on a set of libraries that happen to not be installed by default.
And when you run things on WINE, they run pretty fast and stable. You don't need to rely on Codeweavers, since they could simply test to make sure their software runs on the default install of WINE. It'd be one option for developers to provide cross-platform compatibility even if their primary development platform is Windows.
Now I agree that, ideally, everyone would do real cross-platform development and make their games completely native on Linux and OSX as well. I'm just saying that if software developers are finding that it requires too much additional resources to do that outright, developing with WINE compatibility in mind might be a good middle-ground.
So why would you want to force it to run using something like wine, when it would be less painful to reboot into Windows and run it natively?
I guess it depends on whether you really think it's less painful to do that. You have to close all your applications and everything you're doing, reboot, run the game, and then reboot again to get back to everything else.
And that even ignores the fact that you have to set aside disk space to install a whole other OS, buy that other OS, install it, hunt down drivers, process the updates, and potentially worry about system security and system optimization for a whole other OS. And then if you've miscalculated the amount of hard drive space that you'll need for that second OS, you have to deal with that.
WINE isn't that hard to install these days, and it's not hard to install and run programs in WINE, assuming they work. The integration into your Linux system isn't quite seamless, but it's pretty good.
But the real issue with WINE these days is the part where I said "assuming they work". You can get lots of applications running in WINE pretty smoothly, but you can't count on all your applications to run in WINE. However, if developers set WINE compatibility as a goal it might be a real alternative to using Windows.
You can already run Steam and some games on OSX and Linux. I've played Portal and Half Life 2 on my Mac using Codweavers' software. It played pretty well.
I wonder how much work it would really take to get more games running in WINE or some derivative, assuming that was a goal of the game developers.
are we really sure that management and the "sales drones" are fundamentally incompetent, and that we are fundamentally better?
I would even ask, are these programmers really making the product they think they are? I've seen it happen before that a bunch of developers complain about their sales people, essentially that they were selling it wrong. The salespeople kept focussing on feature set A, while the developers thought feature set B was much more important.
And the problem there was that the customers cared about feature set A, and the salespeople knew it because they were the ones talking to the customers. The developers seemed to be more interested in developing what was fun/interesting to develop, while the customers just wanted certain specific functionality.
You're going to have to offer some support for your claims. I think I've shown pretty clearly how Apple benefits from open source.
Tell me how much it would have cost, exactly, for Apple to build all the pieces of OSX that are from open source projects. Tell me exactly how long it would have taken, in comparison to how long it took. And then explain why it is that Apple would be just as well off to be without that extra time and money.
And keep in mind that you entered into a conversation on a question about whether open source software could ever "catch up" with proprietary software. This wasn't some hypothetical about whether Apple is theoretically awesome enough in your opinion that they could have written a Unix all by themselves, but apparently you're dead set on turning it into one. So tell me, exactly what are the costs of this sort of project.
While you're at it, give me a rundown of the marketing difference that Apple would have to deal with if their OS weren't open source, and statistics on how much popular support they would gain/lose, whether it makes a difference on pricing, how relationships with partners and developers would be different, etc. Let's really run this hypothetical out.
But you're forgetting that this is an "in case I die" file, not "in case of fire" file. Building a flaming safe-launcher in your house may actually increase the likelihood of death.
Ideally, you want to keep the events of jeopardizing your "in case I die" file and your death as separate events.
You've ignored the essential point...the open sourceness has nothing to do with your argument, except that they elected to go with certain elements based on open source projects (along with quite a few from proprietary development).
No, open source has a lot to do with my argument. If the software had come from non-open proprietary projects, then (a) they would have had to pay for them; and (b) they wouldn't benefit from continued community support.
I'm not saying Apple didn't do anything or doesn't deserve credit for their own success. On the other hand, when giving them credit, talking about the good decisions they've made, one should definitely include, "using open source projects heavily" as one of their very good decisions. It allows them, to some extent, to focus on developing things like Aqua, CoreAudio, CoreImage, etc. as well as *targeted* improvements to the underlying OS instead of worrying about the whole underlying OS all the time.
I think you missed my point. Of course I'm not under the impression that everyone with a copyright makes money from it. Notice I said, "to have done some valuable work at some point".
Yeah, GTA sold staggering number of copies, and so have lots of other games. They made their money, and shouldn't have to be collecting royalties on those same games in 50 years in order to stay afloat. Hopefully they'll write a few more games between now and then.
Most of OS X was written in house or brought over from NeXT.
Would you like to offer some support for that... perhaps talk about what parts of the OS are completely original or NeXT creations?
The kernel is Mach, and most of the rest of the OS (Darwin) is derived from FreeBSD and NetBSD. The web server is Apache. Their remote desktop is based on VNC. Their remote access is SSH. The webmail on their server line is Squirrelmail. They use SAMBA for Windows file/print sharing. Safari is from KHTML.
No doubt they bough/produced from good applications, and the GUI is theirs, but it would have been far more expensive and would have taken them far longer to write the OS from scratch.
Whether or not you like Mach is irrelevant to my point. My point was that OSX is open source software with a proprietary GUI layer on top. The reason Apple has gotten as far as it has with OSX as quickly as it has was because they drew from a reserve of open source.
I don't see a particular reason to drag OSX into this, but fine, it only goes to illustrate the point. Apple was able to make OSX such a successful OS as quickly as it did only because it was able to build off of an open source base. Darwin is based on BSD Unix, Webkit is based on KHTML, and OSX is packed full of GNU tools.
But also I think Linux has become very competitive with both OSX and Windows. It seems like it supports a greater variety of hardware then either, it's just as easy to install, and it really is easy to use and attractive. The major downside to Linux that I see is still application availability, but I think that will only last for so long.
Irrelevance? By what standard? Red Hat has a market capitalization of $1.64 billion.
Right now, if I go to download any enterprise-level Linux product or any proprietary Linux product, I'll definitely be able to find RPMs for RHEL. No doubt. I'll probably also be able to find packages for SuSE, and maybe some other distros, but probably not Debian or Ubuntu.
Until that changes, I don't think anyone can claim that Red Hat is irrelevant.
I think you're right, and the idea of "copyright" in general is headed towards some kind of reform over the long term. Eventually we'll find ourselves in a world where it's not sufficient to have done some valuable work at some point, and then sit around and collect money for the rest of your life.
Now I don't know how long people will be able to hold that off, but I think it's just a matter of time. I don't think copyright is going away, but it's either going to be restructured or it's going to be ignored, as it's already starting to be ignored.
Lots of people used to ask whether FOSS could compete with proprietary software. I remember reading lots of people ask, "Will Linux be able to catch up to Windows?" I haven't seen that in a while, and for good reason. I think the fact that lots of people can contribute and no one ever really has to start from scratch means more consistent progress. So if you're a developer and your livelihood is based around building a highly in-demand software and sitting on old innovations, while hoping that FOSS won't catch up, you'll eventually find yourself in trouble.
So now to the big worry-- how are developers going to make money? I'm not sure. There will be demand for software development, and where there's demand, there's money to be made. I don't know if it's through support and services alone, or if there's something else. Maybe you just have a shorter term to make your money, and that term starts when you offer a new innovation first, and ends when other people get around to offering it.
...will eat your metaphorical lunch.
I thought we were drinking metaphorical milkshakes now.
IE7 is definately a standard-ignoring bastard. And assuming you're an FF advocate, remember it didnt pass Acid2 until FF3. And IE8 is shipping in a standard-complaint mode by default, which should help all browsers out.
Complaining that Firefox didn't pass Acid2 until v3 doesn't make a lot of sense if you understand why the test was made. No browsers adhere to all standards 100%, but all the browsers except IE do a fairly decent job of rendering pages the way they're supposed to. So when Acid2 was created, the idea (AFAIK) was to put together a complex rendering that would expose a selection of bugs that would cause every major browser to fail it. It was supposed to be a sort of test that said, "even if your browser is doing a pretty good job, here are some places where it might fall apart."
So it's not supposed to be the end-all be-all test of standards compliance. You can pass the Acid2 test but still not render normal pages properly, or you could generally do a good job rendering pages but fail the test. The fact that it took Firefox some time to pass isn't an indication that it took them a long time to figure it out, but rather that they fixed in in their new rendering engine and took a while to put that rendering engine into their release version of the browser. There wasn't much reason to rush because it wasn't terribly urgent.
But the question is still whether the browser will generally render pages according to the HTML and CSS standards. Most browsers do far better than IE. As for "standard-compliant mode", I still wonder how standard-compliant it will be. Right now, if I make a page, I generally have to design it to the standards, which will make it run in most browsers, and then figure out how to make it display properly in IE. If IE8 makes it so I don't have to do that anymore, a lot of my complaints will go away.