Because there is a perception that users should not be running servers. In particular, typical users are told "you need a firewall", which would block any webserver they actually managed to set up. KDE has a very nice system tray webserver, but how many distributions have iptables set up so it's inaccessible? Not to mention how many people are behind NAT these days.
Users need a way to transfer files to each other. What they should do is run an actual server for this, but they are told they should not, so every end user program gets a file transfer protocol tacked on - users can't be expected to say "yeah,get the file from http://my.ip.address:8080/foo", so they're given a way to transfer directly.
On Windows systems, rename.exe files to.exe.unsafe. Refuse to run such files and pop up a stern warning message. If they just rename it, well they get what they deserve.
There's already a pretty strong warning in the open dialog they've clicked. Users are used to blindly following a set of instructions, including "ignore the warning message" - just about any piece of hardware they get will come with such instructions. This would not make one jot of difference.
If I were to click the link in gaim, on a linux machine (assume for the sake of argument, this browser is platform independent and would work on a linux box)?
You seem to have left this dangling, but this could do everything it does in windows on linux. Play annoying sounds at login? Certainly. Change your wallpaper? Easy. Change your browser to their own one? Slightly harder, but very much doable - sure, it won't change it for other users, but that's not really an issue. The problem here is not the OS directly, it's how easy it is to download and run code - and other than educating users or completely locked down trusted computing platforms, I can't see a way to solve this.
It really is interesting that Free as in Beer tends to be the import thing for individuals while Free as in I get the source is important to companies. Most end users don't care about having the source and frankly they are useless to them as getting the igs, and Gerber files would be for your average car buyer.
I think it's probably because people making company purchasing decisions aren't spending their own money, so they're more willing to spend extra if it seems necessary. Also, a company is more likely to have a few programmers on staff who can make changes they need than an individual is to be able to make changes themselves.
I am sorry if you have ever produced any OSS code. Which project?
I maintain a plugin for noatun (though that's mainly sticking two libraries to each other), fixed minor bugs in emerde and uptimed, scraps of work on a few other things. Not much as yet, but I do what I can with my current coding ability.
Even if Apple had used Linux and GPL they still would have made Quartz closed. All of the graphical goodness would still be locked up and out of the GPL sphere. You can buy a closed source X-Windows for Linux right now and not violate GPL. It would be just a simple to create a closed source Quartz, Cocoa, and Carbon frameworks.
It would very much be possible, but I think it would have cost them more - less of the basic libraries on linux can be freely used in propriety products. And that might, just might, have been the tipping point between making it closed and open.
The simple truth is that they probably would not have used GPL just so they wouldn't had to worry about the risk violating the it. Instead they would have used BeOS.
They use lgpl things now which have the same requirements as regards the project itself. Sure, they could have used BeOS, but again, it would have cost them more.
The key here is that the FreeBSD developers have every right to choose the license they want to put their work under. It is there work and they decide what to do with it. No one has any right to their work that they don't grant.
Of course they have the right. But that doesn't mean I can't say I think they're doing bad here.
Every piece of code that is released under OSS helps. Even if latter it gets used in a closed source project.
This is the central issue. I don't think it does, because given the choice between GPL library and propriety (licenseable for $$$) library that do the same thing, companies have an incentive to go open source - it saves them money. Wheras if we have GPL, propriety and BSD libraries, companies simply take the BSD one and stay closed.
It is a simple choice. If you like BSD then release your code under BSD. If you like GPL release your code under GPL. But don't try and tell other people how they should release their code! That really goes counter to the entire "Free as in speech" ideal of OSS.
I support their right to release code under BSD, just like I support the right to anti-religious hate speech (first example that comes to mind). But I think they're harming me and OSS as a whole, and I don't think they should do what they are doing, and will say this. Free speech does not mean the right to never be criticised for your speech.
This has got the be the strangest thing I have ever heard in my life. How are you being harmed? Because someone else gets some benefit from OSS code that you don't?
Because they're destroying the advantage people could get by going OSS, an important encouagement.
Good grief! The more I read you post the clear it is that you have never written a line of OSS code.
Well, shows how good a judge you are, because you're wrong, plain and simple.
On the other hand porting elm to Xenix 286 was a nightmare, mostly because the author wasn't aware that there were machines in which sizeof(char *) > sizeof(int)... and porting from Win32 to Win64 would probably be as hard.
I don't see why it has to be. Well written code will port easily across architectures, badly written code won't. Of course if your OS has multiple architectures it's more immediate, but good programmers know coding properly is better in the long run anyway.
We were early adopters of Digital UNIX. Brand new UNIX, brand new hardware, the first ever fully 64-bit UNIX, we had ALL the arrows in our back. And when I sat down on our first box, back when there was NO open source repository for the Alpha and EVERY program was a port... there wasn't even a stable gcc that I could find... 90% of the programs we used were built with no more than a couple of makefile tewaks to get the library names right. Most of the ones that didn't port easily were using configure.
Well, perhaps you had it better - the pre-configure days were mostly before my time. But that's a far better experience than I've had trying to simply get supposedly supported straight linux working on my newly acquired alpha.
Not in the same category as using a no-cd crack to play a warez copy of a game, I'll admit. But I bet the EULA and/or license for the game forbids you from using such software.
The license is meaningless under my country's law. I bought the game, I can do what I want with it provided I don't violate the law (including their copyright), and that includes patching it so I don't have to stick the CD in all the time.
But if you filter words like "crack" and "keygen", you'd basically have to do that manually by making special rules for those sorts of things. But then why wouldn't folks just start using different words?
And they don't for pr0n?
And what about if those words were being used for legitimate purposes? (Admittedly, I can't think of any legitimate reason most people would do so)
Braindead internet filtering software caused lots of trouble when I was researching hash functions.
It's only because of Apple's goodwill that code even exists. Apple could just as easily have kept using their AT&T-licensed code and not released any of it, or they could have gone with BeOS, or the NT kernel (which wasn't out of the question at all in the late '90s before it got forcibly stuffed with Win32 crap). There's this undercurrent of "if it wasn't BSD Apple would have had to use Linux and the kernel would still be open" that I'm perceiving... and that's not true.
If *bsd were not there they would be forced to spend money licensing/developing it themselves (ok, not if Apple had the licenses lying around anyway, but more generally) if they didn't want to opensource. It's an incentive.
The FSF defines "a derived work" to mean "anything that uses an API that requires they use a GPLed library". Not "anything that's linked with a GPLed library". If they didn't, you couldn't use gcc to compile proprietary software, you couldn't ship proprietary software on Linux.
Then why is glibc lgpl?
Which supports what I just wrote. That's why I said "open systems with GPL implementations", not "proprietary GPLed APIs". An open system is one that is defined in terms of public interfaces and protocols, that isn't defined by an implementation.
Ok, how about the objective C (IIRC) frontend for gcc? It's gpl because it had to be (they wanted to ship object code and have the end user link it), and it's not as if there weren't other C compilers around at the time they could have licensed - they chose gcc because it meant they didn't have to go out and pay for one or pay people to code it. If there were a BSD licensed optimising C compiler, they would have gone with that and we would not have got a free objective C compiler as quickly as we did.
You say that, and yet there really are people coding for.NET.
That's an addition, the existing win32 API will still be there.
I guess you could say it's simply chance that a group of people with a strong server background designed and implemented a strong server OS, but I really think that's pushing the term a bit far.
It's rather that it's simply chance Apple is making a desktop rather than a server OS. Any company who wanted could take the freebsd codebase, hire a handful of programmers, and make a - yes, only very marginally, but it would be a margin that made the difference - better server OS.
You have a complete hosted UNIX for Windows, and it's going to be in there as a standard part of Vista. But there's a huge difference between "X contains an implementation of an open system" and "X is an implementation of an open system".
The core native system calls, interfaces, and protocols in Mac OS X are UNIX ones. Even many of the Mac OS 9 compatibility components in Carbon, like aliases, are accessed through UNIX APIs.
Cocoa and Carbon are running on top of Darwin, they use the UNIX APIs to do their job, and Apple has moved a long way away from the Carbon/Classic model to a much more UNIX-based one in Cocoa.
The internal architecture is that the UNIX interface is on the same level as the win32 one. Sure, there's the lower level native NT API, but that's deliberately undocumented and not meant to be used by anything lower level. Wasn't vms considered open once it had a posix layer, even if it wasn't the lowest layer of the system?
OS/2 is dead
So are most of the commercial unicies
and Wine illustrates the difference between an open API and a closed one.
I'm not sure it does. Sure, it's imperfect, but I seem to have a similar chance of getting a windows program to run on wine as getting an unported program from one unix to run on another, or a random java program to run on a non-Sun JVM. So whilst I agree specifications should be open, it appears to make little difference when the code itself isn't.
The UNIX API is stable enough and small enough that implementing enough of UNIX to run command line tools is a decent one-quarter college course. I created a subset of the UNIX API in *Fortran* after reading "Software Tools" and working through the examples, and it was good enough to make porting '80s era apps to Ratfor from C by semi-automatic code practical.
True enough, but the flipside of that is there isn't that much to it, which leads to a lot of system-dependent stuff, so having an implementation of the unix API doesn't make program portability a done deal.
Meanwhile it's taken Wine a decade to get to the point where it runs real apps and it's still playing catch-up... a decade after Linus started developing Linux you had people porting Linux APIs back to traditional UNIX systems!
It's at the point where I would expect a typical windows program to work on it - I certainly feel it's at a similar level to compatibility between linux and traditional unix systems.
Compare to the source trees on opendarwin.org... even without the XNU-x86 code.
Apples and oranges - comparing what MS shipped with what's available from the darwin community. There is a similar level of stuff around for SFU, though it's far more scattered - but that's disorganisation, not a reflection on the project itself.
Um, the "open system" versus "proprietary system" distinction arose long before there were open-source UNIXes available, long before there was a GNU manifesto. The FSF chose to implement a UNIX clone in HURD not because UNIX was the best OS design they knew (a lot of the FSF were agressively dismissive of UNIX) but because it was an open system that wasn't subject to the whims of a single company.
The impression I got was that unix was chosen because the components could be replaced one piece at a time while still having a working OS.
but because it was an open system that wasn't subject to the whims of a single company... by the mid '80s not even AT&T could have made a major change to the UNIX API and gotten away with it... as proven by the failure of the System V TLI API to supplant Berkeley sockets.
There's no way MS could get away with changing the win32 API these days. Adding to it, sure, but plenty of unicies do that too.
Whether the source to XNU is open or closed, the vast majority of interfaces to XNU are open standards, so even Darwin x86 is just as much an open system as any commercial UNIX has ever been.
Yes. But if the commercial unicies were open enough, what's the point of freebsd? The idea of OSS was that that isn't free enough.
Meanwhile, FreeBSD remains a superior server operating system, and UNIX software runs efficiently and natively on both.
If freebsd is better on the server for now it's by fortune more than anything else. And just about anything runs unix software efficiently and natively, including windows.
Windows is closed in the "open source" sense, and the "open systems" sense, and Microsoft has much more control over it than AT&T ever had over commercial UNIX or Apple has over the UNIX and BSD APIs that OS X is built on. The difference in "openness" between Windows and OS X is immense, real, and meaningful.
You have the posix APIs in windows as well, and Apple's added APIs like Cocoa/Carbon are just as closed as the windows API, quite possibly more so since there are no alternative implementations wheras windows has OS/2 and wine (Yes, one of them is based on the NeXTStep API, but it's diverged far enough that that's not really any use). So I don't really see this difference.
Apple doesn't get all the work of the FreeBSD programmers, because they aren't using all of FreeBSD.
But the license allows them to take any and all that they want.
And FreeBSD gets the work of the Apple programmers, there's ongoing projects to incorporate code that Apple wrote and included in Darwin... such as launchd... into FreeBSD.
True, but it's only by Apple's goodwill that that code is available. And Apple being a for-profit company, their goodwill is not something that can be relied upon.
Erm, there's GPL code in Darwin too. The GPL doesn't require that applications running on open systems with GPL implementations be GPLed.
The GPL requires that anything that uses a GPL library be GPLed. The obvious example is readline - it being GPL left companies a choice between not using the functionality, reimplementing it themselves, or making their software GPL, and there is more open source software because of it. Now that libedit exists, companies no longer have to make that choice. But this could be applied equally well to many libraries
They let me run more free software on my Mac than I ever could on Windows.
I doubt that. Every large OSS project I've seen has had a windows port, and the smaller ones usually compile fine against SFU.
Because the XNU kernel for the x86 (a tiny part of Darwin) may be a proprietary UNIX kernel at this point, but it's a UNIX kernel, and that means it's still an open system.
They write code and they want that code to be used by the most people possible. That is their return. They want it to be compatible with everything (GPL, proprietary, etc.); and so they chose a license as close to public domain as possible.
And, while done with the best of intentions, I feel this was an antisocial thing to do. There's no incentive to make your software opensource so you can use all these cool GPL libraries if you can get equivalents with no strings at all.
Public domain would be the choice of most people who choose to license with MIT, BSD, etc., except for the legally uncertain ground of software liability. So basically all these licenses are public domain + "don't sue us".
Plus don't remove the attribution. This matters a lot to some people.
FreeBSD is still far superior to Mac OS X as a server. OS X is much slower and bulkier, it has no standard UNIX tape support, it doesn't implement softupdates or jails or pretty much any of the other features of FreeBSD that make it a great server OS.
All I can say is I'm very surprised. Have the OSX developers removed these features? If so, what were they smoking?
So rather than saying "the freebsd team has made sure there is a propriety OS which will always be better than theirs", try "the freebsd team has made sure there is a proprietary UNIX which is good enough as a server, and better than Windows as a desktop". Which is a win-win situation for this long term FreeBSD developer, thank you very much.:)
So you've replaced one propriety system with a better propriety system which will be harder to switch people away from. I don't feel that's something to celebrate.
Because I don't want to be a second citizen as a user of a Free OS. If the propriety OS is superior in every way, the free system becomes relegated to that used by those who can't afford quality, discouraging hardware and in particular software support for it. And I want to use a Free system, I want this to be normal enough that hardware and software makers support it.
And that never happens with GPL software!
Every ISP that used Linux and doesnt contribute code back gets a leg up with no return!
Every person that uses GNU Cash gets a leg up with giving anything back!
Just about every Firefox and OO.org users gets a benefit without giving anything back.
The difference here is that they are helping their direct competitors, and quite possibly people they have an idealogical opposition to.
Is OS/X better than FreeBSD? From what I hear FreeBSD is a better server platform than OS/X.
For that to be the case Apple would have had to have taken the OS and then made it worse, which seems very implausible. The Apple team gets all the work of the FreeBSD team, which gets none of theirs, so even if FreeBSD has many more programmers, Apple can still get ahead.
The things that made OS/X better as a desktop where never OSS. Even if they had used a Linux kernel the graphics system "Quartz" and the user interface would still be closed source.
I don't think they would to the same extent. The number of basic libraries that are pure GPL would mean it would require a lot of reimplementation effort from Apple if they wanted to keep things closed.
What it really comes down to is Freedom. The Freebsd team choose to release their work under the BSD license. That is their right. Since I doubt you contribute code to that project and I know I don't what right do we have to complain?
The right of someone harmed by another's actions. I honestly feel the FreeBSD team are making propriety systems more entrenched, and making the world worse for those who want to run free software.
They make them known through their actions, not their complaints. If the OP would prefer a different kind of site, it would be far more effective to go to a site of that kind. If society as a whole prefers it,/. will wither and die.
I am in the same situation, and find bounces make up far more of my spam than anything else. If mail servers were configured not to send them, that would cut my spam problem by an order of magnitude.
While I realize that this is/., and that/. is "supposed" to be for that 1% of the computer using market that speaks in lanquage the "norms" can't understand, but seriously would like to know why should I care?
You've answered yourself. If you don't want to care, no-ones stopping you finding another website, it's not as if there's a shortage of them. Perhaps you could show a little common courtesy and not try and spoil it for those of us who do, but I guess that's too much to ask for these days.
The point is that by going with the BSD license, the freebsd team has made sure there is a propriety OS which will always be better than theirs. It's not about the license Apple chooses, it's about open source giving them a leg up for no return.
It should be a safe assumption that the regular infantry whos letters are oft cited from that era would be average for the time period.
Not at all. Most people then couldn't write, so comparing the average of those who could with the average of those who can under today's education systems is not at all fair.
Slashdot Mirror
Users need a way to transfer files to each other. What they should do is run an actual server for this, but they are told they should not, so every end user program gets a file transfer protocol tacked on - users can't be expected to say "yeah,get the file from http://my.ip.address:8080/foo", so they're given a way to transfer directly.
There's already a pretty strong warning in the open dialog they've clicked. Users are used to blindly following a set of instructions, including "ignore the warning message" - just about any piece of hardware they get will come with such instructions. This would not make one jot of difference.
You seem to have left this dangling, but this could do everything it does in windows on linux. Play annoying sounds at login? Certainly. Change your wallpaper? Easy. Change your browser to their own one? Slightly harder, but very much doable - sure, it won't change it for other users, but that's not really an issue. The problem here is not the OS directly, it's how easy it is to download and run code - and other than educating users or completely locked down trusted computing platforms, I can't see a way to solve this.
I think it's probably because people making company purchasing decisions aren't spending their own money, so they're more willing to spend extra if it seems necessary. Also, a company is more likely to have a few programmers on staff who can make changes they need than an individual is to be able to make changes themselves.
I maintain a plugin for noatun (though that's mainly sticking two libraries to each other), fixed minor bugs in emerde and uptimed, scraps of work on a few other things. Not much as yet, but I do what I can with my current coding ability.
Even if Apple had used Linux and GPL they still would have made Quartz closed. All of the graphical goodness would still be locked up and out of the GPL sphere. You can buy a closed source X-Windows for Linux right now and not violate GPL. It would be just a simple to create a closed source Quartz, Cocoa, and Carbon frameworks.
It would very much be possible, but I think it would have cost them more - less of the basic libraries on linux can be freely used in propriety products. And that might, just might, have been the tipping point between making it closed and open.
The simple truth is that they probably would not have used GPL just so they wouldn't had to worry about the risk violating the it. Instead they would have used BeOS.
They use lgpl things now which have the same requirements as regards the project itself. Sure, they could have used BeOS, but again, it would have cost them more.
The key here is that the FreeBSD developers have every right to choose the license they want to put their work under. It is there work and they decide what to do with it. No one has any right to their work that they don't grant.
Of course they have the right. But that doesn't mean I can't say I think they're doing bad here.
Every piece of code that is released under OSS helps. Even if latter it gets used in a closed source project.
This is the central issue. I don't think it does, because given the choice between GPL library and propriety (licenseable for $$$) library that do the same thing, companies have an incentive to go open source - it saves them money. Wheras if we have GPL, propriety and BSD libraries, companies simply take the BSD one and stay closed.
It is a simple choice. If you like BSD then release your code under BSD. If you like GPL release your code under GPL. But don't try and tell other people how they should release their code! That really goes counter to the entire "Free as in speech" ideal of OSS.
I support their right to release code under BSD, just like I support the right to anti-religious hate speech (first example that comes to mind). But I think they're harming me and OSS as a whole, and I don't think they should do what they are doing, and will say this. Free speech does not mean the right to never be criticised for your speech.
So whether your system is open won't really affect how portable your code is, no?
Because they're destroying the advantage people could get by going OSS, an important encouagement.
Good grief! The more I read you post the clear it is that you have never written a line of OSS code.
Well, shows how good a judge you are, because you're wrong, plain and simple.
I don't see why it has to be. Well written code will port easily across architectures, badly written code won't. Of course if your OS has multiple architectures it's more immediate, but good programmers know coding properly is better in the long run anyway.
We were early adopters of Digital UNIX. Brand new UNIX, brand new hardware, the first ever fully 64-bit UNIX, we had ALL the arrows in our back. And when I sat down on our first box, back when there was NO open source repository for the Alpha and EVERY program was a port... there wasn't even a stable gcc that I could find... 90% of the programs we used were built with no more than a couple of makefile tewaks to get the library names right. Most of the ones that didn't port easily were using configure.
Well, perhaps you had it better - the pre-configure days were mostly before my time. But that's a far better experience than I've had trying to simply get supposedly supported straight linux working on my newly acquired alpha.
The license is meaningless under my country's law. I bought the game, I can do what I want with it provided I don't violate the law (including their copyright), and that includes patching it so I don't have to stick the CD in all the time.
And they don't for pr0n?
And what about if those words were being used for legitimate purposes? (Admittedly, I can't think of any legitimate reason most people would do so)
Braindead internet filtering software caused lots of trouble when I was researching hash functions.
If *bsd were not there they would be forced to spend money licensing/developing it themselves (ok, not if Apple had the licenses lying around anyway, but more generally) if they didn't want to opensource. It's an incentive.
The FSF defines "a derived work" to mean "anything that uses an API that requires they use a GPLed library". Not "anything that's linked with a GPLed library". If they didn't, you couldn't use gcc to compile proprietary software, you couldn't ship proprietary software on Linux.
Then why is glibc lgpl?
Which supports what I just wrote. That's why I said "open systems with GPL implementations", not "proprietary GPLed APIs". An open system is one that is defined in terms of public interfaces and protocols, that isn't defined by an implementation.
Ok, how about the objective C (IIRC) frontend for gcc? It's gpl because it had to be (they wanted to ship object code and have the end user link it), and it's not as if there weren't other C compilers around at the time they could have licensed - they chose gcc because it meant they didn't have to go out and pay for one or pay people to code it. If there were a BSD licensed optimising C compiler, they would have gone with that and we would not have got a free objective C compiler as quickly as we did.
That's an addition, the existing win32 API will still be there.
I guess you could say it's simply chance that a group of people with a strong server background designed and implemented a strong server OS, but I really think that's pushing the term a bit far.
It's rather that it's simply chance Apple is making a desktop rather than a server OS. Any company who wanted could take the freebsd codebase, hire a handful of programmers, and make a - yes, only very marginally, but it would be a margin that made the difference - better server OS.
You have a complete hosted UNIX for Windows, and it's going to be in there as a standard part of Vista. But there's a huge difference between "X contains an implementation of an open system" and "X is an implementation of an open system".
The core native system calls, interfaces, and protocols in Mac OS X are UNIX ones. Even many of the Mac OS 9 compatibility components in Carbon, like aliases, are accessed through UNIX APIs.
Cocoa and Carbon are running on top of Darwin, they use the UNIX APIs to do their job, and Apple has moved a long way away from the Carbon/Classic model to a much more UNIX-based one in Cocoa.
The internal architecture is that the UNIX interface is on the same level as the win32 one. Sure, there's the lower level native NT API, but that's deliberately undocumented and not meant to be used by anything lower level. Wasn't vms considered open once it had a posix layer, even if it wasn't the lowest layer of the system?
OS/2 is dead
So are most of the commercial unicies
and Wine illustrates the difference between an open API and a closed one.
I'm not sure it does. Sure, it's imperfect, but I seem to have a similar chance of getting a windows program to run on wine as getting an unported program from one unix to run on another, or a random java program to run on a non-Sun JVM. So whilst I agree specifications should be open, it appears to make little difference when the code itself isn't.
The UNIX API is stable enough and small enough that implementing enough of UNIX to run command line tools is a decent one-quarter college course. I created a subset of the UNIX API in *Fortran* after reading "Software Tools" and working through the examples, and it was good enough to make porting '80s era apps to Ratfor from C by semi-automatic code practical.
True enough, but the flipside of that is there isn't that much to it, which leads to a lot of system-dependent stuff, so having an implementation of the unix API doesn't make program portability a done deal.
Meanwhile it's taken Wine a decade to get to the point where it runs real apps and it's still playing catch-up... a decade after Linus started developing Linux you had people porting Linux APIs back to traditional UNIX systems!
It's at the point where I would expect a typical windows program to work on it - I certainly feel it's at a similar level to compatibility between linux and traditional unix systems.
Compare to the source trees on opendarwin.org... even without the XNU-x86 code.
Apples and oranges - comparing what MS shipped with what's available from the darwin community. There is a similar level of stuff around for SFU, though it's far more scattered - but that's disorganisation, not a reflection on the project itself.
It was 4 in the UK. (and yes, it did happen)
The impression I got was that unix was chosen because the components could be replaced one piece at a time while still having a working OS.
but because it was an open system that wasn't subject to the whims of a single company... by the mid '80s not even AT&T could have made a major change to the UNIX API and gotten away with it... as proven by the failure of the System V TLI API to supplant Berkeley sockets.
There's no way MS could get away with changing the win32 API these days. Adding to it, sure, but plenty of unicies do that too.
Whether the source to XNU is open or closed, the vast majority of interfaces to XNU are open standards, so even Darwin x86 is just as much an open system as any commercial UNIX has ever been.
Yes. But if the commercial unicies were open enough, what's the point of freebsd? The idea of OSS was that that isn't free enough.
Meanwhile, FreeBSD remains a superior server operating system, and UNIX software runs efficiently and natively on both.
If freebsd is better on the server for now it's by fortune more than anything else. And just about anything runs unix software efficiently and natively, including windows.
Windows is closed in the "open source" sense, and the "open systems" sense, and Microsoft has much more control over it than AT&T ever had over commercial UNIX or Apple has over the UNIX and BSD APIs that OS X is built on. The difference in "openness" between Windows and OS X is immense, real, and meaningful.
You have the posix APIs in windows as well, and Apple's added APIs like Cocoa/Carbon are just as closed as the windows API, quite possibly more so since there are no alternative implementations wheras windows has OS/2 and wine (Yes, one of them is based on the NeXTStep API, but it's diverged far enough that that's not really any use). So I don't really see this difference.
But the license allows them to take any and all that they want.
And FreeBSD gets the work of the Apple programmers, there's ongoing projects to incorporate code that Apple wrote and included in Darwin... such as launchd... into FreeBSD.
True, but it's only by Apple's goodwill that that code is available. And Apple being a for-profit company, their goodwill is not something that can be relied upon.
Erm, there's GPL code in Darwin too. The GPL doesn't require that applications running on open systems with GPL implementations be GPLed.
The GPL requires that anything that uses a GPL library be GPLed. The obvious example is readline - it being GPL left companies a choice between not using the functionality, reimplementing it themselves, or making their software GPL, and there is more open source software because of it. Now that libedit exists, companies no longer have to make that choice. But this could be applied equally well to many libraries
They let me run more free software on my Mac than I ever could on Windows.
I doubt that. Every large OSS project I've seen has had a windows port, and the smaller ones usually compile fine against SFU.
Because the XNU kernel for the x86 (a tiny part of Darwin) may be a proprietary UNIX kernel at this point, but it's a UNIX kernel, and that means it's still an open system.
How so? Because the API is documented?
And, while done with the best of intentions, I feel this was an antisocial thing to do. There's no incentive to make your software opensource so you can use all these cool GPL libraries if you can get equivalents with no strings at all.
Public domain would be the choice of most people who choose to license with MIT, BSD, etc., except for the legally uncertain ground of software liability. So basically all these licenses are public domain + "don't sue us".
Plus don't remove the attribution. This matters a lot to some people.
All I can say is I'm very surprised. Have the OSX developers removed these features? If so, what were they smoking?
So rather than saying "the freebsd team has made sure there is a propriety OS which will always be better than theirs", try "the freebsd team has made sure there is a proprietary UNIX which is good enough as a server, and better than Windows as a desktop". Which is a win-win situation for this long term FreeBSD developer, thank you very much. :)
So you've replaced one propriety system with a better propriety system which will be harder to switch people away from. I don't feel that's something to celebrate.
Because I don't want to be a second citizen as a user of a Free OS. If the propriety OS is superior in every way, the free system becomes relegated to that used by those who can't afford quality, discouraging hardware and in particular software support for it. And I want to use a Free system, I want this to be normal enough that hardware and software makers support it.
The difference here is that they are helping their direct competitors, and quite possibly people they have an idealogical opposition to.
Is OS/X better than FreeBSD? From what I hear FreeBSD is a better server platform than OS/X.
For that to be the case Apple would have had to have taken the OS and then made it worse, which seems very implausible. The Apple team gets all the work of the FreeBSD team, which gets none of theirs, so even if FreeBSD has many more programmers, Apple can still get ahead.
The things that made OS/X better as a desktop where never OSS. Even if they had used a Linux kernel the graphics system "Quartz" and the user interface would still be closed source.
I don't think they would to the same extent. The number of basic libraries that are pure GPL would mean it would require a lot of reimplementation effort from Apple if they wanted to keep things closed.
What it really comes down to is Freedom. The Freebsd team choose to release their work under the BSD license. That is their right. Since I doubt you contribute code to that project and I know I don't what right do we have to complain?
The right of someone harmed by another's actions. I honestly feel the FreeBSD team are making propriety systems more entrenched, and making the world worse for those who want to run free software.
I haven't used freebsd as a server, I just find it incredibly unlikely that Apple's additions have made it a worse OS.
They make them known through their actions, not their complaints. If the OP would prefer a different kind of site, it would be far more effective to go to a site of that kind. If society as a whole prefers it, /. will wither and die.
I am in the same situation, and find bounces make up far more of my spam than anything else. If mail servers were configured not to send them, that would cut my spam problem by an order of magnitude.
You've answered yourself. If you don't want to care, no-ones stopping you finding another website, it's not as if there's a shortage of them. Perhaps you could show a little common courtesy and not try and spoil it for those of us who do, but I guess that's too much to ask for these days.
The point is that by going with the BSD license, the freebsd team has made sure there is a propriety OS which will always be better than theirs. It's not about the license Apple chooses, it's about open source giving them a leg up for no return.
Not at all. Most people then couldn't write, so comparing the average of those who could with the average of those who can under today's education systems is not at all fair.