I didn't say they were violating the license, just that it annoys me how they choose to contribute.
Sorry, I could have made this comment clearer. GPL and BSD licenses are generally preferred for different things. The areas where BSD is very popular is where the coders find widespread adoption/standardization to be more important that keeping future contributions public. (To some extent the LGPL fills a middle ground). The coders where happy when MS took the BSD licensed TCP/IP stack and incorporated it into Windows. It would be better yet if they kept it open and published the changes, but they didn't. The technologies that fit into this category are generally not usually as time dependent as GPL and normal userspace software. You say you wish Apple was faster publishing the source to Darwin, but why? Very few people seem to be adopting the technologies Apple introduces in Darwin so it is not like they are waiting for the new version to start harvesting for Linux. I know very few people with any interest in seeing this code. Mostly those people are a few hardcore security people looking to tweak things and audit looking for holes, backdoors, and privacy concerns. Aside from that, there are some people interested in violating the license and running a copy on generic hardware. Really, aside from them, who wants to see the source and needs it right away that Apple should make this a priority?
And why do you suppose they started with a kernel they could get under a BSD license?
Mostly because it was the kernel used in NextStep and all the UNIX people that had just taken over the company from their acquisition of Next were intimately familiar with it and advocates of it. Given a choice of two very similar kernels, one BSD and one GPL, the BSD licensed one is more flexible for a business and the GPL one is more likely to get contributions from the outside. Obviously Apple would prefer BSD because of their culture, because they are trying to make a profit (what kernel is on the iPhone?), and because it simplifies their legal obligations.
If Apple were to fork the latest WineHQ Wine, thus requiring them to give code back (LGPL'd and all), I'd argue that it's not because they're so willing to share the code, but because it would take them much more work to bring any of the other forks up to speed. I don't necessarily believe they'd avoid releasing at all, but rather, that they'd stall and delay and maybe give something back every year or two.
Why did Apple choose more permissive licenses for their ZeroConf implementation and for LaunchD and why have they been keeping that code up to date regularly? Is a Windows API re-implementation more like these projects or more like their kernel? Like how they handled Webkit, Apple would probably keep such a project hush hush until it released, but then the coders at Apple would probably be happy to talk to other coders on the project and help re-integrate their work as well as keeping the code they release up to date with the version they have in the shipping version of OS X or the product that includes it. That has been their behavior in the past for projects where there are other, major contributors actively working on it. Realistically, however, Apple is the only one working on Darwin, so they don't have anyone really asking for it to be kept up to date, except the occasionally conspiracy theorist posting on Slashdot... who is unlikely to ever really look at the code anyway.
Just a minor correction, for your lists, both Age of Empires III and Civ IV are out for the Mac, leaving only Elder Scrolls IV as the lone top 10 title not to be ported for 2006. That makes it 9 of 10 and 8 of 10 for the last two years. We haven't yet had a full year of most Macs running on Intel yet, or seen the effect of Cider being used for cheaper, faster ports yet. Also, Mac market share is up about 50% from last year, now making up 8% of the US market. Basically, I see the situation getting better over time, not worse. You mention the lag time, which matters a lot to hardcore gamers waiting for their new fix, but in reality is not too significant for the average gamer. The average gamer buys 3 or fewer games and is a low/mid range system from two years ago, and thus can't play a lot of the big titles until their next upgrade anyway.
...the only games i've played on my Macs have been WoW and Diablo and they use a different development model.
The majority of big game developers (not owned by MS) move to programming with fairly portable and reusable code within a few years because it makes business sense even if they don't want to port to the Mac. They usually license or create an engine, almost all of which work with both ActiveX and OpenGL, making porting fairly minor. Making a Mac port of a game that is or is likely to be successful is just good business and has been for years. The only reason not to do a port is if you're cutting your losses for a game that is going to fail or if your code is a bloody mess and is too hard to untangle... at which point you're going to be screwed soon anyway.
I'm surprised that Snyder ignored a crucial argument in the PDF: that Microsoft supports their products for a lot longer than Firefox. He didn't rebut that point, which was actually pretty reasonable. I'd be interested to see what he has to say about that. In this regard, Microsoft seems far ahead of Mozilla.
The earliest version of IE you can get support for is 5.0, released in 1998. InfoSpan, the leading company providing Firefox support, will do phone support for version 0.9, released in 1999. So IE has about a year on them. However, MS will not actually do bug fixes to IE 5, which in my mind is a critical part of support. With Firefox, you can not only get bug fixes to any version, you can take bids on the fix from multiple vendors or use internal resources. Not only that, but the cost is often not even very high, seeing as most fixes you'd want are already publicly available in a later version of Firefox, so you can just pull in the fix; unlike IE where the code is closed.
I don't really see how you can categorize IE as winning in the support category, let alone being "far ahead."
Microsoft's responsibility is to the vast majority of its customers...
And they serve those customers by deceiving them and claiming to have fewer holes because they keep a lot of their holes secret even after they are fixed? You're also ignoring the number of holes MS finds that they don't fix. I know some people who used to work at MS and even after they started their security drive, the majority of bugs with security implications were not prioritized high enough to be fixed... ever. Sorry, but MS tried to deceive people by pretending holes they did not publicly acknowledge, don't exist and that is just a load of horse shit.
What I find frustrating about Apple is their need to so tightly control every bit of code they borrow.
Partly I think this is because Apple relies upon secrecy in order to be competitive against MS's offerings so they don't like people looking at their codebase for future releases, unlike most OSS projects. They tend to wait until they have a project completely and ready to go before they let anyone outside Apple know it exists, which often means they've reworked code for a year and the original projects has a massive load of work dumped upon them at once.
Look how long it's taken for Webkit to go back into Konqueror...
That is actually a good example, although a bit clouded by all the nonsense people posted about it, when they had no idea what they're talking about. For some fairly obvious for business reasons Apple could not have let slip to MS they were working on their own browser, lest MS retaliate by canceling IE before it is ready, or introducing a lock-in into IE in some way. When Apple did release the code, they did not well document the evolution of their version. Someone commented on this in a forum and suddenly all sorts of people were claiming Apple was screwing over the Konquerer team, or intentionally obfuscating things, or violating the spirit of the license. Of course at that point, no one had asked anyone at Apple for a better breakdown and when someone did, the guys working at Apple went out of their way to help make things easier for them to re-integrate into KHTML. Mind you, because the Konquerer team was not happy with some of the design decisions Apple had made, they delayed implementing most of them. They had been used to being the only ones contributing and were not used to dealing with major contributions from other coders. Lately, they've come around with Apple and several other making regular contributions (something the Konquerer guys consider the best thing to come out of Apple's adoption) and they're moving to merging the WebKit and KHTML branches back together since Apple's contributions are more useful than the inconvenience caused by Apple's architectural decisions. The delay in getting Apple's changes incorporated, however, can't really be blamed on Apple, more than a few days, for the most part it was a conscious decision by the Konquerer developers.
...and don't even get me started on BSD/Darwin, whose policy seems to be "Open whenever we feel like it."
Credit where credit is due, the BSD license does not require Apple to release their changes at all, so doing so on a delayed timetable is still a lot better than most vendors.
Thus, I suspect that, were Apple to include Wine, they'd fork it, improve it quite a lot (though largely in ways that can't easily be integrated back into Wine), assuming they didn't just fork Crossover, Cedega, or the newest version of Wine that's not LGPL'd.
I doubt it. Why do you suppose Apple publishes the Darwin source or any of the other low-level technologies they code (ZeroConf, LaunchD, etc.). They publish them because they actually see the business case for sharing the work with other companies and gaining wider adoption of said technologies. Windows API re-implementations fit in that same category. If possible, Apple would try to share the load with other players. Realistically, I think they would be prevented from using WINE because of their license to MS's code nor do I think they have a lot interest in such a project.
Webkit isn't "from KDE". Apple started with KHTML and went from there, but saying "WebKit from KDE" sounds like they just copied it, which isn't at all true.
Umm, KHTML was written by the Konquerer team for use in Konquerer and other parts of KDE. Apple branched that codebase and started adding to it. They certainly did not invent the codebase, thus this contradicts the claim that Apple has NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome.
Quartz and its related technologies aren't based on PDF: they're original Apple technologies from the ground up.
If they were "from the ground up" Apple would have invented their own vector display format and standard, instead they adopted a published standard invented by Adobe. They may have written all the code themselves, but they were re-implementing the display technology someone else had already invented. This is, in my opinion, a very good thing and it certainly contradicts the claim that Apple won't adopt anything they did not invent.
Just being pedantic. ..
If you want to be pedantic you should have called out the "BeOS bits recreated" comment, since that was the largest oversimplification. Apple did not actually reimplement parts of BeOS as recreate some of the same functionality of their filesystem and OS interaction in completely different ways.
Well, I think there is more to it. They know there is money since they were supposedly asking an outrageous 1 million dollars US, up front, from any publisher who wanted to port it. More than that, however, Valve was founded by two Microsoft employees and I think they seriously drank the kool-aid there. I suspect their coders have little or no experience with anything but DirectX and they are happy to keep it that way. I notice that engineers with diverse skills tend to hire more of the same, whereas engineers that only know one thing tend to hire kids straight from college or with a similar or even more limited skill set, so they don't look incompetent themselves or are at risk of having the newbies promoted above them.
I don't know what all goes on there, that is just my impression from Valve developer comments.
Mac OSX 10.8 British Longhair Now with Windows 1.0 executable loading support!
Well, Apple has had an internal Windows compatibility project for many years, they even considered including it in Copeland. They have license to the APIs right up through the release of WinXP SP1, which is good enough for 95% of software on the market today, although that number will go down as more users target Vista's APIs. I doubt they will go that route though.
that's a pretty misleading way of examining the games. the 5 games listed there that work on a Mac have release dates that span more than a decade (Myst is 1993?).
So? They're the top selling games of all time, picked for that reason. WoW is only a few years old and is a good representation of the normal gaming market. The Sims is even better, as Sims expansion packs occupied 4 of the top 10 spots last year.
if your argument is that the list you gave is a representative sample of all games released and therefore the time between those top games can be filled with others, i'd have to disagree.
That is not my argument. My argument is that the top 10 games in a year represent a significant portion of most people's gaming time and for the most part, that situation is not very bad for Mac users. The casual gamer can easily find 1 to 3 games to play in a year and that is all most people buy. If their tastes are average, they're even better off. I don't think the games available are a large deterrent to the average person, even if it is the the relatively small hardcore gamer market. This isn't even taking into account the console gaming market's mitigating effect.
but it's hard to provide evidence beyond suggesting that you take a walk through the Mac games section of your local CompUSA, well maybe "walking through" it is an overstatement since it'll be about 20 boxes (of which a majority will be solitaire compilations).
Hmm, their Website claims the one closest to my house has 122 mac gaming titles in stock. 34 of those are in either card games or puzzle/trivia/board categories leaving 88 in action, RPG, shooters, and strategy. Not that it matters because if they did have only 20 games, so long as they included 8 of the top 10 games of the year, 5 of the top 6 of all time, and 5 standby games like solitaire compilations, the average person would be happy enough not to consider it a serious detriment to using that platform.
It is my opinion that because of the overlap of technical people and hardcore gamers and because of the the "popular wisdom" on Slashdot and the like, people don't actually look at what games people buy, and how many, and which of those are on the Mac to see how much the difference in available games effects normal people. The popularity of the Wii should have woken a few people up to the fact that Slashdot is not a good predictor of the mainstream gaming market and that entrenched ideas about who buys games and what type and what matters... well it is often just completely wrong.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again now: Objective C is exactly at the sweet spot for a computer language...
This may well be true (I've only dabbled with it). The sad fact is, the best technology may not be the best choice depending upon what is popular. Apple has been damaged before by supporting better technologies, that never caught on in the mainstream simply because of momentum or marketing. Objective C might be way better than C# or java or C, but if the dev tool makers and the developers don't adopt it, then it will become another wall between Windows and OS X, hindering migration and portability. If Objective C cannot gain developers on Windows and Linux then, it were better they moved to support Java and/or C# (although "timeo Danaos, et dona ferentes" applies to MS as much as to the Greeks).
Combined with the brilliant minds at Adobe (they hire a large number of the top Indian graduates each year), there's no reason why they couldn't get Photoshop working using such technology.
Having spoken to the all indian dev team working on Framemaker, I hope your comment was sarcasm. (I expect MadCap to slaughter them within 5 years of Blaze's release.) Anyway, Adobe could continue to use a deprecated API and try to work around it, but I don't think any architect would think that is wise in the long term.
...there have also been plenty of complaints that the OSX version is buggy and doesn't run as well.
Umm, I've mostly heard complaints that the Windows version is buggier actually. There is plenty of software that is badly ported or not available on OS X, but you picked a crappy example. Of course it cuts both ways, since iTunes on Windows is pretty crappy by comparison, and you can't get OmniGraffle at all.
Plus how many people avoids becoming switchers because you can't run games?
Some, but not as many as most people on Slashdot probably think. The hardcore gamer market is not as large as it is vocal. The casual gamer has a several year old machine and by the time they own one that can play a given game, most of them (especially outside the hardcore market) are ported to OS X. The top 10 games in a given year account for about half of game sales, and the last time I checked, 8 out of 10 had been ported within a year.
When did they release a Mac version of Halo? What about Halflife?
That's where a lot of people are misled. Most gamers could not run Halo on their machine for years, even if the owned a PC. And what most people care about is The Sims. In fact, if you look at the list of top selling games of all time, according to wikipedia you have:
The Sims (16 million shipped) - simultaneous Windows and Mac release
StarCraft (9.5 million) - simultaneous Windows and Mac release
World of Warcraft (9.3 million subscribers) - simultaneous Windows and Mac release
Half-Life (8 million) - Windows release only, no Mac - there are some interesting theories why.
Diablo II (4 million) - simultaneous Windows and Mac release
Myst (6 million) - Mac release before Windows
Do you see how the average, gamer who is not hardcore would not be too perturbed by the lack of choice?
The trouble is they have NIH and so won't just work with the wine project.
Apple? NIH?!? Umm, the BSD subsystem, Webkit from KDE, OpenStep from Next, BeOS bits recreated, MAC from TrustedBSD, PDF as the basis for their display from Adobe, dtrace from Solaris, Apache, CalDav from Oracle... I could go on.
Apple might avoid the WINE codebase, but only because they have rights to much of an older version of the Windows API directly from having won a lawsuit against MS quite a while ago when MS stole their code. I don't think Apple would otherwise have a problem supporting WINE and I would not be surprised if Apple employees have submitted code to WINE or one of the offshoot projects. I think, however, they're probably content with the current ease of running Windows apps, inconvenient enough that not many mainstream developers can ignore OS X, but easy enough so that businesses are not put off and people are not afraid of trying OS X as their primary OS. I would not be surprised, actually, if this feature was added at the request of Parallels, whose latest RC supports making Windows apps the default for opening filetypes in OS X (which will launch the VM and open the file in the specified application.
They can't keep selling it at a loss and hope to eventually make a profit, since Microsoft's online music store isn't as comprehensive as iTunes.
Considering Apple runs the ITunes store at near break even prices, Apple can't afford to sell players at a loss either. Truthfully, though, both companies make money peripherally, MS by licensing WMP and by locking customers into Windows upgrade cycles, and Apple with increased brand awareness and sales of Macs.
If you are serious about OSS then you will leave Zimbra alone because, although they *call* it 'Open Source' what they are really doing is redefining 'Open Source' to suit their marketing strategy. Its released under an *attribution* license not an Open Source license. Its *badgeware*
You're making a common error by confusing "open source software" with "free/libre software." Zimbra is OSS, because you can see the code and make changes to it, with some restrictions. It is arguably not free software because some of the restrictions to the license are bit more restrictive than industry standards.
It cannot be forked; if you make changes to the source you have to be careful to preserve the Zimbra logo all over the place, on every page of the web interface. It creates a legal burden on the user of the source.
Even the BSD license requires the credits be maintained in any future version. Zimbra has taken it further, without doubt, and in so doing have made it hard for a competitor to make a commercial fork. They have not, however, done much to hinder regular users of the software who want to customize versions for their own use. Basically, the restrictions don't matter to users, just competing vendors, which is certainly not ideal but is not a deal killer for most users. It also works with established open standards, so once off of Exchange, there is nothing preventing you from later migrating to Citadel or iCal server or something else entirely.
For small and medium businesses, Zimbra is a great choice. For a very large business like IBM who is likely to be contributing a lot of code to whatever system they use, they'd probably be better off with something with a more traditional license, like GPL. Of course, anyone making purchasing decisions at IBM or the like probably already know that a lot more concretely than I do, so I'm not too concerned I misled them.
We paid for licensing to get iPhones and Blackberries to synch properly and support editing on the device without screwing up all the time. I believe we wrote our own connector for Palm devices, engineering time not being free.
True, and really the only valid point you made.
I've used Exchange servers for years and I've used Zimbra and Lotus. I think I have a pretty good handle on where each one is weak. I've even used Exchange 2007, unlike most people here and I have experienced where it still falls down.
I'm not a fanboy, but the OP was right - nothing can fuck with it, not even close.
Umm, okay, what other solutions have you tried and which you're comparing it to? Have you tried, Lotus, Zimbra, Citadel, and iCal? Or are you just assuming Exchange is better without having tried anything else?
I provided a concrete list of where in my experiences Exchange is inferior. Where in particular do you find it to be superior.? It is easy to say it is better, but tell me a few concrete ways. What features does it have that are better? Is it more stable (sure isn't in my experience). How is Exchange so much better? I'm listening or are you just an astroturfer paid to spout FUD as an AC to try to make it seem like people with experience prefer Exchange?
The OWA client for Exchange 2007 is so good that there are companies who are getting rid of Outlook for all normal mail users and having everyone use the web client.
Having used the previous version I had hopes all the bug reports I sent MS would be fixed in the 2007 version. I was disappointed. For years now at my former employer we had to transfer certain files via CD or shared folders because as e-mail attachments they would render the entire Exchange Web interface for a user inoperable until an admin went in and removed that e-mail and attachment.
If you go to Microsoft's support pages and look at which features are supported via which interface they all out 92 features, 9 of which are fully supported in the Web interface.
marketing websites and resellers say different things. resellers get massive breaks and pass them on to customers. Our Exchange 2007 organization license was just under $3k from our reseller and our CALs were $25 per user.
And the same is true for the competition. If you have enough users or want to support it in house, you can get away with as little as zero licensing fees for OSS solutions.
OWA light does suck (firefox, opera, safari, etc). But if you can use IE, OWA is great.
Yeah great if you ignore the missing features and if you use a nonstandard browser that only works on one platform and which is banned in many secure environments.
Simply wrong. There are no additional licenses required to use Exchange ActiveSync on your CAS server.
You have to license a third party plug-in for most smartphones in order to get them to interact properly with an Exchange server. At least that has been our experience.
You have to buy a blackberry enterprise server if you want to use blackberries, but you had to do that before and will have to do it again in the future.
But do you have to if you want to use Blackberries and other smartphones with CalDav. For most the answer is no (Palm, iPhone, all T-Mobile), although I have not investigated blackberry in particular.
Outlook, OWA (web), EAS (mobile), OVA (voice), and basically any client that supports POP3 or IMAP4 if you choose to turn those features on, on the server. Nobody says you are limited to the native Exchange MAPI unless you choose to do so.
Except Exchange only supports a subset of features using POP and IMAP and lacks full support for scheduling, calendars, etc. In addition that means you're running two different protocols for the same purpose increasing your exposure to security risks. Running a crippled Web client or a crippled desktop client is not the same thing as getting your choice of all features on any client adhering to the standard, which is why we have standards and why MS avoids them.
True, but do you really blame them?
Blame? Who cares about blame? I'm interested in what features each solution offers and if MS does not want to provide features for strategic reasons then I certainly do ake that into account.
As nice as it would be to load Exchange up on Linux, it just doesn't help MS make more money by doing that.
Strangely I have no interest in MS making more money, only in saving money for myself and my clients. If MS wants more of my money or none at all they will find they are getting none at all in most cases. Why would you even consider this a mitigating factor when comparing two solutions?
True, and really the only valid point you made.
Bullshit. The truth is every one of the items I listed is an area where Exchange is losing in comparisons. If you actually looked at the costs of both solutions side by side or even took bids requests on such a project you'd have a much better idea. There are a lot of open and hidden costs to exchange and it is winning right now on three things:
Yes, I would love to have this functionality in the OSS world. Where is it?
I don't see any features you list that are not included in Zimbra. Additionally, you don't have to buy the connectors for your smartphone since they pretty much all support CalDav for free now. Additionally, you only have to pay for support and for a connector to support exchange clients and you have to pay once, not every few years. You don't have to buy Office for your home system either and it does not have to be a Windows machine.
It sounds to me like you decided there was no replacement for Exchange instead of actually looking at the other options on the market, especially Zimbra. Zimbra is a near drop in replacement for an Exchange server. You'll probably want to pay for support and migration services for the first year, but in the end you're off the upgrade cycle, have more choices, flexibility, and platforms supported.
$100 per user is outrageous for software that is integral to your business? I don't think so.
You don't judge the cost of something only relative to how important it is, you also judge it compared to other offerings in the market. If something works 90% as well, but costs 1% as much, it is reasonable to consider. If something works better and costs less, well that is something you may want to consider even more. Is $100 a person too much for staples every year? Without them your business would become disorganized. But no one pays $100 a person because you can get them for a lot less from a competitor. The same is now true for calendar/e-mail/scheduling software.
The OSS solution would have to be damn close in functionality to justify not spending $100 per user, and none of them are.
Like I said, a few years ago, I'd have agreed (for most medium and large businesses). Now, however, in many ways OSS competitors like Zimbra are more than close in functionality, they are superior in functionality including all the ways I listed in the post you're responding to. Do you know any features where Zimbra is inferior to Exchange that balances out the list of ways it is superior? It seems to be winning on cost, functionality, interoperability and flexibility. The only way I know in which it is inferior is in that there are not as many engineers experienced with it, but assuming you're hiring quality people, that is not a large concern.
Basically your assertion that Exchange is better, is unsupported by anything so far and your claim that cost does not matter is absurd.
s there some particular reason you need to replace Outlook for an Open Source alternative? This makes no sense to dump something that works and is clearly the best solution right now.
Up until a few years ago, I would have agreed it was the best solution for most businesses, but times have changed. I don't know what industry you're in, but a lot of larger companies are introducing more Linux and Macs on their networks and the ability to function cross-platform and across a variety of clients is a huge feature for a lot of companies.
Unless you just want to save a couple of bucks, there's nothing magical about an Open Source product that makes it better.
According to MS, in order to license the current version of exchange it will cost you $4000 per server + $97 per user + some unnamed fee if you want to interconnect with other companies servers. So, assuming you have 1000 people and two servers, you're looking at over $100K. And for that price you can only use all the functionality if all your clients are on Windows, so your advertising people on Macs and your software development team on Linux both end up running their own little calendaring servers or using a shitty Web interface that has not kept up with the regular client. People with smartphones also end up costing you extra for connectors that allow them to access some of the functionality of your Exchange server, instead of all the functionality of a CalDav server.
To summarize, the failures of Exchange are:
licensing costs
future licensing costs for upgrades to support new clients
lousy cross platform support
added expense to support smartphones
lack of choice for clients
lack of choice for server platform (only Windows and VMWare) Whereas CalDav servers like Zimbra also support OS X, Linux, Solaris, etc.
lack of choice for support and customization and services, only MS instead of RedHat, Zimbra Inc, IBM, etc. (If MS does not fix a security hole tht is a problem for you, you're screwed, whereas with CalDav you can hire someone else to fix it or even fix it using internal programming resources)
...there's nothing magical about an Open Source product that makes it better.
Umm, not magical, but being OSS is a feature, one that Exchange is lacking. It is not the only feature that matters, but it does bring significant benefits, including reduced risk and protection from vendor lock-in.
I don't know of MS holds a patent on the UI, but I haven't seen it anywhere else.
This function is available with the CalDav server standard and that particular feature is available in the implementations in the open source Zimbra client/server and the 10.5 version Apple's iCal server/client. I don't know about other implementations, but I imagine most other ones either include this or will soon, as Caldav has really taken of in adoption by major projects. Zimbra even offers that feature via the Web interface to their server.
Also, with respect to calendaring, in Outlook you can open up several calendars (yours and others) side-by-side in order to see who's free when.
I think Evolution has an interface like this (works with CalDav), but if I recall Zimbra allows you to overlap as many calendars as you want in one window, making the comparison quite a bit easier IMHO.
I'd definitely look at Zimbra if you're serious about a OSS solution with lots of features and compatibility with both standards and proprietary interfaces (they have a full featured Exchange plug-in so users can still use Exchange as their client if they want). The server will run on all the popular Linux distros, OS X, and as a VMWare appliance.
You do realize that a lot of atheists are against abortion, too, right?
A lot of people are misinformed. The argument to ban abortion hinges upon defining fetuses as having human rights, which is not supportable from a scientific perspective, only by applying non-observable criteria to them, i.e. a soul. As for atheists opposed to abortion, I'm sure there are a few, but there are also atheists opposed to killing fish, which does not mean it is constitutional to take that choice away from everyone else seeing as there is no conflict of rights, the only legitimate reason for laws aside from the exceptions spelled out in the constitution.
Your kidney has only your own human DNA.... A fetus has a complete set of human DNA, half of which is different from that of the woman carrying him or her. Which of these convolutions were terribly absurd?
My kidney has a full set of DNA just like a fetus has a whole set of DNA, neither of which are identical to the parents. What's the difference again.
Where does the constitution say anything about abortions?
The same place it bans teaching creationism as science, the first amendment. Until someone writes an anti-abortion law that defines a person using non-religious terms in a way that includes fetuses and not a lot of other things we kill, thus justifying protecting the rights of said fetus, abortion is an issue of separation of church and state.
I think that your implied assertion that the only justifications for banning abortion are religious is ill-founded. This would imply that no atheist in existance opposes abortion, and I'm fairly certain that this is not the case.
Let me clarify. Laws are supposed to be mediating conflicting rights between citizens. There is no, non-religious justification for claiming a fetus is a citizen or person with rights any more than my claiming pigs have rights and it is illegal to kill them. There could be a non-religious law that bans abortion, but to be legal it would have to include a legal definition of a person that includes fetuses, but does not include all the other living tissues we routinely kill and it would further have to do so in a way that was not provably a deception trying to mask a religious doctrine becoming law (ala creationism and intelligent design).
No stats, but I'm always hesitant to say any position is only justified by religion.
To date I've never seen a non-religiously based anti-abortion law. There could be one, but to avoid classifying my kidney, semen, or pet as a person and making it illegal to kill them, it would have to do some absurd convolutions.
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Sorry, I could have made this comment clearer. GPL and BSD licenses are generally preferred for different things. The areas where BSD is very popular is where the coders find widespread adoption/standardization to be more important that keeping future contributions public. (To some extent the LGPL fills a middle ground). The coders where happy when MS took the BSD licensed TCP/IP stack and incorporated it into Windows. It would be better yet if they kept it open and published the changes, but they didn't. The technologies that fit into this category are generally not usually as time dependent as GPL and normal userspace software. You say you wish Apple was faster publishing the source to Darwin, but why? Very few people seem to be adopting the technologies Apple introduces in Darwin so it is not like they are waiting for the new version to start harvesting for Linux. I know very few people with any interest in seeing this code. Mostly those people are a few hardcore security people looking to tweak things and audit looking for holes, backdoors, and privacy concerns. Aside from that, there are some people interested in violating the license and running a copy on generic hardware. Really, aside from them, who wants to see the source and needs it right away that Apple should make this a priority?
And why do you suppose they started with a kernel they could get under a BSD license?Mostly because it was the kernel used in NextStep and all the UNIX people that had just taken over the company from their acquisition of Next were intimately familiar with it and advocates of it. Given a choice of two very similar kernels, one BSD and one GPL, the BSD licensed one is more flexible for a business and the GPL one is more likely to get contributions from the outside. Obviously Apple would prefer BSD because of their culture, because they are trying to make a profit (what kernel is on the iPhone?), and because it simplifies their legal obligations.
If Apple were to fork the latest WineHQ Wine, thus requiring them to give code back (LGPL'd and all), I'd argue that it's not because they're so willing to share the code, but because it would take them much more work to bring any of the other forks up to speed. I don't necessarily believe they'd avoid releasing at all, but rather, that they'd stall and delay and maybe give something back every year or two.Why did Apple choose more permissive licenses for their ZeroConf implementation and for LaunchD and why have they been keeping that code up to date regularly? Is a Windows API re-implementation more like these projects or more like their kernel? Like how they handled Webkit, Apple would probably keep such a project hush hush until it released, but then the coders at Apple would probably be happy to talk to other coders on the project and help re-integrate their work as well as keeping the code they release up to date with the version they have in the shipping version of OS X or the product that includes it. That has been their behavior in the past for projects where there are other, major contributors actively working on it. Realistically, however, Apple is the only one working on Darwin, so they don't have anyone really asking for it to be kept up to date, except the occasionally conspiracy theorist posting on Slashdot... who is unlikely to ever really look at the code anyway.
Just a minor correction, for your lists, both Age of Empires III and Civ IV are out for the Mac, leaving only Elder Scrolls IV as the lone top 10 title not to be ported for 2006. That makes it 9 of 10 and 8 of 10 for the last two years. We haven't yet had a full year of most Macs running on Intel yet, or seen the effect of Cider being used for cheaper, faster ports yet. Also, Mac market share is up about 50% from last year, now making up 8% of the US market. Basically, I see the situation getting better over time, not worse. You mention the lag time, which matters a lot to hardcore gamers waiting for their new fix, but in reality is not too significant for the average gamer. The average gamer buys 3 or fewer games and is a low/mid range system from two years ago, and thus can't play a lot of the big titles until their next upgrade anyway.
...the only games i've played on my Macs have been WoW and Diablo and they use a different development model.The majority of big game developers (not owned by MS) move to programming with fairly portable and reusable code within a few years because it makes business sense even if they don't want to port to the Mac. They usually license or create an engine, almost all of which work with both ActiveX and OpenGL, making porting fairly minor. Making a Mac port of a game that is or is likely to be successful is just good business and has been for years. The only reason not to do a port is if you're cutting your losses for a game that is going to fail or if your code is a bloody mess and is too hard to untangle... at which point you're going to be screwed soon anyway.
The earliest version of IE you can get support for is 5.0, released in 1998. InfoSpan, the leading company providing Firefox support, will do phone support for version 0.9, released in 1999. So IE has about a year on them. However, MS will not actually do bug fixes to IE 5, which in my mind is a critical part of support. With Firefox, you can not only get bug fixes to any version, you can take bids on the fix from multiple vendors or use internal resources. Not only that, but the cost is often not even very high, seeing as most fixes you'd want are already publicly available in a later version of Firefox, so you can just pull in the fix; unlike IE where the code is closed.
I don't really see how you can categorize IE as winning in the support category, let alone being "far ahead."
And they serve those customers by deceiving them and claiming to have fewer holes because they keep a lot of their holes secret even after they are fixed? You're also ignoring the number of holes MS finds that they don't fix. I know some people who used to work at MS and even after they started their security drive, the majority of bugs with security implications were not prioritized high enough to be fixed... ever. Sorry, but MS tried to deceive people by pretending holes they did not publicly acknowledge, don't exist and that is just a load of horse shit.
Partly I think this is because Apple relies upon secrecy in order to be competitive against MS's offerings so they don't like people looking at their codebase for future releases, unlike most OSS projects. They tend to wait until they have a project completely and ready to go before they let anyone outside Apple know it exists, which often means they've reworked code for a year and the original projects has a massive load of work dumped upon them at once.
Look how long it's taken for Webkit to go back into Konqueror...That is actually a good example, although a bit clouded by all the nonsense people posted about it, when they had no idea what they're talking about. For some fairly obvious for business reasons Apple could not have let slip to MS they were working on their own browser, lest MS retaliate by canceling IE before it is ready, or introducing a lock-in into IE in some way. When Apple did release the code, they did not well document the evolution of their version. Someone commented on this in a forum and suddenly all sorts of people were claiming Apple was screwing over the Konquerer team, or intentionally obfuscating things, or violating the spirit of the license. Of course at that point, no one had asked anyone at Apple for a better breakdown and when someone did, the guys working at Apple went out of their way to help make things easier for them to re-integrate into KHTML. Mind you, because the Konquerer team was not happy with some of the design decisions Apple had made, they delayed implementing most of them. They had been used to being the only ones contributing and were not used to dealing with major contributions from other coders. Lately, they've come around with Apple and several other making regular contributions (something the Konquerer guys consider the best thing to come out of Apple's adoption) and they're moving to merging the WebKit and KHTML branches back together since Apple's contributions are more useful than the inconvenience caused by Apple's architectural decisions. The delay in getting Apple's changes incorporated, however, can't really be blamed on Apple, more than a few days, for the most part it was a conscious decision by the Konquerer developers.
...and don't even get me started on BSD/Darwin, whose policy seems to be "Open whenever we feel like it."Credit where credit is due, the BSD license does not require Apple to release their changes at all, so doing so on a delayed timetable is still a lot better than most vendors.
Thus, I suspect that, were Apple to include Wine, they'd fork it, improve it quite a lot (though largely in ways that can't easily be integrated back into Wine), assuming they didn't just fork Crossover, Cedega, or the newest version of Wine that's not LGPL'd.I doubt it. Why do you suppose Apple publishes the Darwin source or any of the other low-level technologies they code (ZeroConf, LaunchD, etc.). They publish them because they actually see the business case for sharing the work with other companies and gaining wider adoption of said technologies. Windows API re-implementations fit in that same category. If possible, Apple would try to share the load with other players. Realistically, I think they would be prevented from using WINE because of their license to MS's code nor do I think they have a lot interest in such a project.
Umm, KHTML was written by the Konquerer team for use in Konquerer and other parts of KDE. Apple branched that codebase and started adding to it. They certainly did not invent the codebase, thus this contradicts the claim that Apple has NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome.
Quartz and its related technologies aren't based on PDF: they're original Apple technologies from the ground up.
If they were "from the ground up" Apple would have invented their own vector display format and standard, instead they adopted a published standard invented by Adobe. They may have written all the code themselves, but they were re-implementing the display technology someone else had already invented. This is, in my opinion, a very good thing and it certainly contradicts the claim that Apple won't adopt anything they did not invent.
Just being pedantic. .If you want to be pedantic you should have called out the "BeOS bits recreated" comment, since that was the largest oversimplification. Apple did not actually reimplement parts of BeOS as recreate some of the same functionality of their filesystem and OS interaction in completely different ways.
Well, I think there is more to it. They know there is money since they were supposedly asking an outrageous 1 million dollars US, up front, from any publisher who wanted to port it. More than that, however, Valve was founded by two Microsoft employees and I think they seriously drank the kool-aid there. I suspect their coders have little or no experience with anything but DirectX and they are happy to keep it that way. I notice that engineers with diverse skills tend to hire more of the same, whereas engineers that only know one thing tend to hire kids straight from college or with a similar or even more limited skill set, so they don't look incompetent themselves or are at risk of having the newbies promoted above them.
I don't know what all goes on there, that is just my impression from Valve developer comments.
Well, Apple has had an internal Windows compatibility project for many years, they even considered including it in Copeland. They have license to the APIs right up through the release of WinXP SP1, which is good enough for 95% of software on the market today, although that number will go down as more users target Vista's APIs. I doubt they will go that route though.
So? They're the top selling games of all time, picked for that reason. WoW is only a few years old and is a good representation of the normal gaming market. The Sims is even better, as Sims expansion packs occupied 4 of the top 10 spots last year.
if your argument is that the list you gave is a representative sample of all games released and therefore the time between those top games can be filled with others, i'd have to disagree.That is not my argument. My argument is that the top 10 games in a year represent a significant portion of most people's gaming time and for the most part, that situation is not very bad for Mac users. The casual gamer can easily find 1 to 3 games to play in a year and that is all most people buy. If their tastes are average, they're even better off. I don't think the games available are a large deterrent to the average person, even if it is the the relatively small hardcore gamer market. This isn't even taking into account the console gaming market's mitigating effect.
but it's hard to provide evidence beyond suggesting that you take a walk through the Mac games section of your local CompUSA, well maybe "walking through" it is an overstatement since it'll be about 20 boxes (of which a majority will be solitaire compilations).Hmm, their Website claims the one closest to my house has 122 mac gaming titles in stock. 34 of those are in either card games or puzzle/trivia/board categories leaving 88 in action, RPG, shooters, and strategy. Not that it matters because if they did have only 20 games, so long as they included 8 of the top 10 games of the year, 5 of the top 6 of all time, and 5 standby games like solitaire compilations, the average person would be happy enough not to consider it a serious detriment to using that platform.
It is my opinion that because of the overlap of technical people and hardcore gamers and because of the the "popular wisdom" on Slashdot and the like, people don't actually look at what games people buy, and how many, and which of those are on the Mac to see how much the difference in available games effects normal people. The popularity of the Wii should have woken a few people up to the fact that Slashdot is not a good predictor of the mainstream gaming market and that entrenched ideas about who buys games and what type and what matters... well it is often just completely wrong.
This may well be true (I've only dabbled with it). The sad fact is, the best technology may not be the best choice depending upon what is popular. Apple has been damaged before by supporting better technologies, that never caught on in the mainstream simply because of momentum or marketing. Objective C might be way better than C# or java or C, but if the dev tool makers and the developers don't adopt it, then it will become another wall between Windows and OS X, hindering migration and portability. If Objective C cannot gain developers on Windows and Linux then, it were better they moved to support Java and/or C# (although "timeo Danaos, et dona ferentes" applies to MS as much as to the Greeks).
Having spoken to the all indian dev team working on Framemaker, I hope your comment was sarcasm. (I expect MadCap to slaughter them within 5 years of Blaze's release.) Anyway, Adobe could continue to use a deprecated API and try to work around it, but I don't think any architect would think that is wise in the long term.
...there have also been plenty of complaints that the OSX version is buggy and doesn't run as well.Umm, I've mostly heard complaints that the Windows version is buggier actually. There is plenty of software that is badly ported or not available on OS X, but you picked a crappy example. Of course it cuts both ways, since iTunes on Windows is pretty crappy by comparison, and you can't get OmniGraffle at all.
Plus how many people avoids becoming switchers because you can't run games?Some, but not as many as most people on Slashdot probably think. The hardcore gamer market is not as large as it is vocal. The casual gamer has a several year old machine and by the time they own one that can play a given game, most of them (especially outside the hardcore market) are ported to OS X. The top 10 games in a given year account for about half of game sales, and the last time I checked, 8 out of 10 had been ported within a year.
When did they release a Mac version of Halo? What about Halflife?That's where a lot of people are misled. Most gamers could not run Halo on their machine for years, even if the owned a PC. And what most people care about is The Sims. In fact, if you look at the list of top selling games of all time, according to wikipedia you have:
Do you see how the average, gamer who is not hardcore would not be too perturbed by the lack of choice?
Apple? NIH?!? Umm, the BSD subsystem, Webkit from KDE, OpenStep from Next, BeOS bits recreated, MAC from TrustedBSD, PDF as the basis for their display from Adobe, dtrace from Solaris, Apache, CalDav from Oracle... I could go on.
Apple might avoid the WINE codebase, but only because they have rights to much of an older version of the Windows API directly from having won a lawsuit against MS quite a while ago when MS stole their code. I don't think Apple would otherwise have a problem supporting WINE and I would not be surprised if Apple employees have submitted code to WINE or one of the offshoot projects. I think, however, they're probably content with the current ease of running Windows apps, inconvenient enough that not many mainstream developers can ignore OS X, but easy enough so that businesses are not put off and people are not afraid of trying OS X as their primary OS. I would not be surprised, actually, if this feature was added at the request of Parallels, whose latest RC supports making Windows apps the default for opening filetypes in OS X (which will launch the VM and open the file in the specified application.
Considering Apple runs the ITunes store at near break even prices, Apple can't afford to sell players at a loss either. Truthfully, though, both companies make money peripherally, MS by licensing WMP and by locking customers into Windows upgrade cycles, and Apple with increased brand awareness and sales of Macs.
You're making a common error by confusing "open source software" with "free/libre software." Zimbra is OSS, because you can see the code and make changes to it, with some restrictions. It is arguably not free software because some of the restrictions to the license are bit more restrictive than industry standards.
It cannot be forked; if you make changes to the source you have to be careful to preserve the Zimbra logo all over the place, on every page of the web interface. It creates a legal burden on the user of the source.Even the BSD license requires the credits be maintained in any future version. Zimbra has taken it further, without doubt, and in so doing have made it hard for a competitor to make a commercial fork. They have not, however, done much to hinder regular users of the software who want to customize versions for their own use. Basically, the restrictions don't matter to users, just competing vendors, which is certainly not ideal but is not a deal killer for most users. It also works with established open standards, so once off of Exchange, there is nothing preventing you from later migrating to Citadel or iCal server or something else entirely.
For small and medium businesses, Zimbra is a great choice. For a very large business like IBM who is likely to be contributing a lot of code to whatever system they use, they'd probably be better off with something with a more traditional license, like GPL. Of course, anyone making purchasing decisions at IBM or the like probably already know that a lot more concretely than I do, so I'm not too concerned I misled them.
We paid for licensing to get iPhones and Blackberries to synch properly and support editing on the device without screwing up all the time. I believe we wrote our own connector for Palm devices, engineering time not being free.
True, and really the only valid point you made.I've used Exchange servers for years and I've used Zimbra and Lotus. I think I have a pretty good handle on where each one is weak. I've even used Exchange 2007, unlike most people here and I have experienced where it still falls down.
I'm not a fanboy, but the OP was right - nothing can fuck with it, not even close.Umm, okay, what other solutions have you tried and which you're comparing it to? Have you tried, Lotus, Zimbra, Citadel, and iCal? Or are you just assuming Exchange is better without having tried anything else?
I provided a concrete list of where in my experiences Exchange is inferior. Where in particular do you find it to be superior.? It is easy to say it is better, but tell me a few concrete ways. What features does it have that are better? Is it more stable (sure isn't in my experience). How is Exchange so much better? I'm listening or are you just an astroturfer paid to spout FUD as an AC to try to make it seem like people with experience prefer Exchange?
The OWA client for Exchange 2007 is so good that there are companies who are getting rid of Outlook for all normal mail users and having everyone use the web client.
Having used the previous version I had hopes all the bug reports I sent MS would be fixed in the 2007 version. I was disappointed. For years now at my former employer we had to transfer certain files via CD or shared folders because as e-mail attachments they would render the entire Exchange Web interface for a user inoperable until an admin went in and removed that e-mail and attachment.
If you go to Microsoft's support pages and look at which features are supported via which interface they all out 92 features, 9 of which are fully supported in the Web interface.
marketing websites and resellers say different things. resellers get massive breaks and pass them on to customers. Our Exchange 2007 organization license was just under $3k from our reseller and our CALs were $25 per user.
And the same is true for the competition. If you have enough users or want to support it in house, you can get away with as little as zero licensing fees for OSS solutions.
OWA light does suck (firefox, opera, safari, etc). But if you can use IE, OWA is great.
Yeah great if you ignore the missing features and if you use a nonstandard browser that only works on one platform and which is banned in many secure environments.
Simply wrong. There are no additional licenses required to use Exchange ActiveSync on your CAS server.
You have to license a third party plug-in for most smartphones in order to get them to interact properly with an Exchange server. At least that has been our experience.
You have to buy a blackberry enterprise server if you want to use blackberries, but you had to do that before and will have to do it again in the future.
But do you have to if you want to use Blackberries and other smartphones with CalDav. For most the answer is no (Palm, iPhone, all T-Mobile), although I have not investigated blackberry in particular.
Outlook, OWA (web), EAS (mobile), OVA (voice), and basically any client that supports POP3 or IMAP4 if you choose to turn those features on, on the server. Nobody says you are limited to the native Exchange MAPI unless you choose to do so.
Except Exchange only supports a subset of features using POP and IMAP and lacks full support for scheduling, calendars, etc. In addition that means you're running two different protocols for the same purpose increasing your exposure to security risks. Running a crippled Web client or a crippled desktop client is not the same thing as getting your choice of all features on any client adhering to the standard, which is why we have standards and why MS avoids them.
True, but do you really blame them?
Blame? Who cares about blame? I'm interested in what features each solution offers and if MS does not want to provide features for strategic reasons then I certainly do ake that into account.
As nice as it would be to load Exchange up on Linux, it just doesn't help MS make more money by doing that.
Strangely I have no interest in MS making more money, only in saving money for myself and my clients. If MS wants more of my money or none at all they will find they are getting none at all in most cases. Why would you even consider this a mitigating factor when comparing two solutions?
True, and really the only valid point you made.
Bullshit. The truth is every one of the items I listed is an area where Exchange is losing in comparisons. If you actually looked at the costs of both solutions side by side or even took bids requests on such a project you'd have a much better idea. There are a lot of open and hidden costs to exchange and it is winning right now on three things:
I don't see any features you list that are not included in Zimbra. Additionally, you don't have to buy the connectors for your smartphone since they pretty much all support CalDav for free now. Additionally, you only have to pay for support and for a connector to support exchange clients and you have to pay once, not every few years. You don't have to buy Office for your home system either and it does not have to be a Windows machine.
It sounds to me like you decided there was no replacement for Exchange instead of actually looking at the other options on the market, especially Zimbra. Zimbra is a near drop in replacement for an Exchange server. You'll probably want to pay for support and migration services for the first year, but in the end you're off the upgrade cycle, have more choices, flexibility, and platforms supported.
You don't judge the cost of something only relative to how important it is, you also judge it compared to other offerings in the market. If something works 90% as well, but costs 1% as much, it is reasonable to consider. If something works better and costs less, well that is something you may want to consider even more. Is $100 a person too much for staples every year? Without them your business would become disorganized. But no one pays $100 a person because you can get them for a lot less from a competitor. The same is now true for calendar/e-mail/scheduling software.
The OSS solution would have to be damn close in functionality to justify not spending $100 per user, and none of them are.Like I said, a few years ago, I'd have agreed (for most medium and large businesses). Now, however, in many ways OSS competitors like Zimbra are more than close in functionality, they are superior in functionality including all the ways I listed in the post you're responding to. Do you know any features where Zimbra is inferior to Exchange that balances out the list of ways it is superior? It seems to be winning on cost, functionality, interoperability and flexibility. The only way I know in which it is inferior is in that there are not as many engineers experienced with it, but assuming you're hiring quality people, that is not a large concern.
Basically your assertion that Exchange is better, is unsupported by anything so far and your claim that cost does not matter is absurd.
Up until a few years ago, I would have agreed it was the best solution for most businesses, but times have changed. I don't know what industry you're in, but a lot of larger companies are introducing more Linux and Macs on their networks and the ability to function cross-platform and across a variety of clients is a huge feature for a lot of companies.
Unless you just want to save a couple of bucks, there's nothing magical about an Open Source product that makes it better.According to MS, in order to license the current version of exchange it will cost you $4000 per server + $97 per user + some unnamed fee if you want to interconnect with other companies servers. So, assuming you have 1000 people and two servers, you're looking at over $100K. And for that price you can only use all the functionality if all your clients are on Windows, so your advertising people on Macs and your software development team on Linux both end up running their own little calendaring servers or using a shitty Web interface that has not kept up with the regular client. People with smartphones also end up costing you extra for connectors that allow them to access some of the functionality of your Exchange server, instead of all the functionality of a CalDav server.
To summarize, the failures of Exchange are:
...there's nothing magical about an Open Source product that makes it better.Umm, not magical, but being OSS is a feature, one that Exchange is lacking. It is not the only feature that matters, but it does bring significant benefits, including reduced risk and protection from vendor lock-in.
This function is available with the CalDav server standard and that particular feature is available in the implementations in the open source Zimbra client/server and the 10.5 version Apple's iCal server/client. I don't know about other implementations, but I imagine most other ones either include this or will soon, as Caldav has really taken of in adoption by major projects. Zimbra even offers that feature via the Web interface to their server.
Also, with respect to calendaring, in Outlook you can open up several calendars (yours and others) side-by-side in order to see who's free when.I think Evolution has an interface like this (works with CalDav), but if I recall Zimbra allows you to overlap as many calendars as you want in one window, making the comparison quite a bit easier IMHO.
I'd definitely look at Zimbra if you're serious about a OSS solution with lots of features and compatibility with both standards and proprietary interfaces (they have a full featured Exchange plug-in so users can still use Exchange as their client if they want). The server will run on all the popular Linux distros, OS X, and as a VMWare appliance.
A lot of people are misinformed. The argument to ban abortion hinges upon defining fetuses as having human rights, which is not supportable from a scientific perspective, only by applying non-observable criteria to them, i.e. a soul. As for atheists opposed to abortion, I'm sure there are a few, but there are also atheists opposed to killing fish, which does not mean it is constitutional to take that choice away from everyone else seeing as there is no conflict of rights, the only legitimate reason for laws aside from the exceptions spelled out in the constitution.
My kidney has a full set of DNA just like a fetus has a whole set of DNA, neither of which are identical to the parents. What's the difference again.
The same place it bans teaching creationism as science, the first amendment. Until someone writes an anti-abortion law that defines a person using non-religious terms in a way that includes fetuses and not a lot of other things we kill, thus justifying protecting the rights of said fetus, abortion is an issue of separation of church and state.
Let me clarify. Laws are supposed to be mediating conflicting rights between citizens. There is no, non-religious justification for claiming a fetus is a citizen or person with rights any more than my claiming pigs have rights and it is illegal to kill them. There could be a non-religious law that bans abortion, but to be legal it would have to include a legal definition of a person that includes fetuses, but does not include all the other living tissues we routinely kill and it would further have to do so in a way that was not provably a deception trying to mask a religious doctrine becoming law (ala creationism and intelligent design).
No stats, but I'm always hesitant to say any position is only justified by religion.To date I've never seen a non-religiously based anti-abortion law. There could be one, but to avoid classifying my kidney, semen, or pet as a person and making it illegal to kill them, it would have to do some absurd convolutions.