Not a very productive day.
Spent some time thinking about the recent Mac announcements from MacWorld (I'm going tomorrow... I LOVE SAN FRANCISCO!!!) and how they apply to Free Software.
The numbers break out to about 7.5% UNIX 7.5% Mac... the rest Windoze. When OSX ships (of BSD with some proprietary crap on top) this should bring a UNIX market of 15% (if you don't consider the other... boring... non Free Unixes). This should be a Good Thing. (don't have to explain why... I am sure you will see :)..
It just bothers me that Apple is SOOO close to getting a clue but they still don't see the light. I can't decide if they decided to base on BSD because they are smart... or too stupid to build their own OS. I think it is a safe bet to assume they are stupid and choose BSD because they couldn't figure out how to write a decent OS themselves.
This leads to why the CHROME (or Crystal... or whatever) stuff is still proprietary. BSD/Darwin allows this. If they based on Linux most of this stuff would also have to be GPL. This 15% I mentioned before might not help us if application developers don't code to Free APIs. Might be a good idea to write an abstraction layer for all of this.
- Why do they charge users $30 for the MacOSX beta... can't you just download it? dumb.
- Why do they only ship MacOSX for their own hardware? Didn't they learn this mistake 10 years ago? stupid.
So again... are they just another stupid/evil company (like Microsoft, SUN or Oracle) or are they actually *smart* but haven't reached the point where they realize that *everything* should be OSS :)
Good Zen quote:
"The best way to control your sheep is to let them roam free."