Linux drove me to get a Mac

Mon Jan 12 20:54:21 UTC 2009

On Fri, Jan 09, 2009 at 06:45:29PM -0500, Kamran Khan wrote:
> Well the Open Source Community lives in one Universe the rest of the  
> world lives in another.  Asking companies to completely open source  
> their software and platforms is ridiculous.  There is a lot of  
> information to be gleaned from open source and open specs, some of it  
> trade secrets, some of it just plain hard work to figure out, some of  
> it work figure out and some of it trivial.  Having said that, would  
> you go to a Chef and ask him to give you his best recipes for free?   
> Some of his recipe will be secret, some will be plain hard workto  
> figure out, some just work to figure out and some just trivial.  Put  
> it all together and you have a dish that people from miles around will  
> come to and pay handsomely for.  The Open Source Community is  
> advocating a business model that the rest of world doesn't follow and  
> would outright reject.  The problem started when people starting  
> politicizing, of all things, computer technology.  Stallman et al have  
> brought a philosophy that belongs on a hippie commune into the realm  
> of computer technology.  Most people expect to paid for their work and  
> technology companies are no different.  They have shareholders, they  
> have employees and they have multi-national interests that dictate  
> they turn a profit.  You own a car once you pay for it but do you  
> actually expect to get the engineering diagrams, technical  
> specifications and manufacturing techniques as well?  The bottom line  
> is cloud computing and virtualization technology have pretty much made  
> this entire discussion pointless.  Microsoft isn't f going away  
> anytime soon and neither is Linux.  With cloud computing and  
> virtualization technology everyone gets to play and looks like  
> Microsoft well get to play a lot.  As for Apple. their future looks  
> grey but for now it is the best desktop platform going.

The vast majority of the stuff for which specs aren't open are NOT trade
secret worthy stuff.  It's commodity equipment these days.  I don't
expect everything to be open source, especially not complex software
(like CAD systems and the like).  I do however expect the interface
specs to a piece of hardware I can buy to be open.

For example I do want the specs for how to interface with my video card
(I don't have it but I want it).  I do NOT expect the existing drivers
to be open sourced, because the way opengl drivers do optimizations of
the input very much does qualify as trade secret and something ati and
nvidia don't want to share.  But I should be able to get enough info on
how to talk to the hardware to write my own (very inefficient) drivers,
and that I don't have (yet).  ATI claims to be working on it for their
hardware, and intel seems to be doing rather nicely for their newer
chips, so it is improving.

Cloud computing will probably make very little difference to consumers.
It's a corporate world thing, or its used to run web services (like
gmail and such).  Your home system isn't going to chance because of it
because people want their computer to work no matter what independant of
the rest of the world.

As for apple, well they have the best OS they have ever had with OS X,
and their market share is higher than ever it seems.  They are doing
well and deserve it.  They worked hard for it.  Their systems don't do
what I want in a computer, but I think it's a great design and a good
choice for many people, but not me.

> As for my assumptions.  Yes I assume that people view computers as  
> tools.  It is a tool to get something done.  If you look at operating  
> systems strictly from that assumption, which most people do, clearly  
> you must make significant sacrifices to run Linux.  Ultimately you are  
> running an operating system that is largely licensed under the GPL  
> but   most people can not even understand how the code works and for  
> the few that can they can not improve Linux on the desktop since it  
> becomes exceedingly difficult to reverse engineer the multitude of  
> hardware available for the x86 platform.  Knowing that, clearly you  
> are a slave to an operating system for scoio-political reasons and  
> nothing else.   You may pay a premium for PC hardware from Apple but  
> even in the higher prices there are tangible benefits like a visually  
> appealing piece of hardware, decent resale value and in person  
> technical support(both hardware and software) for 1-3 years across the  
> globe.  In addition your choice of supported hardware and software is  
> greatly increased.  Naturally if you argue that I only do such and  
> such, this is not what the vast majority of people do with the tool  
> and secondly if this is true perhaps you really don't need this kind  
> of tool and could probably do fine with a SE Smart Phone.

I view a computer as a tool and hence it should do what I want it to do,
not what someone else thought it should do.  I should be able to fix it
too if I have the skills.  That is slightly harder on the mac, and very
difficult (often imposible) on windows.

I am quite sure my linux box supports a lot more hardware than a Mac
does.  It probably even supports more hardware than a vista box does.
Vista supports some new gadgets that my linux box does not, but I don't
have any of those.  Vista does not support a lot of the hardware I have,
including a lot of stuff that worked with older windows versions
although XP did break support for a lot of it.

There is a lot of software I can run on linux, which would probably work
on the mac (in most cases) but would not work in windows in most cases.
It might not be on the shelf at best buy or futureshop, but it is still
software.

> My original post was merely a related comment on the person switching  
> to Vista.  Considering this LUG functions at least sometimes as a  
> Linux advocacy group I thought my posting may have been of interest to  
> the community.
> 
> Anyways, I'm off to the Apple Store to look at gadgets.

Ah pretty over priced gadgets with lovely interfaces.

-- 
Len Sorensen
--
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