[CrackMonkey] OS/X Beta

[Paul Duncan]

* J C Lawrence (claw at kanga.nu) wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Sep 2000 09:25:12 -0700 
> Don Marti <dmarti at flynn.zork.net> wrote:
> 
> > begin Peter A. Peterson II quotation of Thu, Sep 14, 2000 at
> > 11:14:50AM -0500:
> >> True enough. Still, that's ridiculous!
> 
> > Proprietary software isn't ridiculous because of the price -- even
> > $0 proprietary software is still the business equivalent of eating
> > a ham sandwich in an organic chemistry lab.
> 
> If Apple are sufficiently smart, they could end up owning the casual
> user desktop.  They have the history and design legacy, as versus

This statement was true about 15 years ago, when Apple was sitting
on a significant market share, and our buddies in Redmond were 
more concerned about shipping Excel than about maintaining their
draconian rule over the desktop market.

Don't forget that Apple is (or at least they think they are) almost
completely at the whims of Microsoft.  They have bent over and grabbed
their ankles several times in the past few years to keep the Macintosh
version of Office shipping.  Granted, they did fight (and are still
fighting) Microsoft on the streaming media front, but that war is
basically a lose-lose for free software users.  Do you want

 - the proprietary stream with atrocious video quality (rm)
 - the proprietary stream with a modular format, 10 years of
   development effort, horrible motion blur, and no player for any
   OS other thn the big two (qt)
 - the proprietary stream designed by the spawn of satan himself (asf)
 - the open video stream, built as a composite of several different
   patented video compression technologies, where the specs are closed,
   and you have to pay a large amount of money to get into the
   consortium that has access to the specs (mpeg4).

> Gnome and KDE, as well as the established presence.  They're

Microsoft is the established presence now.  At this point Apple is
merely the little bird picking the bacteria from between Microsoft's
teeth.

> actually in a fairly good position to embrace and subsume (slightly
> different from ebrace and extend) the OSS development efforts as
> they march *nix onto your grandmother's desktop.  As compared to

I'm pretty sure Apple does not have the manpower to take over a 
fraction of OSS development, let alone all of it.  Even if they did,
Apple was synonimous with NIH throughout the 80's and part of the 90's,
and I'll bet money it's still pumping through their veins.

Here's some food for thought:  What will we do when Apple
inadvertently slaps an NDA on GPLed code?  

> SGI, they're not trying to push Linux into supporting their customer
> base, or Sun with their split brained tandem-horse, but are instead
> approaching it tangentially and are actually in a rather good
> position to cherry pick the bits they like, folding them into OSX as
> they go along (and gradually opening it en route).

Neither SGI nor Sun cater to desktop users, so this statement doesn't
really apply.  Also, SGI has been pushing Linux -- they've been opening
up tons of their internal software, and they have been porting a lot of
it to Linux.  I think the long-term plan is to rely almost exclusively
on Linux for their platform.   Back to the point, it's also worth noting
that Apple has gotten fucked every time it has tried to has tried to
enter the mid-range server market.

> Talk about winning the distro wars through the back door.

-- 
Paul Duncan <duncanpa at engr.orst.edu>    Network Support
http://www.pablotron.org                Botany and Plant Pathology
pabs on #e (EFNet IRC)                  Oregon State University