Powerbook Setup

[Chris Pressey]

On Tue, 19 Oct 2004 17:31:39 +0100
Paul Robinson <paul at iconoplex.co.uk> wrote:

> My point is that on the one hand we have all these people proclaiming
> Open Source to be the greatest thing ever, whilst at the same time
> paying over the odds for Junior Unix on over-priced hardware to a
> company that keeps most of the really neat stuff to itself under
> closed source.  Do you not see some element of duality in their
> standards there?  Don't you think there is a kind of contradiction
> anywhere?

Sure.  But who is saying that open-source is the greatest thing ever? 
Literally, I mean?  To make that claim would be absurd in itself.

The BSD license lets Apple close their source.  If you don't like that,
perhaps you would find more appeal in the GPL, which - in its own way -
tries harder to prevent that.

> See, at work I look after a 6-way Windows 2003 cluster. I think it
> rocks at what it does. I've signed off on purchases of Microsoft
> Content Management Server, SQL Server, etc. and I *know* that the
> £500k that went down that hole *could* have been better spent helping
> fund work on an open source CMS and back-end tools like MySQL. Problem
> is, there were other major political forces in my way. I know there
> was a double-standard on my part there, and I know my support of that
> Windows architecture shows duplicity in my own beliefs, but I want to
> try and get to the bottom of the OS X crowd who are splitting from
> FreeBSD. What are the actual factors involved in their decision, and
> are they really as vacuous and empty as excuses as I suspect they
> might be? I want to be proven wrong here.

I can't, because I infer from the above that you believe that politics
is less vacuous than style.  I'm not sure I agree.  From what I've
seen of it, politics is pretty darn vacuous.

> OK, but what would it take for you to see FreeBSD + X + whatever is
> better than OS X? I say it already is, but seriously, what would it
> actually take to get there?

IMHO: Make support for FreeBSD more accessible than support for OS X.

IOW, in the big picture, technical merit isn't everything.

> [...]
> You've just said it. Some people claim there is no brain drain, yet
> you yourself admit that there are people out there who USED to work on
> FreeBSD who no longer do so, because they're off playing with OS X. I
> don't have a real complaint with them, but shouldn't we be trying to
> stop this, or do we all just pack up now and just make 6.0 a link to
> Darwin and advise everybody to go out and but Apple gear instead?

False dilemma, I think.  Everyone is free to do as they like.  You're
free to try to pursuade them to stay if you choose, as well, although
advocacy@ might be a more appropriate venue for that.  My point is that
I don't think Apple-bashing (deserved or not) is going to be very
persuasive to most people, so if that's your goal, my recommendation
would be to change tack.

-Chris