On Fri, 2004-05-28 at 19:36, Jim Cheetham wrote:You get the seamless "it just works" Apple stuff, and you get everyone else's applications under X windows.ch faster machines.
I like mac stuff but my mission is to get into this linux stuff, work out how to make it productive and push oss along.
Sure, and too many objectives at the same time make life difficult. However, the Mac's underlying operating system, Darwin, is OSS - mainly because it's got a large similarity to FreeBSD :-) You can run Darwin on it's own without any of the proprietary Apple stuff, and put KDE/GNOME/whatever on to as the GUI just as you would in Linux.
Basically, grokking Mac and Linux together helps you grok Unix, not just Linux :-)
Add to that, I don't have a mac and can't see myself affording one for awhile...
The main machines are damned expensive - top of the range G5 boxen are very nice indeed :-) and the bottom of the range eMacs are now only a couple of grand. For many small businesses, I'm coming to believe that the range of applications, ease of use, and lack of virus vectors means that Macs should be seriously considered. Sure, the hardware is a little more expensive and non-upgradeable, but to be honest most businesses don't upgrade their hardware anyway - they run it into the ground and buy a new one.
Sense getting into linux I've come to see value in the whole gnu
idea...
GNU Open Source Is Not The Only Open Source.
Although I think I understand the differences between licenses, I must admit that I still don't really know how to choose one over another. GPL seems to be the "easiest" choice, especially if your project won't be as popular as Apache, MySQL or Mozilla ...
Wouldn't buying into the Mac world just be as bad? ...
> they are just as closed as Microsoft aren't they?
In some ways yes, and in other ways no. See above - the underlying OS is Open Sourced, and the default installation comes with all the development tools you would need in order to develop for the Mac (optional install packages are provided). Everything else is available just as it is under Linux - most source packages will build, once you have worked out the dependancies (and the Fink Project has done that for 3700+ packages). Only kernel-specific stuff won't work, because Darwin does not use a Linux kernel (it has a Mach-like microkernel, but actually does "everything" in a monolithic BSD kernel server. One day there will be "proper" kernel servers for things)
For people/businesses who have a little bit of money available to spend, and want a reliable, easy to use machine that can also run OSS, I'd recommend a Mac. For people who want to get into the internals and interesting things, I'd stick them with Linux :-)
-jim
