On Feb 8, 2005, at 22:12, Roger Binns wrote:
Mac OS X has only been around a few years and there aren't many people working on making it better (though I'm sure there are lots of people using it), so you can't really expect a best of breed solution just yet.
There was, and still is to a certain degree a relative high cost barrier of entry for doing MacOS stuff, especially for developers who want
to support multiple platforms. The Mac mini has helped, but the
lack of virtualisation software still hinders. Apple also has around
5% market share of the desktop which means when people are deciding
where to allocate their time, they have to think real hard about
supporting Apple.
This is a very valid point, but since when has that really mattered to people writing open source software? Windows certainly doesn't seem to have more support from the open source community than anything else.
As a counter-point, deploying software on Mac OS X is cheap and fast. You save god knows how much time and money in development and testing (especially testing), so you have much higher profit margins.
Virtualization software is useful (and I'd love it to death if it was around), but I've found it to be rarely necessary for Mac OS X development. I only have to use 10.2 when testing, and rarely have to make any changes to accommodate it. MacOnLinux showed some promise a while ago, but it doesn't seem to be actively developed these days and it didn't work well last I tried it.
-bob
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