From: Eirikur Hallgrimsson (eh@mad.scientist.com)
Date: Mon May 07 2001 - 23:50:50 PDT
On Tuesday 08 May 2001 01:56, Dave Winer wrote:
> Think about Mac OS X a bit. The religious issues fall aside, and think about
> bridges between the two worlds.
I do think about Mac OS X, a lot. More than I want to. And I really fail to
see a connection.
The Darwin base is ~= BSD, available elsewhere for free. Available as Darwin
for free, too.
The Apple proprietary layers (Aqua, Carbon, etc) are the same proprietary
model that Apple and Microsoft have always used as differentiation and as
lock-in. I expect that they are up to the usual standards of Apple quality
(generally quite good) and have the same probability of being dropped
immediately upon my adoption of them (very good indeed) as previous new
proprietary interfaces from Apple have had.
You can't run a portable GUI application on Mac OS X as it is shipped. You
can't run a command line app, because the command line isn't enabled by
default. Dave, I don't think it's a bridge until it runs Free Software.
Maybe I could see it as a bridge for sufficiently motivated programmers, but
it certainly is not a bridge for users. End users are going to be very
skitish about downloading a whole additional graphics interface (X) and it's
housekeeping. Apple could have taken care of it for them. Instead, they
have spent a lot of money on additional proprietary APIs.
My conclusion: Apple wants you to be a registered developer and pay them for
the privilege of investing your time in their unique APIs. They must want
this significantly more than they want users to be able to run any class of
free program.
Typing on PowerPC,
Eirikur
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