New Essay - "FOSS Licences Wars"

[geoffrey mendelson]

On Sep 1, 2009, at 10:43 PM, Steve Litt wrote:
>
> Even if they do monopolistic things with your code? See this:
>
> http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9137291/Mac_clone_maker_sues_Apple_over_Snow_Leopard
>
> I think the preceding article is one of the strongest arguments for  
> copyleft
> I've ever seen.


Why? Apple is free to do what they want with their code. If they only  
implement drivers and kernel support for their own computers, how is  
that wrong?

As for MacOS, the base operating system, Darwin, happens to be free as  
in beer. You can download the source code for it, and build your own  
drivers, system loader, etc. It's very easily done and has been done  
many times. There have been many distributions of Darwin for generic  
PC's, many of them bundled with bootleg MacOS distributions, some of  
them not.

What is proprietary is the GUI  called Aqua which runs under it and  
the programs which run under Aqua, although you can if you wish  
develop or port FOSS to it. See OpenOffice.org for example, the early  
versions of OO were launced under Aqua (but could have been launched  
via the Darwin CLI) and ran in  XWindows (which was also FOSS). The  
newest version and a branch (NeoOffice) replaced the Xwindows UI with  
a Java one, so that it could be portable across all platforms and  
still access the GUI.

Apple produces a better product (MacOS) and can afford to test and  
support it better because it is limited to their hardware. If they  
expanded it to support all PC's it would be much larger, require more  
testing and more support. Look at any PC generic product such as  
Windows or any distribution of Linux and tell me that it has testing  
and support anywhere near as good as MacOS. it doesn't. Windows Vista  
was a disaster of testing and support, and look at the size of  
Microsoft, and Linux, look at the quality of the latest releases from  
Ubuntu for example. 9.04 was IMHO something that made Windows Vista  
look like heaven. The release would not boot on small computers, and  
the small computer emergeny "fix" would not boot on bigger computers.  
It took over two months to release a 9.04 kernel that would both  
support optical drives and not memory leak to the point it had to be  
rebooted every 24 hours.

Apple is actually a pretty decent supporter of FOSS, they just chose  
not to use the GPL, which lead them to BSD instead of Linux, and they  
kept parts of their operating system and technology proprietary. They  
have an obligation to their stockholders to maintain the value of  
their investment. They also pay their employees fairly and have good  
benefits, something that some people on this list feel is their right  
as consultants marketing FOSS, but not the right of the developers of  
it.

Geoff.

-- 
geoffrey mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
Jerusalem Israel geoffreymendelson at gmail.com