FSF Campaign against Microsoft's Plan to Enforce "Secure Boot"

[geoffrey mendelson]

On Oct 25, 2011, at 11:23 AM, Nadav Har'El wrote:
>  another company can decide that it can't be bothered with this
> small market (this is the way Apple went for many years, and many of  
> its
> services still are unavailable in Israel),

That's simply untrue. Apple for whatever reason it chose, sold an  
exclusive franchise to a company called YEDA about 27 years ago. When  
it expired, they chose to sell another one to a new company iDigital,  
which happens to be part owned by the President's son.

They do that in many countries because of tax and other considerations.

What products are sold in Israel or not is up to iDigital. They have  
to commit to a certain level of sales and support before Apple will  
consider letting them sell products. This requires an investment in  
sending technicians overseas to learn how to maintain products,  
training sales and support people, producing sales and user  
literature, etc.

Some products are not sold here because they are phased in, for  
example the iPhone 4s, but that's common around the world.

For example, someone I know went to Office Depot the first day they  
were selling legally imported iPads and a person from iDigital was  
there answering questions and doing demos.  The iPad came out of the  
box with Hebrew support.

I don't know anything about Apple II's, etc, but when I purchased my  
first MAC in 1990 (I was using them at work before that), it was in  
the US. It did not come with Hebrew support, but you could download  
for free (or get it from a user group if they had it) a Hebrew  
localized version of MacOS. I assume it was available here for free.

BTW, despite what many people say, Steve Jobs was very supportive of  
open source. The actual MacOS is open source (though with a different  
license). The GUI and the apps are not, but that is a different issue.  
Every version of MacOS X based upon UNIX is. It also comes with a  
suite of developer tools including gcc (now an optional download or a  
free app from the app store) and X windows, so you could in theory,  
boot the OS, go into X windows and live there running open source  
programs, without ever running a closed source program from Apple,  
once you started X.

In fact I have a particularly pesky Windows program I need to run on  
my MAC, and I run it by having compiled an open source version of X  
Windows and WINE and run it by starting a BASH script. Both X and WINE  
were compiled from source. There are versions available in binary, but  
I needed to build them in sync to get the app to work.

Back in the old days (before OSX and the G3 processor), Apple did in  
fact implement Linux on Macs, and it was GPL'ed. In the end they  
decided to not persue it, because they are as you say in the business  
of making money, and the GPL was not compatible with that goal in  
their opinion.

Instead they used BSD with its "artistic license", but it's still open  
source.

BTW, as for boycotts, the only easily recognized Israeli product in  
the MACs in the 1990's was a Tadiran  battery and someone sued Apple  
in the UK for "supporting the genocide of the Palestinians" by using  
them.

Geoff.

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson,  N3OWJ/4X1GM
My high blood pressure medicine reduces my midichlorian count. :-(