On 19/01/07 18:50 +0530, Vihan Pandey wrote: <snip> > > With Apple its the Aqua GUI interface(and a certain apps with come with the > O.S that are closed) which comes to about 30%-40% of the system. The rest > is, G N U + Python + Apache + TeX + etc etc etc.... > After all, it is the interface which defines the Mac experience.
> The main complaint is with the way they support DRM to sell music on their > iTunes music store and how they react when someone violates it(remember the > entire sarovar.org episode). In fact they kind of set a trend(like always) > of DRM in digital music and video. But Apple has never been a big FOSS supporter. They have usually been more closed than Microsoft. > > However i have to make one statement here. i LOVE Apple. Surprised? i'm not > ashamed to admit it. Its their creativity and artistic brilliance which is > UNPARALLELED. The way they take care of every single thing that is needed > for a good user experience is simply beautiful and VERY inspiring. It is > also probably the only company that only stole an idea(GUI from Xerox PARC) > JUST once in its life - and that's it since then they have ALWAYS been > original. Its hard to find such a culture in today's world. Lets see, they attempted to sue Microsoft into not shipping a GUI (one of the earliest look and feel lawsuits). Microsoft and Apple took two entirely different routes into the market. Apple is primarily a hardware vendor, and they attempt hardware lockin. Microsoft is a software vendor, and they attempted to run on as many systems as possible. They got lucky with the price of the x86 system. The PC revolution was driven by Compaq, who beat IBM in the reverse-engineering lawsuit of 1984. The PC world adopted fairly open standards while Apple was closed. This kept the price of Macs high, while the prices of PCs kept falling, and performance increasing. Today, by running on a locked down PC, Macs are essentially competing with midrange to top of the line PC hardware in laptops, but they still aren't all that competitive in desktops. Again, you can get cheaper laptops by avoiding brand names, and then Apple is suddenly not competitive. Hardware will just work, as long as it is Apple approved hardware, or USB (Intel invented USB and PCI, PCIX, Bluetooth, Sun opened the Sparc architecture and NFS amongst other things). Solaris runs on Sun hardware, Intel, and Fujitsu hardware. Apples are nice toys, but they don't even come close to Sun. As for desktops, those are being turned into thin clients in corporate environments again, so about the only place where Apple is making any headway is in tech circles, where Unix geeks are moving to Macs because they need something to run MS Office and would rather not run the even more broken Microsoft Windows. Devdas Bhagat -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
