Its has always amazed me how brainwashed people, aka consumers, get from purchasing products in the name of “good design” and “ease of use” when the companies they buy their products from harm the communities they take their code from without reciprocity. And by company, I mean Apple. And, the aforementioned communities are Free Software, Open Source, and on-line music purchasers. Like Linksvayer, I’m not shocked by Apple’s latest moves and it reaffirms my committment to not buy their one button mouse products (I need three). Bring on the flames, it only increases my Google rank and gets me to laugh when I read the posts 
Come on, stand up, boycott Apple, aka switch, until they give back to the Open Source communities and rip out that DRM from their products. Think Different.
Completely Agreed. I will not buy from Apple until they give, and continue to give, back to the various Open Source communities they are benefiting from. As for DRM, I have never, and will do my best to never buy anything that employs DRM. So far, I think I have succeeded.
- Vlad B
See also http://tieguy.org/blog/2006/06/18/people-switching-and-other-misc-links/ - Mark Pilgrim and Tim Bray are switching away from Apple
Ooops. I should have read the link first
Cool dudes. No flames…amazing…oh wait, anyone who reads my blog is coming from Open Source planets. I’m preaching to the choir!
DRM is so bad. I will do what I can to avoid using and implementing.
The best DRM is self.
you know people need to have new shiny buttons and stuff they don’t need…and if you move to europe people here are still using their Windows …. you know why people use mac and win? Because installing cracks is so easy.
When someone will spend million dolars for advertisement then everyone will use linux.
have you seen “thank you for smoking”?…. linux need to be sexy, make it sexy and will win.
2046
Howdy Jon!
I’ve no flames, but do have an adverse opinion which I hope is also thought-provoking. First of all, 93% of the world’s computing population already boycott Apple, so, you win with the most successful boycott in consumer history. Are they listening yet?
I think the spirit of this is great, and as a highly vocal Free Software advocate *and* Apple user - someone who Thinks a bit Differently from the average in *both* crowds - I’d like to share my rationale:
(a) Apple taught me how to port to gcc 4.0, and as far as I know, no other commercial entity provides developers with *support* for gcc, esp gcc 4.0 porting, including Red Hat. I’d love to give you the names of some developers at Red Hat who would love to make you feel like an idiot for using their product, but you’ve probably already got some. Ulrich “Why support any platform other than Linux/i386?” Drepper comes to mind.
[aside: I remember that Cygnus, if they still exist, will charge you as much in licensing fees for commercial development tools as Apple charge in OS licensing, if you want to go that way, but they won't provide as much support.]
(b) Apple’s DRM is a weak deterrent to piracy which the keyholder can break. It’s based on a great codec, OOTB software will rip CDs to my choice of codec including DRM-free AAC/MP4, and they will walk me through, over the phone, burning DRM music purchased from them to a CD for a friend of mine, as long as I don’t tell them it is for a friend of mine, because then I am making them an accomplice, and for that you can boycott the DMCA.
Furthermore, I have no trouble purchasing AAC/MP4 music at my choice of bitrate from allofmp3.com for a fraction of the price - my choice of music store is orthogonal to my choice of computing platform.
(c) GNOME, KDE, and all of the other Free / Open-Source desktops that I used for ten-plus years *stink*, the community is rude to users and developers alike, packages in linux distributions - esp. debian and yes I am talking about you Christian Fucking Marillat and Takuo KITAME - are ill supported, often broken, and updated in a manner comparable only to that which old people fuck. In fact, last I checked, GNOME was also entirely broken in portage, has been for over a year in anticipation of a minor version update that requires some new dependencies, and no fix is in sight. This is what drove me to buy a Mac. Today, of course, I have the best value proposition for an intel notebook on the market, even if I *did* choose to install GNU/Linux instead of OSX, and I will, in fact, one of these days, get around to setting up a dual boot. Linux IO is fast
(d) My MacBook Pro and the PowerBook I had before it are *far* more reliable hardware than the Dells I have had, they sleep instantly when I close the lid, and if this stops working, I can walk into an Apple store and demand attention. Having a computer whose OS and hardware are supported by one company is a great thing. Furthermore I wonder as a Design + Technology instructor, how are you not concerned with the “design” of a product which makes it fit naturally into a person’s life?
Here’s a question: can you sleep your laptop and swap batteries? I have 30-60s grace.
(e) Cocoa is a *great* dev environment which still, afaict, adheres to the NeXTStep / OpenStep APIs. Conversely, the entire GNUStep team are the biggest assholes I have ever met in my entire life, or at least among them. Tell them that you and a friend who used to work at NeXT want to build a GUI that works like Aqua and they will erupt into arguments about how superior what they already have is, how stupid it is that Apple is making use of the GPU and wasting valuable SETI cycles, how the NeXT was superior to OSX, even though they are not using *any* of the interesting graphics tech that was critical to the NeXT, i.e. Display PostScript. Let’s not forget, in this light, that the visionary NeXT platform predicted the popularity of GNU/Linux on intel hardware, as this was the entire marketing angle - consumer unix on commodity hardware with eased application development. Today’s OSX was once tomorrow’s NeXT.
(f) Apple beats the tar out of Microsoft in the commercial computing arena. Go to WWDC sometime and meet the Darwin team in person - this conference is held every year in San Francisco, so I’ll bet you can make it. Should ACM SIGGRAPH raise funds to send you?
(g) Apple have given a great deal of code to KHTML/Konqueror project, I’m not sure if this has been merged yet, but WebKit is neck and neck with Mozilla for the “most w3c compliant browser” title right about now, was *way* ahead of the curve until Moz/FF 1.5 hit the streets, and still renders better for many situations, not to mention faster in approximately all situations. Also, not sure if you are aware that Apple is driving a *really* neat addition to w3c XHTML/CSS spec - the canvas tag which defines a square, two-dimensional canvas which can be drawn on with JavaScript.
All that said, I entirely understand your viewpoint, if I wasn’t a happy Apple user today and for the past couple of years, I would be on the bandwagon with you, and you have a lot of reason to feel this way and to encourage people to Think Differently about their consumer choices. Here are some downsides I can present which weigh upon my head every day:
(a) I can’t run Aqua, the proprietary window server I purchased a license to, on top of the Linux kernel, and for some tasks or configurations, the Linux kernel can outperform the darwin / xnu kernel twofold or greater. In fact, as OSX uses a microkernel, this eats to the heart of Linus’ honorary Ph.D. I enjoy the microkernel design, and it allows a single thread to span its’ load across both of my beautiful new intel CPU cores, but Linus’ monokernel is faster and lighter.
(b) By all semi-confirmed accounts, Apple have discontinued source releases for some very small and seemingly insignificant parts of the xnu / darwin kernel on Intel only, as of approximately the intel platform switch announcement. I hear rumours that this has something to do with questionable leadership choices in this wing of the company. Of course these seemingly insignificant bits of code were not *very* useful to anyone because the BSD guys could not merge them, see (c), but they are significant in the grand scheme of things because Apple should be moving in the other direction on the sliding scale - slowly opening more and more of their kernel, IOKit, etc..
(c) The APSL is incompatible with the BSD license, but upside, compatible with GNU license. hrmm… Something brewing? I, personally, won’t do work under a BSD license if I can possibly avoid it, because it empowers anyone — including Microsoft — to repurpose my code without sharing changes. So, if Apple is fighting this, more power to them. Sorry, BSD
Also, a side note as regards DRM, Apple is going with middle of the road tech here. They are satisfying the media industry as best they can and thus providing content which in many cases won’t be provided without DRM. As much as I love to share my music, I know that weak DRM like Apple’s hasn’t prevented me from doing anything legal with IP I have purchased from them. They pander to fair use a great deal, and they are opening up a great opportunity:
_People I Know Who Now Use Windows Are Likely To Switch To A Platform That Is Supported By Someone Other Than Me, And Is Based On Over 50% Free Software_.
When I used GNU/Linux on my primary machine, my friends and family paid no attention to it. I got a couple of people to try it, but now, everyone is sort of curious about this Mac. It comes with more software than they can download for Windows, is simple to use, extremely stable, and they still see me hacking away at a real UNIX terminal which at some level, they are pretty sure, holds the answers to life, the universe, and everything, although most of us know that is simply ‘42′.
So, maybe it’s worthwhile to take a step back and realize the significance of this progress in the past five years, and consider whether there are better ways to influence Apple than by way of BoyCott. Apple historically pays far more attention to the 7% of computing population who enjoy their products than the 93% who don’t, so this just doesn’t seem productive. They are still an underdog, and in that vein, they need guidance. I can smell them being ready to answer many of your demands, but they are not sure how — Steve himself, is not sure how, and he won’t ever admit it.
Even Apple’s commercial, non-free applications can be really great at a reasonable value for this sort of app. The trial version of Pages has come through for me when I needed to print invoices and AbiWord just wasn’t up to the task. I love Abi, I really do, but its’ WYSIWYG code is horrible. Of course, I would prefer that my web-based project management system was fully operational, handled all of my time tracking, and spit out PDF invoices to customers on-demand, but for now, silly as it may be, they demand a more professional looking invoice than I can create with most F/OSS. It is worth noting that I refuse to use StarOffice simply because it uses more resources than SecondLife, and for a word processor that’s unacceptable.
I think also that Linux distributions could learn a lot from the improvements Apple has made to UNIX underpinnings. I’ve been driving the idea that portage, for instance, should be able to build .app and Framework bundles. If you aren’t familiar with the concept, basically whereas and linux have a single file for executable applications, and .DLL, .so, .a, etc.. for libraries, OSX has .app and Framework bundles with XML propertylists inside. This code is fully functional in GNUStep, even if those guys are likely to call you an idiot for trying to use their code.
So, let’s say that for some heinous reason you need eight different versions of libxml, libjpeg, whatever, for eight different applications, including your system tools. On a typical GNU/Linux distro, you would either litter the filesystem with them in random places, hierarchically choose between /usr/lib, /usr/local/lib, /opt/lib, /opt/local/lib (!FHS but common), etc.. You might create several subdirectories in /usr/lib/libxml-x.y.z, and symlink the latest.
If you don’t think that’s heinous, well, I do. A Framework can live in a similar manner, in /Library/Frameworks, or /System/Library/Frameworks - a pattern which has been proposed and, I believe, accepted for the next major version of Open Unix Specification. Furthermore, a Framework can live inside an .app bundle, so if you know that your application depends on an old library and you do not want to fight with dependencies in RPM, dpkg, portage, whatever - you can just package up your app with the version you know you can safely link against. Your users will lose a bit of memory when they are using more than one version of the library, but for the most part, this is a major boon. They won’t wonder why, after their last OS update, Inkscape stopped working. It just isn’t likely to happen.
Cheers!
-=JR
Computer Graphics Ninja Overlord
Association for Computing Machinery
|-Global Multimedia Protocol Group
Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques
|-Digital Arts Committee
Whoa, what a response! That is an amazing rebuttal.
My point is that it is great Apple is getting things well in so many ways, but they are really taking from the Open Source community without much giving. Thus, I think that if one wants to support free and open source software, culture and content, please use Free and Open Source friendly software and hardware (if that is possible).
Check this thread today: http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/06/07/03/1934251.shtml
I guess this topic is heating up the web.
Indeed, I got a link to the slashdot post from G. Scott Owen, our ACM SIGGRAPH President.. I don’t think that famous people switching to GNU/Linux is as big of a deal as mundane people ditching a ten-year Windows habit for a Mac.
I really think it is a tough issue. As I said, I’ve become a huge Apple Fan. I can’t imagine being happy with a machine made by anyone else, and I waited *months* to replace the PowerBook that some schmuck sat on last Nov. For about two months I glared at the Sony VAIO with Core Duo on Amazon while the release date for MacBook Pro failed to launch.
I’m definitely violating the spirit of Free Software that dictates that software quality is not more important than software freedom, but I have to find a middleground. The investment in Apple has really paid off for me, esp. during the last two years of unemployed life. The last time I was unemployed for this long, I couldn’t get anything done because I didn’t have my own internet connection and simply could not maintain a Debian system. There really isn’t anyone who addresses this and IMO a lot of F/OSS platforms are driven by people who can afford to, for lack of a better term, Dick Around All Day.
I tell you what - Inkscape, The GIMP, Blender, and Camino, a Cocoa variant of FireFox, all serve me quite well, I don’t cry out in agony trying to install Zope, or anything for that matter, from source, as my Windows-using counterparts do, and for the first time since my freshman year of High School, I feel like a part of normalized digital society again. I can download things and have them run and participate in social computing activities to an extent that is generally not possible for Linux users.
For over ten years I gave up being a part of the world for pure Freedom, and it was great, and I may go back, but my current slant is that Apple is the most conscientious commercial entity in computing whom I deal with, from my perspective, and they are more likely to listen to me as a customer than a non.
I do also feel strongly that Apple are misperceived as not giving much back to the community, and I feel that what they *really* lack is proper leadership on this front. Someone’s got to step forward, IMO Steve-o can only be expected to do so much. If Bill Gates has led a sea of engineers and users to the - no pun intended - gates of hell, Steve-O is at least screaming “Let My People Go!”. Ya gotta love a guy who was fired from his own company, returned, and now publicly slams the management decisions made while he was gone in Keynote speeches.
I must admit I was smacked in the face after asserting that iTunes does not restrict me from doing anything that is not illegal. This is not the case. As of iTunes 4.6 or so, once you have upgraded iTunes and accessed your account with the latest iTunes, you can’t access with a previous version *or* rip the DRM from your content. Furthermore, there is no means of pulling the DRM from video downloaded via iTunes, so the season of “Weeds” I just shucked out $20 for, which I thoroughly enjoyed watching on my 15″ HD widescreen, can’t be burned to DVD to share with my roommates.
In any case, as someone who boycotted RedHat for years, but now loves a good, solid, RHEL server, I think there are better ways to be heard. BTW, this reminds me that once, when I worked at TurboLinux, we hired a prop-plane to circle the RedHat picnic at their semi-private Linux conference with a “Freedom of Choice!” banner. We had been ejected the previous day as guests of IBM after hiring a high school cheerleading squad to pass out our obnoxious yellow sweatshop t-shirts.
Boy I don’t miss those days.
One last comment:
I’d love to be the guy to help drive F/OSS policy at Apple, but my resume has probably been shredded after I sent a drunken rant to Steve_Jobs@apple.com demanding the progressive release of more source code. I don’t regret it.
I’ll see you at the docks, Steve-o.
I’m just sick of these die-hard Apple enthusiasts. People who claim Apple’s are “better” for their field, although the majority of software is available for both systems, and Apple’s don’t provide much customization. I don’t like that Apple abused open-source code for OS but it’s because it’s that much more solid, and honestly, MS should do the same (even though they won’t). I don’t like how everything on and with an Apple comes from only Apple, and their unwillingness to work with others, which is what makes downloading and installing Mac OS on a PC is so much fun =) . Lastly, I don’t like their ‘put an “i” in front of everything’, “we look cool” marketing scheme (which is working wonderfully, look at graphic designers), and can’t wait until a few years from now when all the white iProducts and iPod headphone cords begin to turn yellow.
However, I won’t be suprised when Apple holds the majority of the market, and will have to put up with even more Mac enthusiasts everywhere I go. Despite my opinions, Apple is doing a damn good job.
You have many valid points, save one: The Greenpeace thing. It’s a shakedown.
Apple does enough bad things, there is no need to spread false claims. It damages credibility and makes it easy to be labeled “MS Fanboi” or thir latest insult: a “Dvorak”.
I’m glad for this web site. I wish there were more. My gripe about Apple stems from the fact that Apple CLEARLY has a way to track down stolen iPods, but they REFUSE to do so because they make more money when people have to buy a new iPod. Yesterday, they refused to help me when I called to report that my brand new Nano was stolen only hours before, but told me to contact “local law enforcement” and that Apple would cooperate with law enforcement in any way they could. Apple OBVIOUSLY has the technological capability to trackdown my iPod. Their reluctance to even OFFER insurance on iPod purchases is even more evidence of the “you’re-screwed-and-we-don’t-care” mentality. I’m so SICK OF APPLE! Please report stolen iPods on http://www.stolen911.com/. Since Apple won’t help us, let’s help eachother. I probably won’t get my iPod back, but I like this web site because I officially HATE APPLE!
AND ONE MORE THING! There’s another reason Apple makes money by refusing to track, or at least prevent thieves from using YOUR iPod on iTunes (for example)….THIEVES USE ITUNES TOOOOOOOO! And Apple allows them to do it! Just plug it in…finders keepers! Crooks stick together that way.
http://www.homelandstupidity.us/2007/04/15/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipod/
Yah, I didn’t think about that, but yes, they can track these down, but it is most definitely not in their economic interest to do so. Forget apple and go get some generic player that can run rockbox:
http://www.rockbox.org/