what you've said about the mac crowd is quite true. they are users who are willing to pay for quality hardware and software. What you've said about Linux however, I don't agree with.
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Originally posted by JaseP
But the Linux crowd is all about having the same modifiable hardware as everyone else. Its about having options,... And MAC doesn't supply that. Neither does M$. Linux is about having the choice to take control of your system. [/B]
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Linux is a free open source OS that is adopted by a wide range of people. The above sentiments are only shared by the loyal linux fan who believes in freedom above everything else. but linux is far more than that. you can't just say linux is about ______, linux is about a great many things to a great many people. in this context its about the intended audience being the desktop. and the desktop audience by far doesn't really care about the above freedom. most of them just want to get their work done at the end of the day.
look at all the newbies on this forum who come looking for advice. most of the threads go like this 'i hate windows, sick of reinstalling, want alternate OS, thinking of linux, can i do ___________ on linux?'
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[i]Our common ground with the MAC crowd is good for contiued support of *nix system architecture. However, I haven't seen anything from the MAC end of things supporting open source or Linux in any meaningful way. For instance, games that are ported to MAC could generally, with only a little more than a simple re-compile be ported to Linux. But they aren't. And rarely are the ones that are ported to MAC by Transgaming made to be compatible with Cedega... [/B]
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i think you're being slightly unfair there. for one, on a technical stand point i think porting mac games to linux will be much more difficult than porting the windows equivalent. mac games have the added complication of having to port x86 specific instructions to PPC ones. this is because PPC is big endian and x86 is essentially little endian. So its not really a 'little more than a simple re-compile' to port the same mac game to linux.
additionally, these are commercial companies who invest significant time and effort in these ports. the port has to SELL for them to survive. the market for mac games is small but the companies like aspyr who do the porting survive because mac users are willing to pay for good software like you noted above. look at loki games who began porting games to linux only to go bankrupt. they themselves admitted that the reason they failed was because their business model was all wrong. enough linux users just weren't willing to pay for the game. I'm sure there are exceptions to the rule but the keyword is 'enough' to ensure loki can at least break even.
apple does contribute to open source. they used KHTML for safari and have committed all their code back to the KHTML project. check the developer blogs on the kde site, those developers were very happy with what apple did. they knew that apple didn't really have to go that far to just 'serve the GPL'.
same goes for Darwin, the core of mac os x, its open source and its code is freely available to anyone interested. apple does play nice with the open source community.
but again, most apps on the apple OS are commercial and its completely up to the software vendor to 'port' it to linux. i don't believe its fair to attack apple on something thats down to economics. where apple has benefited from open source efforts, it has committed its changes back.
