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He is almost true in the pragmatic sense that a lot of the OS is open sourced and it certainly lends itself well to running and developing open source. Of cour

He is almost true in the pragmatic sense that a lot of the OS is open sourced and it certainly lends itself well to running and developing open source. Of course it isn't open in the Stallman sense of "if you don't melt the ore yourself, it's not open" but then again Linuxes and others aren't, too.

kamaal 15y ago
Pardon my ignorance, Or may be I'm just out uninformed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X - mentions, its under a proprietary EULA.
- arthurschreiber 15y ago
  Mac OS X as a whole package might not be open source, but many of its individual components (Darwin, Webkit, ...) are open. (See http://opensource.apple.com/ http://opensource.apple.com/)
hollerith 15y ago
The problem with your argument is that you appeal to the idea that open source is more virtuous than proprietary software, and you want that virtue to rub off on Apple, but unless you explain why open source is virtuous, nobody can refute your implication that Mac OS X has almost as much of this virtue as Linux does. I would almost certainly be running OS X even if none of it were open source, and I tend to believe that that is true of most OS X users (even those users like me who can program). In contrast, the fact that parts of OS X are open source does not seem to help OS X gain traction in markets where completely open-source software stacks are vastly more popular than OS X, like embedded systems, supercomputing and internet servers. I am not an expert on all of the reasons developers and admins of embedded systems, supercomputers and internet servers prefer completely open-source ecosystems to OS X, but I tend to believe a lot of it has to do with not wanting Apple to be able to jerk them around and has to do with the fact that if they started to use OS X, Apple would be able to jerk them around almost as much as they would be able to if Darwin, Webkit, LLVM and TextEdit were not open source.

kamaal 15y ago

Pardon my ignorance, Or may be I'm just out uninformed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X - mentions, its under a proprietary EULA.

arthurschreiber 15y ago
Mac OS X as a whole package might not be open source, but many of its individual components (Darwin, Webkit, ...) are open. (See http://opensource.apple.com/ http://opensource.apple.com/)

hollerith 15y ago

The problem with your argument is that you appeal to the idea that open source is more virtuous than proprietary software, and you want that virtue to rub off on Apple, but unless you explain why open source is virtuous, nobody can refute your implication that Mac OS X has almost as much of this virtue as Linux does. I would almost certainly be running OS X even if none of it were open source, and I tend to believe that that is true of most OS X users (even those users like me who can program). In contrast, the fact that parts of OS X are open source does not seem to help OS X gain traction in markets where completely open-source software stacks are vastly more popular than OS X, like embedded systems, supercomputing and internet servers. I am not an expert on all of the reasons developers and admins of embedded systems, supercomputers and internet servers prefer completely open-source ecosystems to OS X, but I tend to believe a lot of it has to do with not wanting Apple to be able to jerk them around and has to do with the fact that if they started to use OS X, Apple would be able to jerk them around almost as much as they would be able to if Darwin, Webkit, LLVM and TextEdit were not open source.