pgwalsh said:
.The point is that Apple has a great friggin opportunity and they're letting is slide right by.
Apple has the better OS... I would just like to see it available throuh HP, Compaq, Dell, and AlienWare or let me build my own. Apple can continue selling their machines, they'll just have to compete.
Hmmm, I can't see it ever happening, it didn't work for them last time. And I think its probably too late now.
I could be wrong, and I concede I am no Linux expert, but heres how I see it.
Perhaps a major reason why OSX is better than Linux is that it actually inevitably consumes a large amount of money to create and improve an OS to the standard of vision and integration that Apple has achieved and must now maintain.
If Linux was as elegant, easy to use and install as OSX, do you think Redhat would survive when it could be got free elsewhere.
Redhat is surely benefitting from the unpaid labour of many talented programmers, and is effectively selling security and ease of use for code that is not intrinsically easy to use or install. The same could be said for IBM. They are all mainly giving a veneer of solidity and professionalism to a body of code they have largely not had to pay to develop and maintain, at least up to this stage.
How much money do Redhat invest into the actual opensource in a way that OTHERS can share without paying money to Redhat. IBM and Novell, are they writing code that benefits ALL opensource users and installations, or just theirs?
And even if they are investing now, the core of the OS was not paid for by them.
I don't think you can have it both ways now. If the previous attempt at licensing the Mac OS had worked better, and marketshare had been maintained or grown, perhaps Apple would be making enough money off software to keep the ball rolling and what you propose might have become the norm.
But now, since the installed base has become so small, its probably impossible to make that move, licensing would probably allow too many of their captive user base to move to another hardware platform and Apple would see a smaller percentage profit from every installed OSX copy than they do from hardware and OSX combined.
Perhaps that remaining revenue would then be too small to keep the OS development running at such a high standard. It would be a very high risk undertaking.
It works for Bill because he has so many copies out there, it works for Linux because most of the programming so far is still being done for free! It won't work now for Apple because they are the best but they are also the smallest.
Its a cleft stick.
