matticus008 said:
Yeah, that's what I meant. I've gotten too used to typing the "X" after OS after all these years
The funny thing is that OS X
has been licensed before (in the sense of "made available for white box PCs without licensing restrictions on which machines it can be installed upon") with limited success. All versions of NextStep from 3.x to Rhapsody (albiet the latter only available to licensed Apple developers) could legally be installed on third party PCs.
NeXT used this to save themselves from oblivion when hardware sales failed to take off as they'd hoped. It had limited success.
The thing that everyone has to remember is that the industry is constantly changing. In the mid-eighties, Apple or Commodore could have taken over the market with a more open attitude towards licensing as they had superior systems that were hampered by the limitations of only being available from one vendor, with one image. Apple's Macs were over-priced and under-powered. Commodore's Amiga suffered from lousy management and branding issues.
In the early-nineties, everyone saw Microsoft as the future and all third party platforms as dead in the water, never able to recover. Most non-Microsoft computer makers had gone bust or stopped selling hardware altogether. Apple was flailing. Apple's licencees sold Mac compatables to the existing Mac user base precisely because there was nobody else they could sell the things to. People otherwise generally bought Windows 95, or if they wanted a "technically superior solution" they chose NT or OS/2, both of which were better than Mac OS 7 on pretty much every level except the GUI (and that's a subjective point.)
Now we're in 200x. Windows is popular, but a significant number of people want out. GNU/Linux is about the only option unless you want to invest significantly in hardware that's rarely going to be cost effective. (Insert usual claims about Mac and Dell equivalents generally having the Mac being cheaper. That's not how it works though. Most people want X, if Apple sells X+Y for $1,999 and Dell sells X+Z for $999, then Dell's machine is, sans operating system, more cost effective. If I want a 17" widescreen on my laptop with DVD playing ability, enough power to run moderately good games, and otherwise just the ability to browse the net, I'm better off buying the sub-$999 laptop (w/ 17" WS, ATI graphics, and a Pentium M) I saw in Staples yesterday afternoon than waiting for the 17" MacBook.)
And generally, GNU/Linux isn't that popular. It might be. GNOME is heading (finally!) in the right direction, but if I say it's not there yet on a Mac forum, I'm preaching to the choir. So people dabble with GNU, go back to Windows, and wait.
I don't think this is the same situation as the mid-nineties when everyone wanted Windows 95. When Windows 95 was truly revolutionary, with a UI that was almost there, and with an underpinning that was far more powerful (pre-emptive multitasking, automatic memory management, built-in TCP/IP networking, and past and future compatability with content that simply wouldn't be available for other platforms) than what Apple had to offer at that time.
To sum up: the market is different:
- Most content available today is platform neutral. It wasn't in 1995.
- Mac OS X is an equal to Windows, and clearly superior on the front-end. Mac OS 7 was a poor cousin of Windows 95, and its UI was only marginally better.
- People are willing to consider non-Microsoft platforms again. In 1995, Microsoft was the land to swim to from the sinking ships of Commodore, Atari, and Apple.
And it's worth noting that Apple/NeXT have tried two different models - licensing to manufacturers (Apple) without restrictions on marketing (ouch!) and licensing to users without restrictions on hardware (NeXT), the former failed, the latter did as well as it could given the circumstances - the one thing it did do was ensure that the OpenStep platform never died.
So can we, for once, hit this "Apple tried it before and it failed" thing about licensing Mac OS on the head? There are many good arguments on both sides about whether Apple should license Mac OS X, but comparing Apple licensing a different operating system in a different market using a lousy licensing model or irrelevent licensing model isn't really providing anything useful.
