[TriLUG] Where is Linux today?

[Tanner Lovelace]

On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 7:32 PM, jason tower <jtower at cerient.net> wrote:
>> What does Mac do that Linux does not?
>
> be proprietary and closed
>
> i am amazed at how many people in the trilug community give this fact
> little to no consideration.

Hmm....

/me checks http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/

Yep, there's the source code to the underlying operating system.  Nothing
"proprietary and closed" about that.

Quite a bit of everything else in OS X is open too.

Granted, the main Cocoa libraries and things like iTunes, etc.. are not open,
but nothing forces you to use iTunes.  Fairly soon you'll be able to run
Amarok (http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/303-Amarok-on-Mac.html)
and the rest of KDE4 applications on it (http://mac.kde.org/). And don't
forget both Fink (http://www.finkproject.org/) and
Macports (http://www.macports.org/).  They have a lot of free software
available and easily packaged for the mac.

So, while there is a proprietary and closed part of it, yes, it is quite a
bit more open than Jason makes it out to be.

And, it is Unix under the covers and you can access the command line
and do anything you want there.

In addition, you don't have to deal with kernel politics or distributions
making a statement by not including codecs (which I applaud their
stance, btw, but I just like things to work) or any of that stuff that
just gets tired after so long.

Cheers,
Tanner
-- 
Tanner Lovelace
http://wtl.wayfarer.org/
(fieldless) In fess two roundels in pale, a billet fesswise and an
increscent, all sable.