'GPL encumbrance problems'

[Craig White]

On Wed, 2006-01-18 at 13:41 -0800, Rickey Moore wrote:
> 
> 
> Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
>         Are you suggesting that there is something morally wrong with
>         the people who contributed to the *bsd components whose lack
>         of restrictions allowed them to be used in OSX as well as
>         continuing to be freely available? Or that OSX existing at
>         all is a bad thing?
> Morally wrong? Nope, no one HAS to live up to my expectations, that's
> a given. 
> 
> My personal take on Mr. Jobs and Apple? 
> <hitches up pants>
> <deep inhale of breath>
> <eyeballs Les>
> I've been largely unimpressed by Steve Jobs since 1978. Woz built a
> helluva machine. Woz is a Saint. Jobs closed it up, and Woz moved on.
> My old original Woz built Apple ][ had integer basic in ROM and would
> drop to a mini-assembler when you hit reset... you could load a
> 'copy-protected' disk into memory, hit reset and write that sucker
> straight to tape using assembler level commands... <evil grin> ... and
> you had it! The 'update' to the roms put floating point basic in and a
> redirect of the reset (03d0) to reboot the system. No more Wozness...
> bad users not in charge of their space anymore. Double bad bad to look
> at how something works. Now Jobs wants open source?  If it wasn't for
> BSD and all of their contributors, Jobs would still be barefoot and
> fingering his butt, trying to figure a way to lock it all in for his
> greedy self and forever getting beat like a wet dog by Gates. 
> 
> Now all these nice wellmeaning people shower Apple with BSD gifts, and
> it'll be a matter of time that we see a return against the GiftDebt or
> not. I won't be affected either way as I haven't given them sh*t since
> I piddled away $2500 in 1978 dollars, to find only several years later
> new software couldn't run because I needed to replace the ! entire
> machine for the latest.. "Then ye shall know the Devil by his works."
> <chuckles>  OSX could be a better thing if it was Fedora'd. The entire
> thing. Heck, I'd probably use that. 
> 
> I keep hoping Apple (apart from the OSX community) will just blow up
> and go to Hell one day,  but that line of thinking is REALLY bad for
> me , my Yama turns a dark shade of maroon. I'll leave them to the
> Creator of the Universe to deal with. May they recieve, in like
> manner, as they have given. 
> 
----
I think their perpetual 3-4% market share is probably akin to the hell you wish upon them. It's not enough for anyone to take them seriously.

I think that it inures to the strength of BSD and BSD license that Apple
can make use of some of it's pearls and build a business model upon it.
Myself, I find OSX modestly unusable and only effective if I put another
2-5 thousand dollars of software on it.

Craig