The important thing about Apple is they are the first company to sucessfully deliver a Unix-based personal computer to the mass market, that has an excellent user interface. I personally don't care whether Apple software components are open-source or proprietary. It is a trade-off between openness and manageability. If Apple opens things up or licenses Mac OS X to other platforms, they may greatly increase market share but then they also greatly increase the headaches of having to support many brands and types of hardware. The author alludes to this when he mentions how relatively slow the open-source stuff is to develop; but the pure open-source stuff is finally starting to get pretty good from a mass market standpoint. Open-source sponsorship has also been dramatically improving.<br><br><br><b><i>David Alban <extasia@extasia.org></i></b> wrote:<blockquote class="replbq" style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(16, 16, 255); margin-left: 5px; padding-left: 5px;">
Apple, like all companies, is a mixed bag of good and evil. In my<br>dealings with them (I recently bought a decked-out 15 " macbook pro,<br>which kicks *serious* booty) I've had an instance of truly<br>discouraging treatment (repeated failures to respond to a query about<br>an important sales issue), and an instance of unsurpassed excellent<br>treatment (my replacement battery arrived in one or two days[1] after<br>completing the web form).<br><br> [1] https://support.apple.com/macbookpro15/batteryexchange/<br><br>On 8/4/06, Adrien Lamothe <alamozzz@yahoo.com> wrote:<br>> Fun little article, the URL is:<br>><br>><br>> http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;1480540357;fp;4;fpid;4<br><br>-- <br>Live in a world of your own, but always welcome visitors.<br>_______________________________________________<br>Oakland mailing list<br>Oakland@pm.org<br>http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/oakland<br></alamozzz@yahoo.com></blockquote><br><p> 
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