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To: Robert Salasidis who wrote (137053)	6/9/2001 10:44:45 AM
From: Dave Budde	Respond to of 186894

Robert, I thought we were discussing whether the Mac's "closed" system was monopolistic or not. I'm aware of the things you stated about BIOS availability, etc. The point I was trying to make was that some PC manufacturers, like Compaq and IBM don't use these, they write their own, and they do their own chip sets and thus the machines they produce have some proprietary edge to them (or so they would like to think). At any rate, this draws the line in a different place about how open a given system really is. And I maintain that Macs are just as open (or as closed depending on your view) as these systems. I can run Windows on a Mac. It's not as efficient, but so what. That's because you need to run it on top of an emulator so binary applications will work. But there is nothing about the Mac that precludes someone from writing another OS for it. Connectix has shown they can develop code that works with the Mac OS layers to control all the hardware. I can run Unix on a Mac. I can run equivalent application software on a Mac and in many cases these are superior applications, and in many cases they are inferior. I can buy all kinds of third party hardware for a Mac. I think the line has moved about what has traditionally been called a closed system. But I agree with you about one thing. We've beat this issue to death.