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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill Fischofer who wrote (62836)	11/12/2001 1:46:02 PM
From: Dave	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

Perhaps because had they chosen Linux MacOS would have fallen under the GPL? That's not true. Only the parts that used GNU source code would fall under the GPL. Those parts would be roughly equivalent to the open-source BSD that underlies Mac OS X right now, and which is covered by Apple's Darwin open-source license anyway. I suspect that the main reasons for foregoing Linux in favor of BSD were (1) most of the work was already done at NeXT, and (2) there are lots of excellent third-party NeXT apps that make use of BSD, and these would have to be ported to Linux. In the long run I think they would have been better off with Linux. But at the time, they didn't have the luxury of planning a long-term strategy. Anyway, the open-source Darwin community is starting to make some major contributions to Mac OS. Remember, Apple is the single largest distributor of Unix software in the world. There are a lot of developers interested in getting their hardware and software to work with Mac OS, whether it be open-source or commercial. Here's another guess. Quicktime will never be made available on Linux because no Linux user would pay for Quicktime Pro and Apple isn't in the charity business. Nice guess but highly unlikely. QuickTime Pro is not a big cash cow for Apple. Mac OS is. And besides, your claim that "no Linux user would pay" for software is bogus, because those "Linux users" would be Mac OS users, who certainly do pay for software. Dave