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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: nommedeguerre who wrote (31971)	1/22/2002 7:32:42 PM
From: Artslaw	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 213176

Norm, Absolutely agree: most non-core Linux apps can be recompiled on BSD, and so should be available on Apple. Indeed, as you said, as long as the GUI is written in a standard package, you can pretty much port it to any platform where the libraries exist (although, once you are running Aqua, the interactions with it are no longer standard). I do most development on IBM AIX and HP UX systems, and had no problem porting my scientific software to Linux when I found they had some idle cycles to steal. Indeed, I had no problem porting to my laptop PC, either, because the Microsoft Developer Studio is a great piece software (and the application is all text-based). I doubt the free software crowd is going to rally to support Apple, though. Why would they waste their time improving OS X when it would be more interesting to just write a window manager for unix that looks like Aqua (but solves all Aqua's problems)? Well, because Apple will sue them, of course. And that doesn't sit well with any developer of free software--quite the contrary. My second comment would be that unix developers are concerned about functionality over form. GUI's are good, but typically slapped on after the fact. This is not the Apple approach at all. So I don't see the Linux world improving Apple's major (and questionable) benefit: "ease of use". It just means you can get good unix system utilities, which won't be particularly useful to a vast majority of the Apple users, but a nice diversion for some. Plus, as I mentioned before, why would I pay for a really slow Linux box with a very high-priced window manager? Oh, I remember! iPod support! :-) BTW, there was someone who was commenting on how great it is to be able to call up a shell from OS X and do a quick "ls" or whatever. There is a DOS shell replacement called "Cygwin" which gives you the feel of unix (including the core functions, shells {bash, tcsh, et al.}, editors {emacs, vi, etc.} and as many standard applications as you feel like selecting during installation} available free. That, along with eXceed (for hosting Xterminal/windows from remote unix boxes) gives about all the unix-in-Windows one could ever want. Sorry, this message waxed long! Steve