Apple's Fears of Open Source come to life...

[KingBahamut]

"Macworld is reporting that "Thanks to pirates, or rather the fear of them, the Intel edition of Apple's OS X is now a proprietary operating system." Mac developers and power users no longer have the freedom to alter, rebuild, and replace the OS X kernel from source code."

http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=14663&Page=1&pagePos=8

OSx86 did this much to them? What did they expect? They expected to come into the open source movement and be regaled with ideas that no one would try to do such a thing. Please. I hardly call someone modifying code to fix a specific type of purpose a Pirate either. That misnomer -- or the insintuation otherwise -- I think is if anything, offensive to the FOSS Community.

[matthew]

If anyone ever thought Steve Jobs and Apple were somehow less ruthless than Bill Gates and the MS crowd they are sadly mistaken. If anything he's worse, but not as lucky nor as business savvy.

[mostwanted]

They closed sourced something (the kernel) that was useless without proprietary extensions (Aqua) and open sourced something else (Quicktime server) that is also useless without the proprietary extensions (Quicktime). This changes nothing.

[megahertza]

I thought that Open source ment that you could use something GPL and alter and lable it your your with out fear of legal action. Sure you can have proprietary OS and still use Open source code.

[mstlyevil]

I have lost all respect for Apple. First they cram DRM down everyones throats by bundling it with iTunes. Then they put blatantly misleading commercials on television that can decieve people into thinking Mac is completely immune to nasties. Then they take shots at MSFT yet refuse to admit their own failings.

Then the icing on the cake is they say Intel CPU'S have doing just dull, boring and mundane task until a Mac set it free. Now I wonder how many games are available on Mac? Gee I guess playing all those games are boring.

Now they are doing this garbage. I normally do not criticize another platform but Apple is way worse than MSFT ever dreamed of being. You could not get me to buy a mac if this is the kind of things they are going to continue to promote.

[mostwanted]

I thought that Open source ment that you could use something GPL and alter and lable it your your with out fear of legal action. Sure you can have proprietary OS and still use Open source code.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software

[BoyOfDestiny]

I thought that Open source ment that you could use something GPL and alter and lable it your your with out fear of legal action. Sure you can have proprietary OS and still use Open source code.

You've confused open source with free software. There are over 150 open source licenses. In the case of Apple, they used BSD [in Apple's case: freeBSD 4.4] code which only requires attribution, Windows uses some BSD code for the TCP/IP stack.

In the case of the GPL, you can't lock it away. If you make changes you aren't forced to share them. I.E. you can keep the software to yourself. But if you do distribute the software you've changed, then you must provide the same freedoms (and the source code.).

So bottom line, apple is the underdog compared to MS, but they aren't the people I'd root for. Secondly Free Software is open source, but not all open source is free software.

www.gnu.org

One thing that irks me about BSD code, is someone takes your work, makes changes, keeps it closed... Then you are stuck competing against your own work... In case you can't tell I'm a big fan of gnu gpl... ;)