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Saturday, March 03, 2007

Linux fans, Mac users, other *nixers, unite.

I know that there's long been a big feud between Linux users and Mac users, or to be more accurate, other *nix users and Mac users, but this is sheer dumbassery. When will both communities wake up and realize that the enemy is not each other? When will both communities realize that the enemy lies in Redmond, WA, and goes by the name of Microsoft? It is Microsoft that has repeatedly abused their customers, violated IP laws, violated antimonopoly statutes, and produced defective products. Can both communities realize that they agree on this most fundamental topic, and instead focus our efforts towards improving our OS's and our other hardware, and either creating ports or analogues that can both read and record to Windoze proprietary formats? Can both communities agree that greater word-of-mouth and other forms of advertising should be done? Can both communities (okay, this means you, Mac users) agree that we need greater penetration in the enterprise market? What people use at work can greatly influence what they buy to use at home. Oh, and Mac users, can we both agree that we need to have OS's that can run on any hardware? Apple's step towards Intel chipsets was good, but they need to do more if we want to provide balance to Windows. Just my thoughts on the subject...

3 comments:

1138 said...

I've been a nixer for a long long time, I wasn't aware of the battle you describe.
Being a user of Solaris, flavors of Linux, flavors of BSD (includung OSX) I'm aware of some tensions, but nothing that amounts to enemy status.
Heck I even run Linux on one of my Apple Boxes.
What happle has to do if finally FREE THE HARDWARE. The move to X86 was a start, but it wasn't a start for liberation, it was a move for survival - the Motorola chips they had been running on just weren't going to go any further under the control of IBM.
If we can get a harware maker to move to a nix that can go from brand to brand, then we can start to finally make solid progress against the Microsoft tax.

Mandelbrot's Chaos said...

Well, not necessarily a war, but I do know that the fans of Linux and the fans of Mac have had... strained relations. Me? I don't care for either Steve Jobs or Steve Ballmer. I think the former wants to control the software and the hardware, while the latter also has a Napoleonic complex, though lacks Jobs' charisma. I think that, just as effective as getting a hardware maker to choose a *nix would be getting one or more major hardware makers to charge actual price for M$. That would definitely cause a shift in the computer market. Of course, the Microsoft tax is currently obscured by the fees AOL et al. pay the major computer manufacturers to put their crapware on computers. We'll see.

1138 said...

Well OS-X being a closed system doesn't help relations between the communities.
But really the MAC is irrelevant, I-tunes has more value than the software OS.