Fanboys who want to defend Apple have just fallen victim to their brainwashing propaganda machine. All a capitalist entity cares about is maximizing profit – if taking away your freedoms and corrupting governments, schools and hospitals means more profit, they’ll do it.

So keep rubbing the Mac fanboys’ dull faces into the dirty facts, hopefully we can stop a second Microsoft from being born.

[]s

Congratulations for the post. I’ve linked it in a post I wrote today, inspired by yours!
http://www.chrisb.com.br/blog/apple-inimiga-da-comunidade-open-source/ (in portuguese)

What Apple and OS X do, particularly in the server market, is divide those who want a modern, friendly Unix-like OS from those who want a free, open-source OS. Traditionally both camps chose Linux, but now those who have no scruples about license are starting to look at OS X instead.

It’s a shame that Apple and various Linux vendors cannot team up to present a united front against Microsoft, because there is a lot to be gained from that. But it would involve both commercial and idealogical concessions on both sides, which I can’t blame either side for refusing.

I think the real innovation area to watch involves iPhone (closed) vs. Google Android (open). They’re basically emerging to market within 18 months or so to each other, so we’ll see how quickly the open source folks and app developers can drive Android forward and either catch or surpass Apple’s innovation on iPhone.

Again, I realize I’m one of those guys talking out of both sides of his mouth: I love Ubuntu. I love Apple. I’ll let you know if my loyalty to Apple ever fades.

“I’m an Apple believer — even though I’m co-founder of the Works With U site.”

and then later goes on to say:

“I believe Apple represents the best of closed source — though I realize that may be an issue going forward.”

is probably one of the clearest examples of what Chris Tozzi is talking about in this post.

The constant excuses that are made for Apple’s blatantly monopolistic behaviors by its fan base continue to amaze me. But I suppose anything is possible when I consider that I have (otherwise intelligent) friends that continue assert that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the September 11th attacks.

The power of faith is astounding. But I have to ask: is what Apple and its evangelists do in the name of the Macintosh “insanely great” or “greatly insane”?

I also emphasize that the larger point of the article is that although Apple has benefited enormously by borrowing open-source software, its policies very much conflict with the ideologies that produce such software, and yet few Linux users seem to be concerned. Apple is obsessed with locking in and controlling users. If the developers of KHTML, Darwin etc. had felt the same way about their products, Apple never would have been able to use them. Steve Jobs likes to share (and he does share code back, as you point out) within a limited context, when it benefits Apple, but he rejects the principles–choice and freedom–upon which sharing is supposed to be based.

As I say in the post, perhaps I’ve just read too much Richard Stallman, but I think that Apple at least should no longer be given such a free pass by larger part of the FOSS community.

Is Apple the most friendly company towards open source? No. Are they completely against open source? No.

Free-BSD and the Mach kernel are the basis for much of NeXtSTEP (which in turn is the basis of OS X), but through Darwin, they HAVE contributed a significant amount of support back to the Free BSD community. And the license says they don’t have to release everything, so let’s get over the “ungratefully borrowed” or “stole” accusations. That’s just oversimplifying and untrue. I suspect that like most Linux zealots, you have little to no experience using BSD. If you did, you would have seen first-hand the benefits Apple has given back.

In the case of Konquerer, Apple took something that flat out sucked — I mean, SUCKED (did you use KHTML pre WebKit, if you say you did and that it was even halfway decent, you are a liar) and all but abandoned and they created WebKit – which is still open source (compile your own damn browser if you want it so badly — isn’t that alway the OS party line when people complain that something doesn’t work or that it doesn’t exist) that is now used by KDE, Gnome, Google’s Chrome and dozens of other smaller projects. Konquerer was crap, would still be crap (or would be abandoned) if Apple hadn’t poured time and money (and hired away Mozilla’s best Mac guy) to create Safari. So Safari isn’t available for Linux. I don’t think the market exists for an Apple branded browser. It is in Windows because a) iTunes is essentially WebKit with a QT wrapper b) Windows users actively buy Apple products. Linux-only users aren’t typically a pro-Apple audience. People like me who use multiple OSes usually do use a MacBook or MacBook Pro because the hardware is more reliable and we can run lots of stuff at one time.

Oh and if you really wanted to cite an example of where Apple does crap on open source, you should have used DTrace. But you didn’t, because you have no idea what you are talking about and instead use the two examples that every anti-Apple Ubuntu freak always uses, even though they are scurious and totally half-baked. I’ll totally say that DTrace was a messed up situation, and that Apple is hardly an open source cheerleader, but they aren’t the devil and in neither example have they done anything other than follow a license and still provide source code (as in the case of Darwin) and actually make something worth using and not a piece of dung like with WebKit.