[linuxiran] My growing interest in Apple

[Aryan Ameri]

Just gained some news and information recently, thought it might be good 
to share it.

Each day, I am becomming more curios and interested about Apple. First, 
I recently learned that Mac OS X, comes with bash and gcc. I mean You 
get these two programs, with every Mac OS X. And yes, they are 
distributing them under GPL.

Ofcourse, it's not always nice for big companies t work with FSF. As we 
all know, gcc is GPL. Apple not only distributes gcc, but they also 
make improvments to it, and work pretty much very seriously on gcc. I 
have heard that internaly, they use gcc as their main compiler. And 
yes, all their improvments are also gpl, so they give their work back 
to the community. exactly like what they are doing on khtml, 
konqueror's html rendering engine.

Mac OS 10.2 comes with GCC 3.1, considering that it was released last 
August, that was the latest gcc at the time.

But in order for FSF to accept changes and make Apple's improvments and 
patches back into the main trunk, FSF states that if you want your 
software to go in our trunk, you should give up your ownership, and 
make FSF the copyright holder. Something that many people don't like, 
and many big companies like apple can't accept.

So the situtation that we now have in hand is that Apple's gcc is much 
better than GNU gcc, and though Apple's gcc is gpl, the improvments 
don't find their way back into gnu gcc.

in contrast, Linus torvalds doesn't require such a thing. If you 
contribute to the linux kernel, you can remain the copyright holder, 
and linus will incorporate your work into the kernel, as long as your 
work is gpl. The same goes for other projects, like KDE.

Anyway, my roommate here, is considering buying a laptop. He has seen 
some of these Apple advertisments in magazines, and generaly likes 
their hardware (and specially their mp3 player, iPod). Now, he is not 
the kind of guy, to use GNU/Linux. He doesn't like Windows either, and 
admires Linux's stability, but when ever he see me working in cosole, 
he grasps. He is a media guy, if he gets a laptop, he wants it to be 
able to work with his mp3 player and digital camera painlessly. 
Ofcourse, my mp3 player and digital camera work with linux, but 
painfully.

So, I thought why not Apple? after all, it's a rock solid Unix, with a 
nice graphocal interface, and the ability to do things that windows 
users can only dream of. e.g I have worked with iTunes, and I can say 
it's the best piece of multimedia application ever produced.

And when you get apple, you can also get fink. fink is a port of 
debian's apt-get into Mac OS X. So with fink, you can easily get all 
you favorite linux applications and run them on Mac. That inclused 
XFree86 4.3, and KDE 3.1.1 and emacs and ... (binaries for all of these 
applications are available for Mac OS X).

And who knows, maybe when my roommate get familiar with the concepts of 
unix, and can navigate in it's filesystem, and gets familiar with bash, 
he may also put linux on his iBook.

I once looked at apple, as a heavily proprietary company. Now the way I 
see it, they are a very innovative hardware company, with a warm hand 
towards open standards and open source. I mean look at the number of 
projects that they are contributing to, GCC, Bash, Khtml, Darwin (which 
is a Mach kernel, which FSF uses for thier Hurd kernel), .... The list 
goes on.

It's a win-win relationship, the community contributes it's code to 
them, and they also give back their improvments. It's nice to see how 
big corporations are finding ways to cooperate with the free software 
community.

Cheers