Re: [linuxiran] My growing interest in Apple

[Arash Bijanzadeh]

On Monday 21 April 2003 11:30, Aryan Ameri wrote:
> 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.
I really can't understand what RMS intend of this?!
>
> 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.
where can we get this Apple's 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
>
>
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