Seriously thoughtful Thinking of ditching Linux for Windows 7

[devilsadvocate]

Originally Posted by Dusty Bottoms

They all have positives and they all have negatives, but none of them will ever be halfway as good as BEOS was back in 1999. And on that note, the Open Source BEOS clone, Haiku, has just reached RC1 Alpha 2 and can be downloaded for free here:

http://www.haiku-os.org/news/2010-05...aiku_r1alpha_2

Interesting...and they have a premade VM image. Think I'll have to do an article on this on my site...Do you know if this is supposed to be open-source? They're pretty vague about licensing at their site.

[Seabound]

I think Ubuntu 10.04 is great. I've had no problems with it so far.

[Dusty Bottoms]

Originally Posted by devilsadvocate

Interesting...and they have a premade VM image. Think I'll have to do an article on this on my site...Do you know if this is supposed to be open-source? They're pretty vague about licensing at their site.

As far as I know it is GPL, but I could be wrong.

[bzImage]

Originally Posted by devilsadvocate

That's okay though, Jobs has been taking credit for others' work since he cribbed Xerox's GUI concept 30,000 years ago.

Yea, and Torvalds has been taking credit for Stallman & Tanenbaum & several thousands of programmers work too.

BTW. im a linux kernel developer working on RedHat, i now my ABC's. The nickname its not just becase.

[devilsadvocate]

Originally Posted by bzImage

Yea, and Torvalds has been taking credit for Stallman & Tanenbaum & several thousands of programmers work too.

Torvalds and Tanenbaum never fought any turf battles, only debates about whose was the better kernel design. Andrew Tanenbaum has repeatedly said there's no bad blood between them and wouldn't conceive of accusing Torvalds of theft from him; see http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/appa.html for the actual email exchange. Tanenbaum would be a fool to regard Linux as "obsolete" (his word, not mine) if it was in fact based on his own OS. I've used both Linux and Minix; they're UNIX-like filesystems and the similarity ends there. Minix users freely contributed to the Linux kernel. If Tanenbaum has an axe to grind with anyone, it would ironically be Apple since they use the exact same microkernel architecture and philosophy Tanenbaum himself says is superior to the Linux kernel.

As for Torvalds using GCC and all the GNU jazz, he never said it was his own. Stallman just wanted credit for Torvalds' use of his toolchain and apps; so much for that no-such-thing-as-intellectual-property stuff he keeps railing about (Stallman, http://www.efytimes.com/e1/fullnews.asp?edid=31990). Nor has Torvalds taken credit for "several thousands of programmers work"; they volunteered and/or were paid and knew exactly what was going on. Platinum corporate members of the Linux Foundation collectively contribute millions to kernel development; nothing stolen there. Furthermore he openly admits to barely contributing any actual code anymore and merely making decisions on contributions. Kind of tough to be greedy if your biggest claim to fame is GNU GPL'ed.

Linux is a kernel, not an operating system. Linux doesn't "want to be" anything, but I can see Mark Shuttleworth and several other CEOs might have different plans. The fact remains that Torvalds and the Linux Foundation routinely give credit where it's due; the GPL gives them no choice. Jobs on the other hand happily ignored Mac OSX's BSD roots in public until Marketing told him being UNIX-based was a big selling-point. You'll also never hear about how the GUI was built with the same Qt toolkit that KDE has been made of since the beginning of the decade, or how IOKit (which makes it all play nicely together) had to be made open-source or Apple was going to be sued for using GPL'ed code (even then, Apple leaves out the header files and makes it all but impossible for anyone in the public domain to use it). The Darwin devs shut their own project down because they were tired of being a sandbox for Apple (see here); all that code is open-source. Jobs' very beginning was selling computers that someone else (Wozniak) designed and built; Torvalds didn't make dime-one until Red Hat dumped US$10 million in stock options on him as a thank-you since without Linux there would be no Red Hat. Torvalds came up with the kernel and companies like Red Hat assembled it into an operating system using FOSS...you know, the same thing you accuse Torvalds of doing.

Torvalds is a programmer, Jobs is...well, let's just say P.T. Barnum would be proud and probably a bit envious.

EDIT: If you're a Red Hat kernel dev why are you trolling for Apple?