Apple, Open Source & Strange Bedfellows
I’ll be up front; I don’t get it. Why is there this massive affinity for Apple in the Open Source community? Apple may be many things, but they are pretty much the antithesis of open source.
A while back, I was at the NoSQL East conference. As you may imagine, this is a very open source friendly group. Extremely so. Nearing the point of religion (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing). I love open source; I run Linux on all my home servers, build MySQL wherever it fits most appropriately (Oracle type stuff pays the bills, but I’m not a zealot).
What I find ironic and amusing is the allegiance these same people have to MacBooks. I understand the “it just works” argument and “it’s really Linux underneath”, but the irony of the open source crowd working with what has to be one of the single most closed vendors on the planet is rather amusing.
And it’s not just NoSQL East. Almost any open source conference will have plenty of white fruity laptops floating around.
Hardware and open source do not usually go together; most open source people are not quite that dedicated (Richard Stallman excepted). And it’s not like Microsoft is all that much on the bandwagon for open source either. Nor should someone have to be purer than Caesar’s wife and run only developer’s licensing to even start in the App Store and the Kremlinology-like “will they approve it or will they not” approval process combining to produce a “don’t you worry your pretty little head, we know better than you” attitude from the folks in Cupertino, I just don’t get why the love. Can anyone explain it to me?
– Update –
Is Apple loosing cool points with techies? According to this article from Tech Republic, yes.
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