[PLUG-TALK] F. Richard Stallman

[Ronald Chmara]

On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 4:31 PM, Russell Senior <seniorr at aracnet.com> wrote:
> RMS's remarks are completely consistent with his philosophy.  They
> aren't news.  They remind people that Apple has a closed,
> freedom-limiting POV, that is often obscured by their marketing and
> their very aesthetic packaging.

Damn Apple for being all open-sourcey, with style.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)

What with encouraging users to hardware hack the Apple II, putting
debug switches on their Mac *hardware* to let programmers debug and
reverse engineer binaries, their promotion/sales/distribution of three
totally different flavors of *nix over the years, (A/UX, AIX, and
Darwin/OS X, with Darwin being open-sourced), their contributions to
WebKit, the free compilers, the multiple expansion and customization
options, licensing macs with Linux pre-installed, etc...

It's easy to think that Apple has a "closed" POV, but it's just
that... easy. It's not correct. I think they have *cultivated* a
reputation of cachet, of simplicity, of being "non-tinkerable" as a
marketing gimmick, but they've been contributors the open source
community since 1988, and I've been fiddling around in their hardware,
and tweaking their software, just as long.

-Ronabop