Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 7th Feb 2008 22:47 UTC, submitted by tyrione
Linus Torvalds, leader of the cult of Linux, took a swipe at Apple's OS X and Microsoft Vista in the same breath at a conference in Australia last week. Speaking at the linux.conf.au conference in Melbourne, Australia, a few weeks ago, Torvalds called Leopard 'utter crap' and bashed the proprietary OS makers for being greedy, according to Australian reporter Nick Miller in the The Age. "I don't think they're equally flawed - I think Leopard is a much better system," Torvalds said. "(But) OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary." He also scoffed at his rivals' practice of revenue-through-renewal by launching upgrades that require new purchases. "An operating system should be completely invisible," Torvalds said. "To Microsoft and Apple (it is) a way to control the whole environment - to force people to upgrade their applications and hardware."
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Member since:
2006-01-28
Linus is stating the obvious. In fact, when read in context, his statements seem fairly sound.
Proprietary software makers are forced to put upgrades in the market place because they otherwise go out of business. While FLOSS benefits from commercial success, it goes on irrespectively, particularly because its revenue stream is primarily tied to support services instead of licenses.
And HSF and HSF+ are indeed pretty old and junky. Let's hope that Apple eventually replaces them with ZFS.