Apple Bails on Black Hat Talk
Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Sun 3rd Aug 2008 15:56 UTC, submitted by netpython
Apple "Apple Inc. has pulled its security engineering team out of a planned public discussion on the company's security practices, which had been set for next week's Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas."
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RE[2]: As we say in venezuela:
by darknexus on Sun 3rd Aug 2008 23:07 UTC in reply to "RE: As we say in venezuela:"
darknexus
Member since:
2008-07-15

Not likely. Linux lacks several things that OS X has:
* A consistent ABI
* consistent driver model
* a consistent user interface
What does linux have? On the ABI front, every distro has a different version of glibc, gcc, and the other base tools (half the time with additional "distro-supplied" patches applied that cause unforseen bugs). On the UI level, we have a lot of different DEs/WMs to choose from, none of which really look or feel like any others. Even if we choose a DE and not a WM, the apps in that DE are hardly consistent--worse, IMHO, than even some of the inconsistent windows apps. Finally, we have the Linux driver model which, for in-kernel drivers or other open source drivers, is fine. But it falls short when dealing with the possibilities of vendor-supplied drivers. One of the major issues is, of course, that the drivers have to be linked to a certain kernel version. Now, before you Linux zealots go after me, yes I know there are ways to work around that (usually making the kernel-specific stuff open source and putting the rest in a binary blob)--nVidia, OSS, and Smartlink are evidence of this fact, but it doesn't change the underlying issue that every time you receive a kernel update, any vendor-supplied drivers need to be reinstalled. To the end user, this is worse than annoying. Yes, I know that if someone's voluntarily updating their kernel they are aware of what will need to be done in regards to their drivers. But, for the average users, their distro gives them a kernel update that they don't pay attention to. They click on software update, the distro updates itself, then tells them they need to reboot. So they do... only to find that some of their hardware isn't working anymore.
All of these things mean that Linux is not a consistent target for vendors to supply drivers and applications for. Each distro is slightly different, has a different kernel, a different DE or version of said DE, etc. So, which one do they target?
This is contrasted to OS X and Windows, where you know exactly what is part of the base OS and what is not, and the ABIs and APIs are done in a way that updating the OS, and even the kernel, doesn't break drivers and apps. OS X has a better handle on this than Windows does at the moment, especially with Windows Vista.
I'm not an OS zealot, I happen to prefer OS X, as it gives me the power of BSD with a consistent and functional GUI. My point is simply to illustrate that Linux has some major hurdles to overcome before it can ever "eat Apple's lunch." Unfortunately, it seems that providing a consistent target is the last thing on the mind of the OSS devs which is understandable, given their development process.

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