Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Thu 16th Jun 2005 08:54 UTC
The Mac platform was always considered a premium platform, hence much of its software is shareware or commercial. In the recent days more freeware applications have emerged, but the majority are small utilities and not full scale applications. Enter the world of GNU which can not only provide "free" applications as in beer, but most importantly, "Free", as in Freedom.
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I'm also willing to go to great lengths to support free software platforms, but there is zero incentive for me to support proprietary ones, since most of their users aren't technically inclined, don't understand what the concept of a software community is, are least likely to contribute back to the project, etc.
If you expect your users to be in a certain state of mind in order to use software, we're not talking about license or technical issues, we're talking about philosophy, or something approaching. Except in very specific cases, I don't see any reason for asking users to be inclined to anything (except the license) when it comes to using a computer program.
I, in fact, agree with you about the "porting librairies" idea. That's what has been done for the greatest IM app on OS X (aka Adium) that uses gaimlib. I do try to use librairies in my Cocoa apps instead of simply recompiling and run the original app in X11. Yet, if it is possible to port a certain kind of Linux apps without much trouble and integrating them with OS X's user interface, I don't see why that should not be done. And the original developers should be happy to see their user base growing, instead of wondering if the end-user is concerned enough about freedom or anything. Using their software is only the proof they write great pieces of code.