Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 26th May 2008 17:54 UTC
GNU, GPL, Open Source Ivan Krstic' critique of the One Laptop Per Child Project has made its ripples around the pond of the intertubes. Apart from the obvious part where it criticises a major project from an insider's point of view, it also had a few other remarks that caught people's attention - most notably the admission that despite his ability to do Linux kernel hacking, his main development laptop is a Macintosh running Mac OS X.
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Comment by Kroc
by Kroc on Mon 26th May 2008 18:42 UTC
Kroc
Member since:
2005-11-10

When you're programming, you want to focus on your work. It's hard enough juggling the architectural implications of your next line of code, without dealing with your operating system grating against you.

It's hundreds of subtle things that make Mac OS X an awesome developer platform, and it's certainly no surprise to me.

RE: Comment by Kroc
by danieldk on Mon 26th May 2008 19:54 in reply to "Comment by Kroc"
danieldk Member since:
2005-11-18

When you're programming, you want to focus on your work.


True. I think that there were originally roughly two groups who were attracted to GNU/Linux: people who wanted to use an affordable UNIX-workalike on i386 hardware, and people who use GNU/Linux because it is free software. (Yes, this is an overgeneralization.)

For the first group, the availability of source code under a free license is possibly an additional advantage, but they are not (fully) attached to it. It's not that surprising that people within this group switch to OS X on the desktop: it quacks like UNIX, it runs on relatively low-end/cheap hardware, and generally has less hassles than GNU/Linux.

This can clearly be seen in the BSD community. Many BSD users/developers use OS X on the desktop these days, and I'd say that they have historically been less attached to copyleft licenses et al.

Edited 2008-05-26 19:55 UTC

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RE: Comment by Kroc
by SEJeff on Tue 27th May 2008 02:46 in reply to "Comment by Kroc"
SEJeff Member since:
2005-11-05

You're right, but only to an extent. Vim's code completion and features along with some macros is more than enough for some people. Vim runs the same on every platform for me. Not being a free software purist but more of an open suoecs purist, Linux is more than enough for me.

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RE[2]: Comment by Kroc
by PlatformAgnostic on Tue 27th May 2008 08:47 in reply to "RE: Comment by Kroc"
PlatformAgnostic Member since:
2006-01-02

I'm curious: does VIM have a C parser or, by 'code-completion,' do you just mean e-tags based text substitution?

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RE: Comment by Kroc
by Karitku on Tue 27th May 2008 07:50 in reply to "Comment by Kroc"
Karitku Member since:
2006-01-12

Indeed, 3 people have changed to Mac it must be flood. How can Apple manage such a demand? Seriously Thom I would buy such a news if it was some major software design company but 3 random people?!?

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RE[2]: Comment by Kroc
by Kroc on Tue 27th May 2008 08:43 in reply to "RE: Comment by Kroc"
Kroc Member since:
2005-11-10

The number is more like a million a quarter, and growing. But hey, keep on soaking in that fear.

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