Tom Yager is a jackass.
Reading OSnews is an amusing pastime for me. It’s replete with comedic gems like this one:
Why Apple snubs its open source geeks
For over a month the claim has been made that MacOS X is now a proprietary operating system when it was once an open-source panacea, and many in the open source world have rattled their sabers and had a lot to say about how evil and draconian Apple is for having done so. Apple is stifling innovation! Driving away its developer base! EEEEEEVIL!
One problem: They’re all wrong.
Apple’s product manager for open source software has publically replied almost one month ago that this is _not_ the case. Apple has not closed the source to the kernel for Intel based Macs, it simply hasn’t opened the repository to the public yet. This is a giant distinction, and it should have immediately crushed all the conspiracy theorism surrounding the issue.
Another important thing to keep in mind: MacOS X has never been an open-source operating system. Only non-proprietary, already well-known and used portions of the operating system have been open sourced. Apple makes money by keeping the good parts of MacOS X (like QuickTime, Quartz and other key frameworks and API’s) to itself, and that has been and will be the case for a long time.
But, inexplicably, people like Tom Yager insist on continuing to moan about it. For this, he spent all those years in school?
June 14th, 2006 at 5:01 pm
It is shocking the number of journalists reporting on things they do not understand or wish to understand - if he would at least look at Apple’s page he would understand what is happening. Even more disturbing is the fact that these people get to keep their jobs..
June 14th, 2006 at 7:23 pm
Apologies to those seeing this blog entries appear twice in a technorati search - I just moved the blog to another server and technorati wound up indexing both.
June 14th, 2006 at 10:54 pm
Another possibility is that these folks understand, but a more sensationalist story gets more eyeballs.