Re: Flawed Look At Alleged OS X Flaws

May 17th, 2006 • General

Mac developers and power users no longer have the freedom to alter, rebuild, and replace the OS X kernel from source code. (emphasis mine)

I love Apple, I really do. It’s things like this that bother me most.

W. A. Gerrard, from StrayPackets, commented on my last post about OSX’s design flaws. It’s people like him that make me appreciate blogging, it almost never turns into a personal conflict.

Gerrard is right that few of the issues I raised don’t relate directly to the user, but that doesn’t stop them from affecting users. Users aren’t stupid, as far as I can tell, they just don’t want to spend time doing things they find useless; like squeezing the last 0.05% of performance.

On the other, it’s our job to do just that.

Monolithic vs. Microkernel

Linux found to be faster than OSX in many tests, and those were general benchmarks, not something specific like database querying or file indexing. Regardless, different people look for different things. If I tell you I can give you a car that performs two times better than you’re Roles Royces, for the same price, just without the leather, would you take it? I sure as hell would.

All operating systems crash, save maybe those used at NASA, and even those go wrong sometimes. Windows crashes, Linux crashes, BSDs crash, OSX crashes too. It’s a matter of how often and how severe the crash is. That’s pretty much minimized in all *nix systems.

But my main argument was about performance, since we all know that both Linux and OSX are very stable. Of course users want the computer to do “stuff”, but they don’t want the computer to get in the way, they probably don’t want to wait for a photo editor to entertain them with a splash screen, they don’t really care. And it’s our job to make sure they never have to.

OSX doesn’t do a lousy a job in that, it’s just been topped.

Portability Issues

It might not be as big an issue as all the others, but I believe it does matter.

Apple is following a plan similar to Adobe’s: give Reader for free and sell Acrobat. Give away low-margin software in order to sell the complement. Even Joel wrote about this before. And that’s a sound plan, except these guys can do better.

If portability wasn’t an issue, every single designer would’ve made the switch to Intel Macs. What do you think is stopping them? Photoshop CS2, they can’t have that yet. And why can’t they have it yet? Portability.

Packages

When you look at OSX as just an operating system, then obviously software wouldn’t matter. The sole purpose of an operating system is to talk to the hardware, and make it easy for developers to write software.

But when you look at OSX as a platform, software comes into the picture. I know that most Linux distributions have tons of repositories filled with incompatible packages, but that’s a topic for another post. Software and packaging are part of the system architecture in the same sense that library names and directory structures are part of it.

There’s nothing wrong with the current model of OSX, it’s just the same as Windows’ model. I only think that certain Linux distributions (like Debian and Slackware) do a better job at making users’ lives easier.

Administration

Honestly, how many professional companies use those Xserver things? They’re barely servers in terms of performance. Just because Apple has a server product line doesn’t mean that it’s selling. Apple used to have cameras, Kodak-rebranded cameras, if I recall correctly. They failed.

What I like about Apple is that they don’t surrender to failing, and when they do fail, they just admit it and move on. They admitted the failure of MacOS, and look what we have now, OSX.

Of course the best system administration is no system administration. But any sysadmin knows it’s a myth. There’s no such thing as “no system administration”. Somebody always has to screw up something. All systems get mysteriously hosed from time to time. And that’s when you need powerful administration tools by default, not as an extra value-added option.

Freedom

Yes, that kind of freedom.

I don’t think those who are concerned about their freedom are a small choir anymore. The last two decades didn’t have an alternative. People got used to buying self-limiting software, and that in itself is a problem.

I was going to publish this post yesterday, but got busy. You know, yesterday I would’ve swore that I don’t accuse Apple of “not playing nice”. Today’s news changed that.

I can see how freedom itself can’t convince most people to switch to free software. These people have things to do, they don’t want to be bothered by things they don’t know. It’s like learning how to drive again, this time with your feet.

Most people don’t read EULAs, they don’t go over long documents, and that’s how Microsoft tried to slip nasty stuff into XP legal documents, which fortunately didn’t work. If only more people read their rights, and carefully considered the options, I think we would’ve seen a greater shift to free software.

I have to clarify a few things here:

First, I’m a fan of Apple and their products. I used to design on a G3, then moved to a G4. But that doesn’t mean I should tolerate whatever they do, especially when they do wrong. I still think that the only advantage of OSX is the really cute interface, but that’s not the only advantage of Apple. As I’m writing this, I’m staring at the MacBook, their recent member of the family, and considering replacing my Toshiba with it. That’s completely aside from my criticism.

Second, and most importantly: The freedom I’m looking for isn’t the freedom I “like”, it’s the freedom I want and value. I don’t really care about the ideology of those who are developing the software. For all I know, Linux could’ve been developed to operate nuclear bombs and catastrophic explosions. I don’t care, as long as I get the freedom to operate my own nuclear bombs and make my own catastrophic explosions.

I see using proprietary software is like buying a car that you can only drive on certain roads, for certain number of times, in certain times of the day, with a limited fuel tank that only the car maker can refill. That can work, it just makes getting around much more difficult.

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