Linux-Kongress: Linux Foundation Declares OS X a Luxury Jail

The British developer didn't mince words. In a short historical rundown he described Linux as the UNIX derivative long awaited by higher educational institutions and private developers outside the U.S. in that they could avoid the lengthy legal battles of the 1980s and early 1990s. A series of these battles involved parties arguing over when and how they could use BSD derivatives as open source.

Bottomley shot right in on BSD by quoting engineering director Jordan Hubbard's assertion that FreeBSD is the favorite Open Source desktop. Naturally Hubbard, who is with Apple, meant the Mac OS X. Rather than challenge him on that point, Bottomley instead likened the OS X to a luxury jail and that Microsoft users are clearly finding themselves in one with dirty toilets in comparison. Mac users, he says, can't even see the cell bars for the plasma screens surrounding them. He emphasized that Apple might participate in Open Source, but that it gives little in return and doesn't disclose many of its components.

Bottomley claims that Linux is a different story altogether and differentiates itself from the other systems in many ways. By his assessment many projects define themselves based on a series of abstract values, whereas Linux relies mainly on the technical competence of its developers and the maturity of its code. The underlying motivation of Linux isn't even the determining factor as long as the code patches are clearly visible to maintainers from a technical perspective. Bottomley claims that this "disparate value" approach is what makes the Linux community as strong as it is.

Bottomley ended his keynote emphasizing the advantages to this behavior. Especially companies can be sure that code they contribute will be viewed and enhanced from as many angles as possible. This fosters valuable contributions in light of millions of lines of code, the nature of which might not exist for projects such as Open Solaris.