Linux-Kongress: Linux Foundation Declares OS X a Luxury Jail
As a director of the Linux Foundation and a Linux SCSI developer, James Bottomley opened the Linux-Kongress in Hamburg, Germany this week with a keynote investigating the commonalities and differences among the various Open Source operating systems. He describes Linux as the liveliest variant among them.
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.
Comments
comments powered by DisqusSubscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
AlmaLinux 10.0 Beta Released
The AlmaLinux OS Foundation has announced the availability of AlmaLinux 10.0 Beta ("Purple Lion") for all supported devices with significant changes.
-
Gnome 47.2 Now Available
Gnome 47.2 is now available for general use but don't expect much in the way of newness, as this is all about improvements and bug fixes.
-
Latest Cinnamon Desktop Releases with a Bold New Look
Just in time for the holidays, the developer of the Cinnamon desktop has shipped a new release to help spice up your eggnog with new features and a new look.
-
Armbian 24.11 Released with Expanded Hardware Support
If you've been waiting for Armbian to support OrangePi 5 Max and Radxa ROCK 5B+, the wait is over.
-
SUSE Renames Several Products for Better Name Recognition
SUSE has been a very powerful player in the European market, but it knows it must branch out to gain serious traction. Will a name change do the trick?
-
ESET Discovers New Linux Malware
WolfsBane is an all-in-one malware that has hit the Linux operating system and includes a dropper, a launcher, and a backdoor.
-
New Linux Kernel Patch Allows Forcing a CPU Mitigation
Even when CPU mitigations can consume precious CPU cycles, it might not be a bad idea to allow users to enable them, even if your machine isn't vulnerable.
-
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.5 Released
Notify your friends, loved ones, and colleagues that the latest version of RHEL is available with plenty of enhancements.
-
Linux Sees Massive Performance Increase from a Single Line of Code
With one line of code, Intel was able to increase the performance of the Linux kernel by 4,000 percent.
-
Fedora KDE Approved as an Official Spin
If you prefer the Plasma desktop environment and the Fedora distribution, you're in luck because there's now an official spin that is listed on the same level as the Fedora Workstation edition.
Claims explained
Bottomley based most of his claims on the old BSD vs. GPL argument that developers such as Apple who use code under a BSD license have no mandadory obligations to "give back" their imporvements. he cited Linux Foundations CEO Jim Zemlin on the "Jail Analogy". He especially named proprietary divers in Mac OS X a problem, if I recall correctly after all that time. You can watch the full video of the talk at http://streaming.linux-maga...vents/lk08/archive/jbottomley/ and read his slides from http://data.guug.de/slides/...linux-kongress-2008_slides.pdf, the mentioned section are on pages 10ff.
Apple OS-X as Jail