I read the title and thought "Apple". Everything about the company smells of evil, and I am reminded of this every morning when I need to download my news podcasts for the road; I have always copied and pasted audio files into every MP3 player I owned, but with the iPod, I need to launch the horrible iTunes and drag programs into my iPod. Should I plug my device into any other computer with iTunes, it would attempt to reset its memory and initialize it for <i>this</i> other iTunes :-/
The enemy of FLOSS is convienence and ease-of-use. I'm not trying to be snarky: I'm typing this on Firefox in Linux and I've almost excusively been on Linux since 2002. I've been elbow deep in this stuff for years, hacking and tweaking and experimenting, etc. I'm at the end of my rope, about to jump to Apple with all the lock-in and overpriced shit and inflexibility and patent abuse, etc. At least it is easy to use and maintain and has many powerful, flexible and even niche applications. And well-supported libraries.<p>I'm starting to see those free software ideals I've held so dear turn into tradeoffs. I'll trade in some 'freedoms' for more capable, abundant, and better supported software that allows me to get work done easier and more effectively.<p>If RMS wanted GNU software to spread then he shouldn't have gone into politics and preaching. He should have made sure that GNU software was more useful to the software users. To most people software freedom is too intangible to be counted as a benefit. Hell, 99.9% of people couldn't even explain it in very basic terms if you asked them. He's just created software for enthusiasts and hobbyists. Not a bad thing, but not his goal either.<p>Anyways, I've grown out of it.<p>I'm just talking about consumer-facing software, by the way. I know free software will always have value in education, commodity software that is not your primary business, etc. It is always going to be an abysmal failure on the desktop unless a free software Steve Jobs appears out of thin air, though.
Every day I am more convinced that the enemies of FOSS are the borderline morons that descend on articles like that one to "tell it like it is" with "M$ IS TEH DEVILZ LOLZ" prose that only makes everyone else shake their heads in disgust or shame.<p>Microsoft would do a far better job at discrediting FOSS if they simply flooded the internet with astroturfers that mimic the FOSS nutjobs.
One thing I find a bit silly about this debate is how seriously we developers tend to take it. We toss around words like "enemy", "devil", and "evil", to describe a company that manufactures consumer electronics.<p>I realize that many of us care deeply about open source software, and hope that the field we work in does not become tightly controlled, but let's face it: it's not like Apple is producing weapons of mass destruction, or cheap guns intended for street gangs, or cigarettes.<p>If we showed an iPad to the average person, and said, "Look how EVIL this is!", they'd probably be more than a little confused.
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I am in total accordance with you. Apple is pure evil just imagine they had the core of their operating system(Darwin) open sourced even if they didn't need it to. They contribute to some high profile open source projects(WebKit, LLVM & SproutCore). Their web browser is standards compliant and their competitors can use the same rendering engine. And you can choose to buy an Apple product or not. We need to stop them now before they destroy our freedom forever.
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I'm not sure that promoting an alternate development model really means "the enemy" of FOSS. If you'd ask RMS, he'd probably say so, but I don't see why Apple's closed model and FOSS' open one can't co-exist. Also, it's not like Apple is attacking OSS, it's playing nicely as well as sponsoring several large projects.<p>If Apple is the enemy of FOSS, we've got a rosy future.