my own "yet another imageboard-script" (116)

57 Name: #!/usr/bin/anonymous : 2008-09-04 21:05 ID:tSfTeKGw

>>55

> Apple made Mac OSX from FreeBSD in a lot less time than anyone has been working on a mass market viable desktop Linux.

>>56 is correct. Apple bought NeXT - partially to get NeXTStep, and partially to get Steve Jobs. If you google Apple Rhapsody, you can find screenshots of intermediate versions of NeXT that look less like NeXTStep and more like MacOS9.

> Just wait till they fork the shit out of the Linux kernel.

Linux has already been forked. There's the big forks on kernel.org like 2.2, 2.4 and mm, but there's also forks in various distributions- RedHat and Ubuntu both supply patches that don't necessarily show up back in mainlines.

> From a pure resource to goal standpoint, fucking sucks. Forking changes the goals and then diminishes the resources for each one.

Unfortunately, the reality of software development isn't a pure resource-to-goal problem. Nobody's entirely sure what needs to be done in the long term and we're only now starting to find out. Free Software is finally feature-comparable with non-free software, so if someone wants to experiment with something, they don't need to wait and beg for Microsoft's permission- they can just go do it. As a result, we see really cool things showing up- like Xen, and Amazon's compute cluster, and Google, that simply wouldn't exist without something to fork.

Once we have a clear idea on what's good, implementation is usually pretty straightforward. Free desktops and free servers have simply opened up new opportunities to fork and experiment; they have not, as you suggest, made products worse, they have made things better.

If you disagree, you can just look at all the "innovation" a proprietary company does when they can stop forks and stop competition.

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