Re: The latest Microsoft FUD. This time from BillG, himself.

[kaih@khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen)]

landley@webofficenow.com (Rob Landley)  wrote on 22.06.01 in <01062207084202.00692@localhost.localdomain>:

> On Thursday 21 June 2001 18:49, Alan Cox wrote:
>
> > > Except that Apple keeps the old code open. Probably because
> > > they'll gain nothing from it, and at best, they can appeal to
> > > the techies.
> >
> > A company that seems to write 'you shall not work on open source projects
> > in your spare time' into its employment contracts is not what I would call
> > friendly or want to work for. Im sure its only a small step to 'employees
> > shall not snowboard' 'employees shall not go skiing' - all of course
> > argued for the same reason as being essential to the company interest
>
> This IS the company that had the "I work 90 hours all the time" club with
> t-shirts and everything back under Jobs in the early 80's.  And far more
> recently, where at least one employee got in trouble for "thinking
> different' with a parody site involving famous serial killers.
>
> The "Proprietary frosting" model is fine for leaf-node projects like games.
> But if the new layer is infrastructure other people are expected to build on
> top of, then what you're really saying is "I want slaves".

Hmm. This *is* the company that has at least one guy full-time working on  
merging their changes back into gcc (with the right Copyright  
assignments), and where the guy in question does discuss how to make gcc  
work nice with both Apple's application framework and the GPL clone of it.

Oh, and one intern working right now to improve gcc's errors-and-warnings  
code, because that's what the gcc list came up with as a task.

Sure, that's not many people in such a large company, but it's a vast  
difference from MS, and it's also a vast difference from the earlier Apple  
from the look-and-feel lawsuit age.

For a while, they also paid someone for working on Debian's packaging tool  
(dpkg) which they now use for Darwin; at the time, that guy was  
practically the dpkg lead developer.

And don't forget MkLinux.

Apple is not another Red Hat, but they're not a Black Hat either.

MfG Kai