Piestar

One of the biggest causes for dismay these days is that Linux advocates are cosying up to Apple, constantly talking about how they ‘will destroy Microsoft’.  Remeber rule #2 (from Part 1) “Microsoft is the antichrist”.  Even Linus Torvalds said ‘Microsoft hatred is a disease’, yet Microsoft hatred is a maintay of the Linux community – it’s as much about hating Microsoft as it is Promoting Linux.  Go find me a review of Windows 7 that doesn’t have a Linux advocate Kanye’ing the comments with pro-Ubuntu propaganda.  Contrast with the various Snow Leopard reviews which only contain a slight smattering of such garbage.  It’s nothing but talk of ‘beating Microsoft’.  It’s important to these people that MS fails.

The bias isn’t even denied.  Slashdot doesn’t even have a Microsoft section - it’s the emotional Voldemort effect (it’s hated so much you can’t even speak it’s name).  APLawrence plain came out and said he’s biased (and then proceeded to do a ‘review’ – dude you have zero credibility if you can’t even try to be impartial).  Some prolific troll I used to see on a regular basis would never type ‘Windows’ or ‘Microsoft’, instead calling it ‘That other OS’.

Consider if a group of car enthusiasts hated the Koreans, would it be fair if the reviews they put out for public consumption were based on an irrational hatred, rather than an actual review of the product?  Would it be acceptable for them to slander the company and it’s products just because they didn’t like the people who made it?  And most importantly would doing so be intellectally honest, or would it simply make the people participating in such activities morally bankrupt and untrustworthy?

Once you get over the whole Microsoft hatred groupthink (I was a hater in my youth, a decade ago (they still use the same ‘jokes’ now)), it pisses you off to see people spouting garbage based entirely on a misformed emotional opinion.  I can’t help but think people who actually subscribe to the ‘Microsoft is evil’ groupthink are probably the same sort of people that would fall for homophobic and racist propaganda, it’s all based on the same self-perpetuating cycle (Microsoft sucks, thus it’s products suck, thus Microsoft sucks).  Starting with the opinion that Microsoft products suck at the start of any review is obviously going to colour your opinion, and picking out the bad points to justify your cycle of hatred is no different than cherry-picking stories of ‘black’ crime and using that to say all blacks are criminals.  There are problems with everything, and everyone, and focusing only on the bad is not reflective of reality.

Not to mention that one a scale of ‘global suffering caused’ Microsoft isn’t even in the top 1000 companies.  What about Shell, McDonalds, Bernard Matthews, Nestle, Gap etc.  Think animal rights and child slave labour.  It makes the whole “Microsoft won’t give us teh codes” wharrgarrblll look utterly ridiculous to the non-indoctrinated.  Seriously, to the outside the Linux community looks like the people you see standing outside the subway yelling ‘the end is nigh’.

I’d even understand if it was about the ‘freedoms’ so frequently blabbed about, but the reality is that Apple are so much worse than Microsoft, yet they get a free pass.

So here’s a quick run-down of Apple’s latest antics.  Find something recent (or even at all) by MS that is worse than this lot:

Psystar and EULA’s

Who’s name I copied for this blog (for no other reason than I thought it was amusing), are in court again with Apple.  The ‘crime’ is selling Hackintoshes – Normal PC’s with OSX loaded.  Apple’s argument, in a nutshell, is that OSX is licensed, not sold, so they can define what you can and cannot do entirely by the EULA.  From the Slashdot headline (Apple’s brief):

‘Finally, every time Psystar turns on any of the Psystar computers running Mac OS X, which it does before shipping each computer, Psystar necessarily makes a separate modified copy of Mac OS X in Random Access Memory, or RAM. This is the third unlawful copy.

According to standing copyright law there is an exception (Section 117 of US Law, don’t know the UK one) which permits someone who buys software to load it into RAM to use it (as technically it has to ‘copy’ it off of the HDD to run it).  It’s obviously ridiculous that such a provision needs to be put in law in the first place as why would you buy two copies just so you can run the installed version, but there you go.

Apple’s claim is that since the software is ‘licensed’ and not a copy, the EULA (license) takes presedence over standard copyright, thus negating Section 117, making it illegal for Psystar to turn on the machine as they are making an unathorized copy.  This is entirely to support their hardware monopoly, they don’t want people to install OSX on any computer that they haven’t paid Apple’s markup on – despite the fact that it can as there is no technical difference between and Apple and any other PC manufacturer anymore.  And this isn’t about ‘support’ as if it was the case they’d just not support anyone with non Apple hardware.  What it is is Apple telling you what you can and cannot do with something you have bought.

Signed Binaries Only

Someone asked me if I had ‘jailbroken’ my HTC Hero.  Thanks to Apple it is now considered status quo to not be allowed to have control over your own device.  The whole reason I went with Android over Apple is I want to do what I want with my own hardware, rather than playing some ridiculous cat-and-mouse game to simply install non ‘Apple approved’ software on it.  Apple have removed basic functionality that has been around since the start of computing, placed themselves as ‘gatekeepers’ and refuse to allow anyone who they don’t want to play in their garden.  It also nicely negates the GPL as you can give away all the source you want but unless you get Apple’s approval (and pay) you’re not going to be able to get the software running.

Forced Upgrade Treadmill

I got an old iMac years ago to test websites out in Safari – that’s all I wanted it for.  But Safari wouldn’t run under the version of OSX it had, and I would have had to jump two versions to actually get it working.  Every time a new OSX version comes out after a while backward compatibility gets broken and Apple owners are forced to buy it.  Some people are still running Windows 2000, a decade old OS, without any issues.  XP from 2001 is still popular.  Yet if you run OSX from 2001 it won’t work with any current software.  Not to mention with Snow Leopard everyone with PPC based Macs (some sold as recently as 2006).  Everything before the Intel switch wont work with Snow Leopard and it’s successors, and when Apple inevitably drops support for Leopard you’ll have to replace your perfectly serviceable hardware with new stuff.

When Apple announced the dropping of PPC it was greeted with joy that ~6gb HDD space would be freed.  Yet in Part 1 of this post some Linux advocate is going mental because apparently Windows 8 (you know that OS that doesn’t exist) will only support 64 bit.

The Palm Pre

Apple has an install base of about 100,000,000 copies of iTunes, or so I have heard.  iTunes only works with iPods, and iPods make up a monopoly share of MP3 Players.  People are then looking at getting a smartphone, already have iTunes and no doubt DRM locked content.  Lets go for the iPhone they think, as nothing else syncs with iTunes.  Isn’t this abusing a monopoly position to get leverage in another market?  Wasn’t Microsoft strung up for using it’s OS share to get into the browser market?

So the Palm Pre came out and pretended to be an iPod so it could get first class citizenship.  iTunes was ‘updated’ which then blocked it.  And the cat and mouse game began again – it’s not that the Pre won’t work with iTunes, it’s that Apple are actively stopping it working.  Just like they stop OSX installing on non-Apple hardware and stop people installing non ‘approved’ apps onto iPhones.  Sure there is that XML file, but that doesn’t count for much.  Yet amazingly in discussions of this on the Internet people say “It’s Apples product, they can do what they want” yet if MS blocked any browser but IE on Windows can you imagine the outrage?  It would be epic.  Apple does the same thing and gets a free pass.

Microsofts Monopoly

People act like Microsoft and Apple are competing, which is entirely untrue.  Apple doesn’t even want marketshare.  They just want the lucrative high-end market and have no interest in the low end.  Apple account for something stupid like 80% of the over $1000 computer market.  If they wanted marketshare they would have released OSX as a standalone – as it stands they are suing a company for increasing their marketshare.  If they wanted to break Microsoft’s monopoly they could, but they don’t, so is it really a monopoly if it only exists because Apple lets it?  If OSX was commercially purchasable I would certainly give it serious consideration, and so would many others – but it isn’t.

Yet in all the discussions I have seen people largely seem to be supporting Apple in it’s behaviour against Psystar and Palm, justifying it and agreeing with it.  At worst they are supporting Apple.  At best they are having a heated (usually quite fair) debate, while ignoring Apple’s massive anti-competitive streak and history of actively excluding competitiors products.

I simply can’t think of a single thing that MS has done in the last decade that is worse than anything I have posted, yet the hatred is still entirely on MS – Apple even have their own Slashdot category.  Tell me this isn’t unfounded, irrational bias.