Apple is an "abuser" of open technology for the simple reason that they are taking a huge advantage by using the free software that the community has produced over many years and they don't give anything back.

Of course you're right: the BSD license allow that and the GPL license is designed to avoid this kind of abuse but this doesn't mean that this behaviour is not an abuse from the moral point of view.

I believe that the approach of Microsoft is much more honest: they are against the free software and they don't use it in any of their products.

I think that MS have made some minor innovations from time to time but the point is that they have acquired an almost complete monopoly over OS and software market in general by always using *unfair* methods. To my point of view their most unsupportable way of doing is the continuous tentative of silently introduce proprietary protocols/formats to lock the people to their products. If MS it was for Microsoft even TCP/IP will not be used and it would have been replaced by IPX/SPX and not to mention the Office closed formats with the fake XML attempt. And the list could be infinetely long because in every domain MS have attempted to use the same strategy. These are the reasons why I don't use MS products even when they are technically better than the alternatives. For the same reasons I'm happy to use Linux even when, in some cases, you need to accept some limitations. Francesco

Companies that spends millions in software development very often produce crap. Look at UNIX, one of the most successful operating systems. The original plan of AT&T was to develop an ambitious OS called MULTICS but they failed to produce anything and UNIX it was developed after its failure by Kernighan & Ritchie. So the company, with all its million of dollars, failed to produce anything where an handful of smart people succeeded. Real innovations and breakthrough software are almost always produced by smart/skilful people or by very small company. The reason is that in big companies a handful of incompetent managers that does not understand anything takes the decisions and this lead very often to crap products. Also they tend to hire mediocre programmers and never hires really smart people because these latter have often a non-conventional CV. Google is an exception in this world and the explanation is that the work was started and the company founded by two very smart guys that understands very well maths and programming. Big companies only produce craps and they need software patents to protect their very fragile advantages. Francesco

It is really sad to see the list of programming language that they have chosen. Two variants of Visual Basic, it is a joke or they are serious? Like if Visual Basic was a real programming language... And they have removed C, the most important programming language for any programmer. If I were a student I will have very serious doubts about this course.