the sort of thing with which Apple would their products associated? I mean, aside from the immature, dolts in the slashdot crowd who think boring out someone's skull with a 50 cal is cool there has got to be a lot of folks who are going to frown upon their favorite consumer electronics product being used to facilitate taking human life.

is my dagger +5, my bracers of defense +5 and I am all set. Excellent it is all coming together nicely.

Heh I thought the same thing. Kind of ruins it when the management types sabotage our acronyms!

Ah yet another reason for executives types to go on an expensive *planning* retreat to determine what they will do instead of actually having a plan.

Execute at week long business treat:
"I know what we will do, we will restructure our business around SOA! That along with massive layoffs will keep the company sharp! Excellent, with that pesky bit of business out of the way I can enjoy remaining week in my week long retreat"

Sends layoff memo to middle management minions instructing to them to cut 5% of staff then heads off to the bar to enjoy a well-earned drink.

Even with the prospect of Jobs having of an extended absence from the day-to-day at Apple I think we will see the company continue to do fine, or at least continue on their existing business path.

While leadership is a key element of business success, so is having a well balanced team of professionals driving your development/innovation teams.

I have to image Apple has this balance in their organization.

I am sure they did tailor their resume, that is exactly what people interested in getting a job do!

The fact is they landed the position because when we interviewed them they demonstrated strong Linux/UNIX skills.

I work with these folks daily, as they continue to demonstrate strong Linux/UNIX skills, and knowledge.

The majority of *market domincance* surveys boil to little more than highly slanted, carefully filtered marketing campaigns. Given that, why do you feel anecdotal experience is essentially worthless?

I have worked for many companies, I have seen a tremendous amount of Linux/BSD on the back-end, and now I am seeing it on the client-side as well.

None of the organizations for which I have worked have been ten person shops but rather larger enterprises looking to maximize their investment in infrastructure from initial purchase to full depreciation. All of them recognized open source as a viable means of achieving these goals in some form or another.

Linux began making headway long before the economy went South. The value proposition of low, or no acquisition cost is just icing on already very appealing cake.

As far number of users, I have heard OS/X has anywhere from six to ten percent of the *OS market* depending on which survey you happen to believe. I would say its not hard to believe that market use of Linux/BSD on the desktop rival this at least.

Honestly I am not sure how people are counting number of Linux/BSD desktop/laptop users since there is no license to buy. You download, then go using one copy of a download to install numerous times/instances. For all either us know there could be many, many millions of users.

According to the Apple site, a copy of Leopard costs $129. Not exactly trivial. though I am not sure what percentage of the cost of a new Mac is the OS.

I have no problem with Macs, or OS/X but for my money I can get a lot more value through commodity hardware coupled with Linux, or FreeBSD.

Many folks are discovering the same.

Who says they Microsoft has the edge? Where I work we hire a number of kids out of college, *all* of them have higher degree of comfort implementing various solutions on a Linux/BSD platform then Windows. That tells me they are getting a tremendous amount of exposure to these platforms during their college years.

Quite frankly I manage to do my own job quite effectively without having to rely on Microsoft products at all, this includes technical aspects as well communicating, documenting, etc.

So by all means use the tools you are comfortable with, but do not imply that they are the only choice for the *real world* when that is not even close to being the case.

I do not think that is true. Plenty of people and organizations use Linux on the desktop/laptop.

With Linux (or say FreeBSD) you can deliver a functional platform with *all* of the applications a typical (and not so typical user) needs for *no* acquisition cost.

Definitely an attractive value proposition which continues to attract attention.