Jobs Offers Free Mac OS X For $100 Laptops 1053
bonch writes "Steve Jobs offered Mac OS X free of charge to the $100 laptop effort by the One Laptop Per Child project. However, his offer was declined because the project was looking for a 100% open source solution. The laptops will now be running on Red Hat Linux on AMD chips."
Re:Silly? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:What? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
Red Hat wasn't always bad. (Score:5, Interesting)
As time has gone on, there have been many improvements that they have failed to adopt. Dropping support for RPM in favour of APT is one such improvement that they didn't make. The whole GCC 2.96 debacle sure didn't help their reputation amongst developers.
Either way, you are correct, Red Hat is not the way to go. Mac OS X, especially free, would have been the best possible choice. Not considering that, Kubuntu would have been the second best option. It'd offer a solid, coherent KDE system, built upon the power of Debian.
Not suited (Score:2, Interesting)
But as it sits, it would have been fsck-all impossible to shoehorn Mac OS X 10.4.3 "just work" into a Negroponte laptop. They wouldn't get to adjust the UI themselves - the part of Mac OS X that is totally closed. With Linux - you can change whatever you want to fit your device. Its perfect.
Now, an Apple engineered open source OS for PDA sized devices - aw hells yeah. That would rock like Mac OS X and the iPod OS because they would design it to "Just Work".
I love the justification... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, with that argument, why not just hand them a pile of dogshit?
That's the most useless justification for staying with Red Hat Linux as I've ever heard.
Further, it's not as if Red Hat-proper is "free". You can bet your bottom dollar that Red Hat is seeing dollar signs out of this deal. Big dollar signs.
Sure, Jobs may have been in it partly for ulterior reasons as well - I'm not going to pretend to know what he's thinking - but considering that the entire core of Mac OS X is open source, and what's not open source is a very polished, easy to use, major-vendor-supported OS with amazing language and multilingual support, revolutionary accessibility support, including the first commercial OS to include a free full-fledged spoken interface, and so on, I think that rejecting it out-of-hand on the basis of wanting to be "100%" open source is a little bit short-signted and foolish, when one steps back and looks at the big picture.
I literally can't believe MIT rejected this offer.
(And no, there wouldn't be concerns with system requirements. Apple would have engineered a targeted version of Mac OS X specifically for this program.)
Apple-Intel Implications (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not for US students... (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:biggest mistake ever (Score:2, Interesting)
i suppose the installation and configuration is going to be done beforehand by some experts who can tinker better with an open-source sytem. and i expect using GNOME is more or less equivalent to using OSX for a person who has not used computers.
besides, i expect linux is better suited for use on more generic hardware than osx is.
Re:Free publicity (Score:1, Interesting)
Personally, I like the idea of a cheap wind-up laptop as the perfect item to include in my earthquake, tornado, hurricane, tsunami, cyclone, monsoon, ice age or US government emergency kit.
Re:Ignore the research, it's only research (Score:1, Interesting)
Make no mistake--that brilliant design decision, and many others in the Apple experience, derive first and foremost from the good taste of Mac users and developers. As Steve Jobs once said: Triumph of the Nerds: The Transcripts, Part III [pbs.org]
Re:OS X easy to use -- what are people smoking? (Score:5, Interesting)
Which was great when we had 9" monitors. Whether it is such a good idea when you have a 30" display, or multiple 20"+ displays is an arguable point. Saying you can just "fling your mouse" when the target is actually several feet away is really dubious.
Being the cynic that I am, I tend not to think that Apple had done research proving a fixed menu bar is the best for large displays. Instead they keep it around because it's a Mac visual trademark that distinguishes them from the competition.
GNUStep (Score:1, Interesting)
Now, i supose that the only benefit that Apple can get from this is mindshare and publicity, but they won't to open source their desktop, so why don't they give more help to the gnustep project? it can be like a low end OSX running with linux/BSD kernel; with it they can give to people a taste of its framework and they will have lot of future developers trained to make free and commercial software for OSX?
Re:Red Hat wasn't always bad. (Score:3, Interesting)
Not only that, KDE has superior support for internationalization. That will be a real benefit when getting these laptops to children in Asia and Africa, for instance. Such children may not know English, and thus will need to rely on the excellent translations provided by KDE.
Another thing to consider is how easy APT makes updating packages. Even from the command like it's something a child could do with ease.
Closed-source APIs? (Score:4, Interesting)
If you think about it, GNUStep running on Darwin is already damn close to replicating OS X with Free Software. Sure, there's a few things missing (notably, Core*), but if OS X started getting really widespread adoption like this, those holes would be patched up quick.
I would certainly like.... (Score:1, Interesting)
Eventually, someone will come up with an interface that combines the best of keyboard and mouse in one unit, and I have a sneaking suspicion the big breathrough will be coming from the gaming/console using world, and not the desktop/workstation world.
Re:Ignore the research, it's only research (Score:1, Interesting)
apple also abandoned much of their well researched (decades!) UI guidelines when they made aqua. apple abandoned good UI design in favor of eye candy. yeuccch.
now you have menubar at top, dock at bottom (or side, ugh!). having the dock jump out at you every time you touch the edge isn't a good UI design either.
and how's this [nyud.net] for bad design? a lot of "mac experts" get it wrong, what's a novice to think? this would never have happened under the old MacOS UI guidelines. it's disturbingly typical of aqua.
nextstep did many of these things right, osx often feels like a braindamaged next.
If Jobs REALLY wanted them to use OS X ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why these laptop designers are idiots (Score:2, Interesting)
p.s. whoever modded you Troll can't argue your points. I'm sick of seeing this kind of censorship on
Re:Silly? (Score:3, Interesting)
Saying all users don't want to tinker is as dumb as saying that all users do want to tinker.
Being able to tinker with a device does not mean the device is not useful. If, using your example, a kid gets a cheap water pump and wants to modify it an any way - the addition of an internal purification filter (or whatever... I don't know enough about pumps to think of anything clever) for example - he will not be able to.
It's great to get something that just works and, if so motivated, be able to tinker with it to better address your personal needs. It may even increase its usefulness.
To use a computer tool, it should not be required to be able to "tinker" with it.
This is correct. But that's not what is being said. The OS should be "tinkerable"... that's not saying that tinkering is a requirement for using the computer, but a requirement for the OS. Whether the user tinkers or not is up to them.
Re:Ignore the research, it's only research (Score:3, Interesting)
Bzzt. Wrong!
If that's not enough, what about the fact that one window seems to be 'hovering' a little 'higher' than the rest of the windows (casting a shadow double the size of unfocussed windows).
Bzzt. Wrong again! Thanks for playing.
I really don't see how anyone who's used OS X for more than 5 minutes could have trouble telling which window has focus.
Then I guess you haven't used OS X for more than 5 minutes.
When windows are unfocussed, OS X offers a title bar style change, title bar text changes color, windows get visibly larger shadows, and a boldfaced, 13 pt label that is always at the same point on the screen.
That's the way it should work. This is not the case here though.
The window you think has focus actually does not.
Try it.
BIG HINT: It's NOT the software update window. If it did, the OK button would be blue. Therefore, the software update window does not have focus.
And no, this isn't a photoshopped image either. It's straight from OSX 10.3.9.
What more do you want? Should the window flash orange and red every five seconds? Should it speak the name of the focussed window? What would make you happy?
A bit of consistency would be make me happy.
Re:Red Hat wasn't always bad. (Score:3, Interesting)
I like how you portray old Redhat in a good manner, and then talk about the equally old GCC2.96 problem to detract from the MODERN version.
Either way, you are incorrect. Almost any Linux distro you could get would be a great choice these days, and one that has commercial might put into its deployment can't be purely bad. As for OS X, I'm not sure whether it'd be a better choice, myself...
Real story here: Licensing OS X (Score:4, Interesting)
Steve Jobs proposed an arrangement under which Apple would allow computers other than its own to run Mac OS X.
Just this summer, Apple VP Phil Schiller was telling the media, "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac."
Now, this is a long way from selling boxed copies of OS X for installation on whitebox PCs, much less a bundling agreement with Dell...but still, it's a significant development. What other devious schemes might Steve Jobs have for OSX86?
Re:Ignore the research, it's only research (Score:2, Interesting)
The argument as you've given it is that you don't have to be precise to perform an action because you can move from your current pointer position to the global menu bar by flinging your mouse to what is pretty much an infinitely sized target at a screen edge. While this is great, the truth of the matter is that most of the time after you have performed some action on the global menu bar you now want to get back to the window you just came from, and now you have to perform precise mouse movements to get back to the window. This is worse on higher display resolutions as the pointer has a greater distance to traverse before reaching it's target.
So what it really comes down to is your screen resolution, usage patterns, and personal tase.
Re:Silly? (Score:3, Interesting)
Are you running OS X on a $100 laptop? There are a lot of tweaks and GUI candy that I can turn off on a GNU/Linux install. Since Quartz is not open source I cannot tweak it to run really well on a $100 laptop. From a MIT researcher perspective I would go with GNU/Linux so that I would have the control to disable extra Quartz or program components. Do I need a music jukebox that can connect to a music store selling $1 DRM laden music tracks in a third world country? Can I mess around with spotlights settings to make some slight changes to optimize it for my $100 laptop? With apple, or other proprietary software developers, it's file a bug report and then start praying something happens and wait. With GNU/Linux, the MIT lab or anyone for that matter can start working on improvements. As Joe or Jane researcher at MIT I would go with GNU/Linux where I have more control.
Re:Silly? (Score:2, Interesting)
My job is 'tinkering' with linux. Linux is not finished. It's buggy, There's no documentation. It's a pain in the arse. There's no glory in doing that last 20% which actually completes a project. Everyone wants to add functionality rather than finish debugging what's there. Or they feel that what is there doesn't do what they want it to do and so reinvents the wheel and develops a subtly different application to do basically the same thing. So I get paid to finish it. Make it good enough for consumer products. Fix bugs that no one wants to fix because they are not interested in fixing boring obscure bugs.
Generally open source software is not managed or professionally developed. There are exceptions but they are exceptions. The quality control is rather lacking. I've had enough. I get paid respectably to 'do' linux at work. I want an easy life at home and so have a Mac. The software may not be the best in the world but it is developed in a comercial environment with the quality controls that go with that. That's what appeals to me about OS-X (and IRIX before that). People haven't tinkered with the software. Those applications you list do what I want them to do. Why should I want to change them. More importantly, if I had the source to them, why should I think that my changes will improve them? That's arrogance!
Re:Sometimes it's tough (Score:2, Interesting)
Well since open-source software will always be around, if Apple does go down the drain they can always just use some open-source OS then. As with the PowerPC Macs, they won't just become instantly useless and fantasmagically explode when they're no longer being developed.
Re:Hardware Requirements?! (Score:3, Interesting)
But I think 1 gig ram is optimistic for a $100 laptop!
64MB is a bit skinny for OS X (Score:3, Interesting)
But this is with 256MB + of RAM. 64MB? You're gonna have a LOT of disk caching going on. More than I'd be able to stomach, though your mileage may vary. If you're really running OS X on 64MB, add a bit of RAM and see what a difference it makes.
I did find a G3 that wasn't happy with OS X: a beige Powermac. OS X is supported through Jaguar, but the Powermac just wasn't interested in playing at 266Mhz with its stock 64MB RAM. I reloaded OS 9 until I can scrounge up a 256MB stick or two. Then I'll add a PCI video card and load Panther. It'll be fine.
Panther must be the second-biggest bargain in OS these days, right behind Linux. $50 new at Amazon, and it runs pretty much everything you can do with Tiger.
Re:Why these laptop designers are idiots (Score:1, Interesting)
Who modded this up insightful? An insightful counterargument isn't just a declarative sentence. Otherwise, I could just say you're a misinformed automaton, and that you should "get over yourself" (another overused, meaningless phrase that doesn't make sense). There, do I get +Insightful?
Re:Free publicity -- What? (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is that statement is way too over-generalized and doesn't really ecompass what the real nature of a corporation charter.
IANAL or a MBA, but I have looked into creating an LLC (Limited Liability Corporation) and know about it than I would like to know. Shareholders can often influence a company if they are the owners with voting stock. If the company does not have voting stock then then it is just monetary sway of keeping the investors money with the company.
People have been told over and over again that the purpose of a corporation was to make a profit and appease the shareholders which is totally unfounded when you look at the nature of a corporate charter in legal terms. A legal charter is nothing more than creating an artificial entity that protects its investors from litigation of their personal assets when someone sues the corporation. You sue the corporation and it runs out of money, but you can't go after the shareholders.
That said... A corporation is only obligated to appease share holders if it wants to. I mean the board member and CEOs could in fact declare all corporate elections null and void and have a revolt of sorts, but they would quickly loose the capital of all the investors unless of course the investors went along with the people still in power.
Corporations do need money to operate to pay its employees and needs an investment base in order to grow, but if someone created a corporation and made it so that they had firm control of the leadership process, they could very well not intend to make any money at all if they so choose to do so.
They may not get investments or capital support from others in the process... So it wouldn't be very long lasted.
But it is a fallacy to assume that corporations are forced by law to make money. They only do so because it benefits those running them, work for them, and those who invest in them.