On Mon, Dec 29, 2014 at 10:57 AM, Valeri Galtsev galtsev@kicp.uchicago.edu wrote:
So, as far as "clever Apple" is concerned, I disagree with you. Unless we both agree they are clever enough to be able to fool their customers ;-)
You can't disagree with the fact that they make a lot of money. They do it by targeting consumers without technical experience or need for backwards compatibility to preserve the value of that experience. That's obviously a big market. But whenever someone else tries to copy that model it is a loss for all of the existing work and experience that built on earlier versions and needs compatibility to continue. For what it's worth, I haven't found it to be that much harder to find Mac ported versions of complex open source software (e.g. vlc) than for RHEL/Centos - they all break things pretty badly on major upgrades, and there is usually just one OSX version needed versus a bazillion linux flavors with arbitrary differences).