One of the first times I visited Fosdem, some 3 or 4 years ago, I read afterwards about how someone complained of a speaker who gave his talk with a laptop running a proprietary OS, in casus Microsoft Windows. Now obviously, on an event like Fosdem, such a thing is quite rare,and probably not the best thing if you want to avoid feeding the trolls.
However, the number of people having macs, running OS X, is definitely impressing. OSX might be the most user friendly Unix desktop OS and all, as far as I am concerned, it remains a propretary OS. Darwin doesn’t make a difference here. Now, I don’t object to people running proprietary software as such. I myself ditched Windows only less than two years ago at home, and at work I only run Ubuntu since two weeks, since I switched earlier this month for a boss who accepts that. And even now I still run some proprietary software (the usual codecs and drivers, pouring some Windows app in wine, ..) when I need to.
But I always thought, back in the days I ran mostly Windows, that I couldn’t advocate Open Source if I didn’t use it myself. And the most customer-facing way of doing that is by running some Linux distro on the laptop one works on daily. So it always strikes me when I notice some long time Linux/OSS advocates – definitely not running Windows, but – settling with a mac and OS X.
I remember when I assisted an Orbid customer some years ago, who hired some “Linux hacker” via LinuxBelgium.com a couple of years ago. This Microsoft shop, a big international company has interest in testing Linux and hires somebody who presents himself as representing the senior Belgian Linux gurus. He makes a general good impression (to the customer), only afterwards I had to agree with the customer it was a bit weird that this person ran OS X on his mac.
– He advocates Linux but doesn’t use it himself. Hmmm.
This afternoon, I met Belgium’s most famous Linux chick irl. You guessed it. Uses OS X. Bummer.
This evening, coming home from LinuxWorld, I updated on my rss feeds. Guess what. An owner at Belgium’s most stable, decent quality hoster and OSS advocate tries to switch to OS X.
Everything is marketing.
3 Comments
My first impression on FOSDEM: 33% *buntu, 33% OS X, 33% everything else.
Dries Buytaert, from Drupal: uses OS X.
50% of the people who attended the free Drupal training (http://develoop.be/free_training): used OS X.
I half-seriously asked if running OS X was a requirement to be a Drupal hacker.
Serge,
I do understand what you try to tell. I have migrated for 7 months now to Mac OS X as main platform (laptop). On my desktop I run Ubuntu and on servers other linux distro’s. Like you were obliged in the past I have to run Windows on my work laptop.
I am also convinced that you can’t sell OpenSource without using it. But my question is: "How far do we want to go?". Are we trying to promote a world without any proprietary software? You are telling it yourself, you still use proprietary software for some applications.
Personally I am first of all advocating for a "Free World". A place where the user has the freedom to choose his product. This kind of approach is only possible using open standards.
I am also promoting Open Source because of the many advantages, both for the users and for the developers. Open Source also helps to work toward such a free world.
I don’t think I’m discarding these ideas by using (a partially proprietary) Mac OS X combined with many many FLOSS software for daily usage.
Of course "open source" doesn’t always mean automaticly "an open source OS"–before I started using Ubuntu on my desktop full-time, I used Apache, Python, OOo, Firefox, etc. on Windows.
Before the linux kernel existed, even RMS had to run a (partially) non-free OS.
Currently I use Ubuntu on my desktop & laptop, but I use some closed source applications/drivers on it… (but only where I can save my data in open formats, where that’s applicable).