🚀 go-pugleaf

jb3o+@andrew.cmu.edu (Jon Allen Boone) writes:

   1) People who use MacIntoshes are not "innocent USERS" - they directly
      support a company who is activily litigating in an attempt (it
      seems) to increase their market share (or possibly drive their
      competitors out of business).

Perhaps they do not use this as their only figure of merit when
deciding what computer to use.  Perhaps they give more weight to
technical than to political criteria.  The issue is not as black
and white as the GNU position presents it to be.

      Apple starts to slip in the competition to put out good machines
      with good software.  They decide they need a trump card to play.
      They sue the authors of the Idraw software for "look-and-feel"
      infringement.  They win - idraw is history.

One problem is that this hasn't happened.  You seem to be willing to
indict Apple for offenses they have not committed.  This is part of
why some of us find the boycott so shrill and misguided.

   4) Double-standards are prevelant throughout the industry - why should
      the FSF be held up to a different standard?

Put simply, because they claim the moral high ground.  If you are going to
claim higher motives, you can't complain about being held to higher
standards.

      Also, there isn't a real double-standard - only Apple (and
      Lotus?) have performed an action which has a direct bearing on
      the FSF's GNU project

That's stretching it awfully far--Apple's suit, especially at this point,
only has "direct bearing" on Microsoft.  It certainly does not stand in
GNU's way.  Contrary to RMS's claims that "Apple won't let him write a
UNIX desktop interface," Apple *supports* the development of other desktop
interfaces, as long as people won't confuse them with the Macintosh.  As
a concrete example, Visix's current flagship product is a UNIX desktop
manager which could be argued to be more "Mac-like" than any competing
product.  However, not only have we not gotten so much as a frown from
Apple's legal department, we regularly get active support and mutual
respect from Apple.

    - patenting is *not* a threat as long as the patents aren't enforced.

AT&T *is* trying to enforce the Pike patent: that's part of why people
keep bringing it up.

     I think that GNU tools should *not* be supported on MACs, just for
     the same reason they are not supported on MS-DOS machines.  To do
     so would simply slow down the project, which is to produce a
     UNIX-LIKE (not MAC-LIKE or DOS-LIKE) system for free distribution.

I don't care if the FSF doesn't bother with Apple or MS-DOS products;
that isn't the issue.  What I object to is the constant attempt to
discourage other people from doing so.  I get sufficiently irritated
by this that I occasioanly contemplate organizing an official "Macintosh
GNU project."  Perhaps luckily, I'm not actually a spiteful enough person
to actually do so :).

     Let MAC-OS and MS-DOS users port the GNU software to their machines

Wonderful!  I'm glad you agree.  Now, if you could have a talk with all
of these other GNU people that keep screaming "don't port GNU stuff to
Apple hardware..."  It's not as though anyone else is going to bother
porting the stuff, after all...

     the MAC-OS doesn't even have a *shell* - where the hell would
     they use my "gecho" program anyway?

It certainly does have a shell, although I doubt that anyone would have
much use for an alternate 'echo' :).  The most popular GNU tools on
the Mac seem to be gawk, bison, flex, indent, and gcc (in roughly that
order).  Most of the porting difficulty stems from limitations of the
GNU code, not of the Macintosh...


Amanda Walker						      amanda@visix.com
Visix Software Inc.					...!uunet!visix!amanda
-- 
"I would give the Devil benefit of the law for my own safety's sake."
	--Sir Thomas Moore, in "A Man For All Seasons" by Robert Bolt