El Reg as Troll?
I'm soooo going to enjoy reading the comments to this one. Especially in the week when we saw Intego hype up an 'Apple says buy AV' and then once the band waggon had started rolling - "OOoops, sorry, turns out it, err, no, actually..."
Apple is closed and proprietary. Always has been. It's their model. That's how they do what they do - tight integration between hardware and software means everyone pays an 'proprietary tax'. But to say that Apple are less 'open' than Microsoft...
As someone who's developed on them since OS 4.2 I've found that the changes since the second coming, i.e. OS X, have been very refreshing. E.g. Darwin. And shipping free developers tools with every OS. And running X, Java, apache, mysql, sqlite, php, python and the entire BSD toolset out of the box. Feels quite open to me. What's the complaint really? OS X's not Unix? OS X's not Vista?
Is this about the iPhone API? Do end users really want an open system? Do they care? We can easily check - see if Android takes off. Are developers really suffering because of the 'closed' nature of iPhone APIs? Not judging by the App store take up, and earning. Yes, there's the % Apple take, but it's a damn site cheaper than self-marketing, and nothing like the markup that say digital river take.
What's more interesting, is that the breakdown in your responses doesn't match the market-share of Win vs Mac. We're not all fanboys, but even so I would have expected, despite the nature of El Reg's readership, there to be far fewer people au fait enough with the Mac OS development environment(s) to comment. Perhaps that a question worth an interpretation.
So apart from the admittedly (i.e. you admitted it) loaded question, was there any other useful tidbits in the survey? OR are we just stuck with this "who's coolaid is the best" competition? :-)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
