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It seems short sighted to say that some arbitrary and subjective personal belief system about technology makes one system inherently "better" / "superior" to another.

It's true that the FSF and those who support them are more concerned with the long-term future of computing availability than about whether they can GSD in the next few days or weeks. I'm assuming that that's what you mean by "short sighted"? Well, that's a bit snarky.

I chose OS X above (though I'm moving more and more in the direction of Linux on the desktop again). I guess it just struck me as odd to use "short sighted" to describe the people who, for idealistic reasons, are willing to take a short-term hit to productivity to ensure long-term capability.

Just out of curiosity, what is making you move towards Linux?

The huge appeal of OS X to me is, as someone said on here recently, it's basically *BSD with a fancy window manager and 1-to-1 hardware/software integration.

The way OS X is being locked down. In 10.8, signing is optional and even if you tell your system not to allow unsigned, you can bypass it on a case by case basis. In the next OS X, we'll probably move a bit farther in that direction, and at one per year, the OS X of 2016 will probably refuse to run unsigned applications at all, for excellent reasons involving security and malware, etc. I'm sure there will be a way to turn it off, but when it's basically impossible to get more than a few users unless you submit to signing, applications like Bittorrent will either submit or find themselves reduced to developers-only status. If they submit, Apple will be able to remove them at any time (for the vast majority of users, who won't know how or want to "root" their Macs). Even if Apple never chooses to use this maliciously -- and I don't think they would for a long time, if ever -- it's going to be only a matter of time before some group sues them to use it to stop infringement or something.

I don't want to run a system where, by design, the manufacturer can remove my ability to run applications I've installed after the fact. So, even though I'm happier in general with the polish and fit of OS X than current desktop linuxes, that's where I'm headed.

This is a one sided narrative which ignores the possibility that code signing provides meaningful anti-malware benefits.

What would you have them do instead?

I did mention those benefits in passing: "for excellent reasons involving security and malware". I don't disagree that this can provide those benefits; I just don't feel that they're worth the cost to me, personally. Also, I don't have any notion of how they could provide what I and other technically savvy people want and what the main base of computer users need at the same time.

The only thing you seem to be saying you want is to be free from the fear of unintended negative consequences of code signing.

It's tautological that nobody can both provide something and freedom from the fear of the unintended consequences of that same thing simultaneously.

On the other hand, since the only way to judge the trustworthiness of code is to know its provenance, I don't see how we can avoid some kind of signing becoming ubiquitous.

To me that means that free software must eventually develop a decentralized code signing scheme.

I think his problem is with those people who would take away the user's freedom to choose who to trust.

Slippery slope fallacies notwithstanding, Apple isn't proposing to take anything away.

My point is that the alternatives don't provide the user with the option to choose who to trust to begin with.

The ability to trust code is something that has to be created with engineering and design.

I don't really expect them to take it away completely. So, a simpler version is that I expect the capability to silently disable applications on user machines will be misused (through third-party insistence if nothing else; see the _1984_ debacle at Amazon). A similar system which could only throw up scary warnings when starting an unsigned application wouldn't bother me much, since it wouldn't be such attractive lawsuit bait. But I agree that I'm only speculating that Apple will carry this through to its natural end of being iOS-like. I can't imagine any reason for them not to do it, and I think that for the majority of their users, it will actually improve the experience.

The only thing you seem to be saying you want is to be free from the fear of unintended negative consequences of code signing.

Yeah, I dislike negative consequences. :)

To me that means that free software must eventually develop a decentralized code signing scheme.

I wholeheartedly agree!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the package managers of all popular Linux distros (except for Arch Linux, who are moving to bring it in soon) have had code signing for years now. It's not decentralised however the package management system isn't either.

OS X has a few things going for it, but even Mac fans will tell you the window manager is not one of them; it's painfully primitive.

Which WM do you prefer?

Right now I'm using XMonad, but there are a number of other tiling WMs under X that actually manage windows for you instead of placing that burden on the user.

There are a number of OSX utilities that do this well.

Know any that don't really really suck?

Even if the WM itself is somewhat primitive, Exposé and integrated swipe gestures more than make up for its shortcomings.

Sorry, I didn't communicate well. The FSF movement is surely thinking "long term" and these people aren't necessarily "short sighted". What I do think is short sighted is using that as the primary metric for the quality of an Operating System; That leaves and awful lot of pretty important bits and pieces out. Admittedly, some people just prefer Linux / BSD... and thats fine. However, the parent comment I was replying to gave me the impression that, for them, the Free Software aspect was the "end-all, be-all" of metrics for measuring the quality of the OS.

Use whatever metrics is most important to you when deciding which OS to run. Some is "free as in speech", some focus on "does this help me git shit down a lot faster" ... some, well, who knows. Who cares for that matter.

I pick a Mac laptop as I can run OSX, Windows, and any necessary flavors of Linux (Metric #1). Plus, it has a nice physical shell and for me, that's worth paying some extra cash (Metric #1). But that is me. I assume no cary over in what works for me with other people.

Laptops are as diverse and affordable as shoes (or any other commodity consumer product) and people pick these things based on whatever suits their fancy at that time.

In regards to getting shit done, I can pretty much get shit done on any distro for the most part once past any learning curve (if there is one).

> It's true that the FSF and those who support them are more concerned with the long-term future of computing availability than about whether they can GSD in the next few days or weeks.

But what's the point then? If it's just an academic process then that's fine, but for the purposes of determining a useful day-to-day primary system, it seems like 'It's free software' is a terrible metric on its own. All else being equal, of course, I'd rather free than closed, but all else is not equal.

It feels sometimes like this sort of 'free therefore better' ideology blinds the people doing the actual development to the fact that if they made the system more productive and intuitive for people to use, then more people would use it, and that's a net benefit to everyone. Perhaps if they DID focus on 'whether they can GSD in the next few days or weeks', then their project would reach more people, and through that more people would be exposed to the (legitimate) benefits of free software.

Isn't that equal to always optimizing locally, as in a greedy algorithm, and therefore ending up at an suboptimal destination? Why isn't a short-term productivity loss acceptable if it improves things in the long-term?

I think it boils down to the difference between idealists and realists. Realists are always optimizing locally whereas long-term change is always brought by the persisting efforts of the idealists.

I also sense that you speak to FOSS as in "us vs them". You want to wait till their products become better than anything else while they are looking for comrades in their campaign to reach there.

Productive in the short term or the long?

I'm decrepit enough that I remember the bad old days when proprietary OSes had a lock on things. I remember the number of times I ended up fucked because I couldn't look at the source of some crucial component, couldn't change it, and could only plead with a vendor to unbreak their stuff. And the standard response to my pleas was, "How many more units will you buy if we change that?"

I'm way more productive now thanks to the open source movement. My minor problems often turn out to be somebody else's big deal, so they end up fixed as if by magic. And if not, I can dig in myself, or hire someone instead.

No thanks to people like you, of course. But I owe a great deal to people who made the "irrational" choice to adopt an open platform and make it the most productive choice.

>Maybe I'm the only one... But as a professional developer working on everything from device drivers, embedded systems, up to your average LAMP stack and other web frameworks the "Freedom" of the operating system is worth exactly bupkis to me, ziltch, zero, nada.

And Linux is the top system for ease of acquiring development tools. Compilers, debuggers, IDEs, version-control systems, scripting languages... you get it all on Linux.

Aren't these just a subset of what you can get on OSX?

On OSX, as well as the FOSS tools you can also choose from a set of nicely tailored Cocoa apps, some free and some worth paying for.

Actually, in my experience, it's quite difficult to get Unix-style development tools running on OS X. There's a whole basis of Unix software and development headers you have to install first, whereas Linux has a package manager for that.

What about macports?

Not nearly as extensive as any Linux package manager. I've tried.

I primarily use Linux, so I'm most productive there, but I understand your sentiment. I would use a nonfree OS if it increased my productivity.

That said, I think Linux and all the other FOSS OSes and software keep costs down. Without Linux, could you imagine what a Windows license would cost? I can't picture that we would have the same price points.

Do you think a similar argument could be applied to Android or any other free/commodity software/platform?

> That said, I think Linux and all the other FOSS OSes and software keep costs down.

That's because they're free as in beer, not free as in speech.

Perhaps the proximate cause of low Windows license cost is that there are alternatives that are free as in beer, but it's obvious to me at least that the only reason such "free as in beer" alternatives exist is because a lot of people work very hard to make sure that there are "free as in speech" implementations of fully fledged operating systems.

I am a GSD metric guy as well. I have two laptops , one mac for apple development (iPhone etc) and a windows machine to do blackberry development.

When im doing multimedia stuff , say using progs like xtranormal i have to use my windows because again, no port for mac is available. If im coding on an xterm connected to my amazon instances im using my macbook because its just alot nicer and basically all the tools i need come installed with the mac.

The thing i never understood is, if you are a mac fanboy and would never use windows or visa versa how do you manage to develop properly. How can an apple fanboy who refuses to use windows do blackberry development and how does a windows fanboy do any iPhone development, do they just restrict themselves to programming in objective C and dot net respectively ?

Yeh you could use a VM but i just found it easier to have two separate laptops with whatever OS i needed to run to get the job done

I guess you can have a preference , me i prefer my macbook when im doing general stuff because again all tools are included and if i need to fire up an xterm, run some network tool, quickly whip up a shell script or try some random thing its just easier on a mac but to be a fanboy who refuses to use the other OS makes no sense to me.

It just limits you ... doesn't it ?!

What you just explained is simply your arbitrary and subjective personal belief system about technology that makes one system inherently "better" / "superior" to another.

Proprietary software - i.e., software you can not modify to suit your needs - can actively inhibit your ability to "GSD". That's kind of the point.

I love these kind of responses! Help support your local exploit developer and use a non-free operating systems and browsers!

I'm not one who has produced a many exploits in comparison to the real pros, but if I had to find a hole in an OS or browser these days I'd much go after Linux or Firefox than Windows.

3rd party apps on Windows are a different matter however.

Well said. I agree. I work in a 99% Windows IT shop, therefore Windows is the OS that will help me get the most work done in the shortest amount of time. I run Fedora and FreeBSD virtual machines in my spare time, but for most of the day, I need to get things done and Windows 7 helps me accomplish the tasks set before me.

I guess your value system is just different than mine and a lot of other people who feel like decisions should not just be made on practical expediency.

By default, the next version of OSX will only allow you to install software from their app store. In 3 years, (or whatever their release cycle is) they might decide to remove the option to disable this restriction all together. Obviously, this will be broken very quickly. However, for corporate users or people who don't want to void their warranties, "Free as in Speech" might very well become synonymous with "Getting Stuff Done".

No, the next version of OSX will by default only allow you to install signed software. It doesn't cost anything to get a certificate for signing.