** Reply to message from Russell Urquhart <russurquhart1@xxxxxxxxxxx> on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 07:07:57 -0500 > i think that OS X is the first where someone could work > extensively in the GUI and never know that they are running a > Unix OS That's arguably true. I just don't believe that you run a Unix-class OS for its GUI. I never have, anyway -- and seldom install the GUI. The whole point of Unix is its amazing granular control over every process. What GUI offers that? > i think you should also at least recognize Apple's licensing > agreements which don't support the running of the OS on > non-Apple hardware Well, I bought a license (from Apple) for OS X, if that's what you're driving at. $110, IIRC. Whether they can compel me to use their hardware is another matter. They won the first legal judgment that I know of (in late 2009) against a commercial developer who employed OSX on non-Apple hardware; but the OSx86 community argues that their different (bootloader etc.) methods circumvent Apple's EULA restrictions. As far as I know, Apple has never confronted the OSx86 community, which is large and noisy. Anyway, if I had to give up my Hackintosh boxes, I wouldn't miss them. > why don't you thumb your nose and direct some rage at the owner > of the source code to Xywrite? Why don't you Me?? > let that source be > distributed, and let that get into the open source community, > and see what some dedicated programmers can do to bring it to > Linux/Unix Basically, NotaBene owns it now (although even they aren't entirely sure where the core rights rest today -- believe me, I've asked. Dave Erickson told me that he didn't know). But the underlying futility of it is that almost nobody has the competence to deal with assembler code nowadays -- nobody I know anyway... Unless you wrote it yourself, it would take forever to untangle it. The complexity of a word processor is phenomenal. My real point was about give and take. Sure, Apple gave back Bonjour, CUPS, GCD, Darwin, maybe a few other things. But pretty paltry, I think, for something with an underpinning of *Free*BSD. ----------------------------- Robert Holmgren holmgren@xxxxxxxxxx -----------------------------