That's what keeps me out of Linux: the other software. I mean, OS X is free. The software I run on OS X is, like, nine grand. I got into mac because the PCs I built kept cooking their CPUs, despite having no overclocking and full BIOS monitoring. So I said "fuck it I'm not dealing with this" and tried to buy a 5-year-old Bondi Blue iMac for $175. The used store talked me up to a $275 iMac G3 because "it could run OS X, which is pretty much Unix." So I went to Best Buy and discovered that you can enable Right Click and that once you had a command prompt, it was like a real operating system. 'cuz that's the thing: you can do anything you need to do from the command prompt, which means you can hack OS X to the point where it's usable. The last on-board program I got rid of was Address Book. I now use entirely third party. I've been beta-testing for these guys for ten years now. Somewhere on here veen linked to an article of why Apple was totally fucked with Maps because the only way you get decent data is by putting in the work and Google put in the work ten years ahead of everyone else. Which means either you sink mad man-hours into it or you acknowledge that you're always gonna be behind. I'll say this: the obliques you get with Bing's birds eye views are dope. But the SAR data in the portable versions of Earth kicks the shit out of Bing & Apple.
The free software ecosystem has always had a problem with the other software for anyone who isn't a programmer. No one tries to sell programmers software anymore, because we'll do it better for free. It's when we try to make software for people who aren't us that we can't quite manage it. We use OsX at work, because back in 2000 supporting non-technical staff on linux was a pain in the ass and the guys who were around back then don't want to try that again. I loath and despise OsX, but except for the desktop environment I can fix the things that annoy me eventually.That's what keeps me out of Linux: the other software. I mean, OS X is free. The software I run on OS X is, like, nine grand.
I am of the opinion that there is a solid business to be made by closing down the best of the currently available free software and maintaining and continuing to develop a OS/software package under a new commercial brand. There are a lot of people that would make the move to a suite that was well-supported and occupied the middle ground between Windows or Mac, and rolling your own with linux.
I don't think so. On the one hand all the previous releases would still be free, and the project you're shutting down to take commercial would surely get forked, if only out of spite. On the other there used to be many commercial unixes, and they're all dead now. Competing with free and equivalent doesn't work.
Yeah, but Red Hat is selling (support for) free software, not taking it proprietary. They're not competing with free linuxes, they're adding value in the form of support, which is a useful thing if you're in corporate shop and need to cover your ass. "Commercial" was the wrong word, I meant Solaris, Irix and friends.
The intention wouldn't be to release the package as is, but to first overhaul them to take out finicky parts, and to unify them under one design aesthetic. From the initiation of development, the source code would be locked down, and there would exist no free equivalent. Over time, the disparities would grow.