I'm a bit tired of hearing Mac fans complain about Apple's ideas being "ripped off" by others (whether it's Vista, Linux or whatever).

First of all, most of OSX is derived from the actual work of others (Mach, BSD). Apple did a fair amount of work in the GUI but the core of the system consists of millions of lines of code written outside of Apple. This is all fine. What I find aggravating is when Mac fans bitch about people "stealing" Apple's ideas. First of all, let's be clear: they are just ideas. Since Apple doesn't open source code, anyone who "copies" them must do so from scratch (contrast this with Apple using actual code from other people).

Secondly, many, if not most, of the ideas that Apple has "invented" actually have prior art that predates Apple's particular implementation by several years.

Let's cover a few of the currently popular ones Mac users seem certain were ripped off from Apple:

1. The GUI (including all the key elements: mouse, window, menu, icon, etc). Invented by Xerox PARC and shown to Steve Jobs who immediately wanted to bring it to market.
2. The taskbar. It's part of the CDE spec. If you don't know what CDE is, it's because you're too young. Even KDE had a taskbar long before Mac. Apple's main contribution in this regard was to make it more annoying with flashy animations.
3. The desktop cube. I used 3Ddesktop back around 2002 on Linux. Pretty cool but used too many resources back then. I'm sure there's been several implementations and variations prior to that. It's not an original idea.
4. The iPod. Sorry, MP3 players have been in existence almost as long as the MP3. Apple's big contribution was to take another technology invented by someone else (IBM) called the microdrive and apply it in a patently obvious way. Oh, and they got to market first with this incremental improvement. I also seem to recall a product called a "Walkman" which used different technology but embodied many of the same ideas.
5. Podcasting. We used to call it "streaming" in the old, less-branded days.
6. White. Apple's marketing has made white the new black. Let's not forget that other companies (Gateway) had white (not beige) PC's and laptops back in the early 90's. Back then we called them "ugly". I'll grant that Apple does make slick hardware and if I packed a Powerbook around all day I'd probably have hairy palms too.
7. Arrogant, condescending users. Sorry, Unix had those years before Jobs and Woz had stopped doing laundry at their mom's house.
8. Marketers who claim their product somehow makes you sexy, young and hip. Apple's only real innovation here is having customers who actually believe it.

I'm not claiming Apple hasn't contributed to the modern PC at all. In fact, they have made huge contributions (much like Microsoft has) to bringing inexpensive hardware and software to the masses. They've also made improvements to existing ideas (like most of the ones I've outlined above). We'd be far worse off without them. I'm just tired of hearing Mac fans pretend that the contributions are a one-way street. Apple borrows as much from the rest of the world as the world does from them. That's a good thing.

Of course it would be nice if they gave back a little more than ideas (i.e. real source code), but ideas are valuable too. Just stop acting like they're somehow worth more than actual man-hours of programming.

[Update]

9. Safari/WebCore: I plain forgot this one. Safari is basically a port of Konqueror to OSX. It also serves as a fine example of Apple's interaction with the FOSS communities it rapes for source code: http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1001

Somehow I missed that this guy has a pretty interesting blog, even if it's a bit difficult for a Linux user to read due to the apparent vitrol he extols with every other word. It's hard to read because so many of his bitches about Linux and FOSS are dead-on and it hurts a bit to have the weaknesses of Linux pulled from under the rock and cooked with a magnifying glass. It's also hard to read because the truths are so insidiously intertwined with utter crap that your mind has to do somersaults to properly separate and digest it.

LinuxHater lives in a world of hypocrisy. Why? Because he simultaneously rips into FOSS and then turns and compares OSX in a positive light. Maybe he should remove all FOSS software from OSX and then tell me how much he likes it: remove Mach, BSD, Safari, Adium, bash, etc and then tell me how great it is. Apple has done a wonderful job of polishing these FOSS turds with their millions of dollars. Quite an amazing feat. Take free software, spend tons of money cleaning it up, and then call it your own. Brilliant, if your name is Montgomery Burns.

Secondly, OSX runs on a very limited amount of hardware. I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing, but I expect running OSX on, say, a cheap Dell laptop would not be a much happier experience than with Linux (in fact, probably worse). Would suspend work? How about the sound card or 3D acceleration? Maybe, but your odds would be probably much better with Linux. He complains that Ubuntu crashes on him frequently. As anyone will tell you, this is almost certainly caused by hardware problems (either broken hardware or poorly-supported hardware). Any computer with unsupported or broken hardware is almost guaranteed to cause serious stability issues regardless of the OS you use. Next time, buy a Linux-certified PC (they do exist!).

Of course, any time I mention Apple's limited hardware selection, I'm forced (by the buildup of bile) to point out that Apple's computers tend to be among the most expensive. Sure, you can argue that the price difference will be made up by time save by not futzing around with cheaper alternatives. We could also just solve the world's energy crisis by insisting everyone buy a new electric vehicle. I know that in our precious sense of self-entitlement we often forget that some people actually have more time than money, but let us take a moment to remind ourselves that not everyone is skinny because they are rich anorexics, or that they buy clothes at second-hand stores simply because they have no sense of fashion. Linux fills a niche for those not rich enough to get on the proprietary-software wagon.

And yes, I know many of you will point to the $1200 wonders that Apple sells as low-end models. $1200 isn't horrible for a laptop, but those particular laptops tend to be end-of-life models that would normally appear on overstock.com or in the vendor's closeout section if they were PC's. I just purchased a Sony Vaio for $620 from overstock.com (core2 duo, 15" widescreen). I decided to check what a similar Mac would cost, but I couldn't. You either pay $1100 for a 13" Mac, or jump straight to $2000 for the Pro series. Inexpensive 14" and 15" Macs are a thing of the past, apparently. I guess sometimes choice is a good thing.

Anyway, back to the main topic.

Windows has the same problem Linux has in regard to hardware (it must support a wide variety of hardware), but it gets around the lion's share of the problem by getting support from hardware vendors. They don't have to write 435,485,308 drivers, just charge vendors to have the driver certified. Frankly, there is no way to force vendors to do this from the Linux world. Linux must rely on good will from vendors (e.g. nVidia, Intel, AMD) and the work of volunteers (many of whom have other jobs that actually pay money). Of course, even this actual advantage has failed to make Windows any more stable. After 5 or 6 years, XP was actually usable (if mind-numbingly boring), but Vista is the most god-awful piece of crap I've ever had to pinch my nose over while downloading a Fedora DVD to replace it. Microsoft has had exactly two successful operating systems (from a non-suck perspective): NT 3.1 and 2000. Neither of them were very interesting but at least didn't remind you every 3.5 seconds that there was an OS there who's primary function was to prevent you from working.

At the end of the day, I can't help but wonder what the hell LinuxHater's problem is. If he hates Linux and has the money to buy a Mac, then fucking do it. No one is forcing him to accept what amounts to a free gift and certainly no one is asking for his whining about it (even if he's right). If he's forced to use it at work, then maybe I can sympathize a bit (I bitch endlessly when forced to use Windows or Mac for more than a few minutes), but I doubt this is the case. It sounds to me like a case of someone with too much time on their hands (and too much disposable income as well). Nothing like being rich and bored to get that endearing sense of entitlement and superiority going. At the end of the day, it sounds like LinuxHater is probably technically capable enough (and certainly loud-mouthed enough) to make splash in the FOSS world and help address some of the issues he finds so annoying, so the fact that he doesn't simply leaves me believing he needs his diaper changed.

Some people seem to believe that he's making a valuable contribution by pointing out the shortcomings in Linux. If you also consider punching someone in the mouth when they buy you socks for Christmas as valid criticism, then I guess you might agree.

LinuxHater: we get the message. Please take your ball and go the fuck home.

With the recent announcement that Apple's CalDAV server was built on Twisted and the following announcement that Apple had donated an Xserve to the Twisted project, it's become clear that Apple has some interest in Twisted.

Twisted isn't exactly the most popular framework on the planet, so I found this a little surprising but chalked it up to mysterious forces.

This morning I was showering and I was thinking about how lame it was to get an Xserve. I'd seen benchmarks that demonstrated that OSX simply is not there as a server OS. The blame is apparently to be placed on the overhead associated with spawning threads and processes on OSX under Mach. The performance of server processes like Apache and MySQL is terrible compared to Linux on the same hardware.

Then it dawned on me: this is undoubtedly the root of Apple's interest in Twisted: it's asyncronous, hence, no threads. I've done no benchmarks or even heard of any, but if Twisted is twice as slow as Apache on Linux, and Apache on OSX is five times as slow as Apache on Linux, then it stands to reason that Twisted on OSX is at least twice as fast as Apache on OSX.

Pure speculation of course, since I've neither seen nor done any type of benchmarks, but it's interesting speculation.