Re: [cobalt-users] The Apple Raq

[Bill Campbell <bill@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, May 22, 2002 at 10:25:48AM -0700, Jeff Lasman wrote:
>Alainna Wonders wrote:
>
>> >Apple today is THE WORLDS LARGEST PROVIDER OF UNIX OPERATING SYSTEMS
>> >and if you use *nix, that's pretty hard to ignore
>> 
...
>They're counting all the copies of OS-X shipped.  It may be true that
>more copies of OS-X have shipped than of any other commercial unix
>system, but it hardly means a majority of the people using it know or
>care that it's got unix at it's core.
>
>And based on how Apple sells, I don't think it changes or redefines the
>market.

It certainly is getting quite a bit of attention from confirmed Unix bigots
(myself included) who would never have looked at Apple for serious servers.

I look at it primarily as a very viable desktop alternative to the Redmond
Raptor's Windows virus.  It's a lot easier to convince the average ignorant
computer user to try an iMac for their desktop applications than it is to
move them to Linux or freebsd, and it does provide real security for a
change.  I'm not ready to use Apples as general purpose servers yet, but
then I'm not ready to use the Cobalt Raqs for anything but commodity web
servers because I'm afraid of breaking them if I want to do anything out of
the ordinary.  I'll use Linux and freebsd servers for the servers where we
need to do things that aren't support out-of-the-box on the Cobalts.

I would be much more inclined to use the Cobalts for interesting things if
Sun made all the SPRMs available so that it would be possible to update
things like perl by starting with the Cobalt SRPMS without losing the
Cobalt-specific modifications.  Cobalt has done some very interesting
things, and done them well, but my life is more difficult if I have to deal
with proprietary systems.

I also have problems with minor things like Cobalt's setting group write
permissions on home directories which prevents ssh authorized_keys
authentication.

Bill
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