The day will come
I was going to blog about that some weeks ago, and now that cybernotic was faster, i just add some quick thoughts. There seems to be a wave of (influential and advanced) Mac users switching away from the Mac as Apple gets bigger and starts doing Microsoftish things. The two articles that started this discourse were by Mark Pilgrim and Cory Doctorow. The main reasons stated for leaving the Mac behind were the decreasing quality of Apple software and that the data created or maintained with this software often becomes an “undocumented binary black hole” as Mark has put it.
I am still happy in regard to the software. Mac developers eat usabilty every morning with their breakfast so that the software i use allows me to be pleasantly productive – apart from my daily procrastination. Even though Apple seems to become more evil on some parts, they still have the lead in designing an innovative system with the user in mind.
I would be happier if all my personal belongings (e.g. pim data) would be stored in well-documented xml, so that staying with the Mac is not a matter of a vendor lock-in. Of course it would be also cool if we see some more open sourcing – not very likely.
I would be a lot happier if Apple would turn itself into a self-ruled collective where the designers, programmers and factory workers work under fair conditions with a good pay – not at all likely. Furthermore the side-effects on the environment and world regions in crisis need to be considered when producing computer hardware. Yet those latter complaints also count within the Linux world (more on this here).
Right now i don’t have the patience to switch, but i am sure the day will come. The FLOSS world has quite a few things to offer. The most obvious is the open nature of a thriving community that is devoted to creating software. While Mac fans get nervous (incl. me) waiting for the next keynote by Steve Jobs to listen to his words, the open source community gets work done through a compellingly open process. While Mac OS X still is technically more innovative, Linux & Co is socially, politically, and economically far more progressive.
