OS X and Vendor Lock-in
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
Every now and then I find myself defending Apple and its products. Besides the unusual (over here) honor of owning two Apple computers, I’ve not indulged in any obvious Apple fandom. I like their products, and I smile when I hear OS X being compared to Windows. 
Regardless, one of the more stupider criticisms of late that I’ve heard is vendor lock-in and how being on OSX somehow locks your data up. This is obviously precipitated by Tim Bray’s unswitch and a couple of other related posts. This is a rebuttal.
OS X is an operating system and it does nothing special to pack your data in and hide it. “Vendor lock-in” occurs probably when you use Apple’s applications. iApps, possibly, or those bundled with the OS. Solution? Don’t use the bundled applications, or use them alongside open data stores. Let’s take my Dock. There’s Adium, which is a port of the opensource Gaim, Skype which is platform independent, Safari, which I use alongside Del.icio.us & Google Bookmarks; Netnewswire, which is an RSS reader and which syncs everything up to Newsgator, the built-in Terminal, ITunes which might take my music ratings along with it (big deal), downloading songs using Transmission, Bittorrent & XTorrent, Textmate which afaik is just a text editor, and Photo Booth, which just takes pictures and stores them as images in my Pictures folder. My email client is Gmail.
Otoh, I use the plethora of opensource tools made available to me through Darwinports: Netstumbler, wget (which is my download manager), curl, and other opensource tools like Neoffice, etc.
I can’t see no vendor lock-in here (sic). Please move on.
2 Apple computers? I know u have a Mini. You bought another apple? Which one? I am thinking of getting a MacBook/Pro still undecided as I already bought a laptop, but still I wanna try out a Mac!! And not just the OSX, coz well, the designs of Apple are just phenomenal :-)!
How’s life otherwise?
Comment by Guru Panguji — Tuesday, 26 December 2006 @ 23:59:59
Macbook. The middle white one. It rocks.
Comment by vishnu — Wednesday, 27 December 2006 @ 10:58:15
Awesome!! Hmmm, I am thinking of getting one myself! You think it’s worth it, huh! :-)! Nice, Nice :-)!
Comment by Guru Panguji — Wednesday, 27 December 2006 @ 12:22:48
It’s absolutely awesome except for how quickly it gets dirty with Indian use. If you have some money to spare, the black one makes sense. Otherwise a C2D processor (I got 2G ram too), a cam inbuilt and OSX… who needs anything else? Imho the macbookpro is overpriced and under-featured.
Comment by vishnu — Sunday, 28 January 2007 @ 19:09:24
[…] mentioned before that I use wget as my download manager. By default, it’s a simple command-line downloader, […]
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