I’m not surprised that Apple closed their sacred Mac OS X for the newer Intel machines. Macworld.uk:

Thanks to pirates, or rather the fear of them, the Intel edition of Apple’s OS X is now a proprietary operating system. Mac developers and power users no longer have the freedom to alter, rebuild, and replace the OS X kernel from source code. Stripped of openness, it no longer possesses the quality that elevated Linux to its status as the second most popular commercial OS.

People criticize Microsoft for being closed — and rightly so historically on a number of fronts — but Apple has their share of proprietary products and offerings too.

Perhaps the bigger story here isn’t proprietary hardware and software — both of which are neccessary, despite the hardcore open source cries (hey, I like open source too) — but the issue of the bad guys continuing to be the thugs of the web. Blue Security threw in the towel with their fight fire with fire campaign against spam.

Open source has its pros and cons. Pure cons to me are the bad guys of which can study and scrutinize every line of code finding the exploits. If they would only report them to the proper parties — and these companies would do something (cough, cough, Sony) before going to these security sites to make names for themselves or worse going underground and exploiting for personal gain.

I don’t blame Apple here. Yeah, this might mean less cool OS hacks, but then there is nothing stopping somebody from making their own brand of Linux and keeping that open source like Ubuntu. The article says they admit to things being in “flux” so nothing is permanent here.

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