Graham Cox wrote:
Just to throw my 2 cents-worth into the debate - any
particular reason
for running on Intel? An Xserve dual G5 gives better price/performance
and is (possibly) much easier to administer. It's probably also likely
to be more reliable. I'm not an Apple apologist, but I think these
machines should be at least given fair consideration. If not, why not?
First, we are committed for internal ideological/political reasons to
run Wikipedia on all free software. Perhaps if it could be shown that
every element of Xserve that's actually in use by Wikipedia is open
source (of course the OS X kernel is, and apache/php/etc would be, but
I really don't know what else), this objection could be met.
Second, it seems very unlikely to me (though I could of course be
proven wrong) that the Xserve dual G5 really gives better
price/performance. Someone else suggested this to me the other day,
so I went to Apple's website to price out what I take to be equivalent
hardware -- the price is *significantly* higher (10-30%) than
commodity Intel/AMD boxes running Linux. It is of course difficult to
assess total performance, of course, without a specific head-to-head
configuration. However, there was no obvious advantage to Apple to be
sure.
----
There's a great irony in the world these days. If we placed
organizations/operating systems on a spectrum from closed/proprietary
to open/free, we'd have the free Unix-like systems all the way over to
the right, and Microsoft over to the left, and (traditionally) Apple
all the way over to the very very extreme left.
I would argue, and without much originality, that Apple's propensity
to try to establish monopolostic situations has been their constant
downfall. Apple would rather squeeze money out of people by locking
them into specific choices than to grow their market with open
standards. This has nearly killed them several times.
And they are operating true to form with the iPod/iTunes pairing.
They seem to think that by refusing to interoperate cleanly with other
alternatives, they will push for dominance. I.E., people will choose
iTunes as their music store because iPod is go great, and they will
choose iPod as their music device because the iTunes music store is go
great, and the two interoperate together most cleanly.
But mark my words -- this will kill them, and in 10 years, Apple will
have a tiny share of the legal downloads market.
--------
None of that is relevant to your question, of course. I'm just saying
that there are good reasons for free software advocates to avoid Apple
products.
(Let me be the first to accuse myself of hypocrisy, as I'm sitting
here typing this on my very beloved G5 running OS X 10.3 Panther. It
is a stunning work of art, and the best desktop Unix system in
history.)
--Jimbo