Not politics but organisational technology and its ramifications get discussed heavily on this site. James Gosling wrote:
As several people have noticed at my talks over the past few months, I no longer carry a Mac laptop. As much as I love the Mac's eye candy, it really hasn't been keeping up as a developer's machine - their attention has clearly been elsewhere.I agree. I have an iBook G4 which is several years old now and has done good service. It has travelled across three continents with me. Its frame is bent, it has no paint on many of the keys and has cracks in the plastic. It is a useful machine - except for development. I am stuck in Java 1.4 and I had all sorts of issues getting Python 2.5 on it. This means I cannot run Eclipse 3.2 either. Windows and Linux are far more reliable as development machines and environments because tools will be built for them no matter how old the operating system. Apple obsoletes what it supports very quickly in computing technology terms.
This now means I will take that into account when making purchases. It will also mean that I will be keeping a Windows/Linux machine around no matter what. OSX is a wonderful operating system but Apple has chosen to make technologies and their support specific to their operating system versions. Which is fine. It is their choice, however it impacts me in how long I can use the machine as a development environment. Something which is important to me.
Despite OSX being the best operating system around at the moment there are trade offs. The single vendor issue being one. Another is that Safari is not particularly good, it is inferior to Firefox, though both put memory pressures on the G4s. I have found that each new update makes my laptop run significantly slower. Especially Safari. Which is disappointing.
The upshot is that there is no one winner in the operating system wars and I cannot choose a single environment. I suspect that may always be the case and despite the inanities in Windows and the haphazard support for new devices in Linux, I will end up running all three at any one time.
Rusty Elliote Harald records Wilhelm Fitzpatrick writing on the java-dev mailing list:
There's a Java oriented software conference called No Fluff Just Stuff that's been going on for the past six years. When I first started going, I was one of the only guys carrying a Mac. Over the last couple years, Macs have sprung up like weeds, and more importantly, nearly all the presenters were carrying them. This year, the Mac were still there, but the first thing most presenters did was fire up Parallels and flip over to XP/Vista or Linux. That's not going to sell many Macs when they are just being used as stylish Windows machines...I need to replace my iBook and the best laptops going are Apples. I will be getting a Macbook, at least it will get me up to date with the Java and Python development environments - for the next couple of years anyway. It will be interesting to see when OSX doesn't become worth it to me and the trade offs to large for me to purchase an Apple laptop. I certainly won't be purchasing an Apple desktop; that will be the domain of Windows/Linux for the foreseeable future.
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