http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,851874,00.asparticle:
January 29, 2003
A Mac Angle on Linux
By Matthew Rothenberg
One of my favorite recent experiences as Mac tour guide was when I escorted my buddy (and Microsoft reporter extraordinaire) Mary Jo Foley to Jacob Javits Center for her first Macworld Expo and a bracing dose of Dr. Steve's keynote patent medicine.
A veteran observer of Windows gatherings, versed in the stylings of Messrs. Gates, Ballmer et al., Foley was pleasantly impressed by the vitality of my little corner of the desktop market. She earned some kudos from Mac users for her subsequent remarks that Mac technology and its adherents can still teach the Microsoft majority a thing or two despite the numerical gulf between them.
Mary Jo may not be ready to cash in her ThinkPad, but this industry veteran did come away from the event with a new appreciation for the finer points of the Mac as a computing platform and a cultural touchstone. (She's even made it back for a couple of subsequent Macworld installments.)
I had a similar cross-cultural experience at last week's LinuxWorld here in New York, where I spent a few pleasant hours walking the floor and talking to the enthusiastic attendees about Linux's desktop prospects, the role Mac hardware can play there and the chances of peaceful co-existence between Linux and Mac OS X.
It bore out a lot of what I've been hearing from fans of both platforms: These are communities that can work and play well together on the desktop.
My longstanding creed of desktop heterogeneity has always seen creative possibilities in the perennial competition between the main commercial desktop OSes -- Windows with 90-something percent of the market and the Mac with most of the rest.
The vibe seems decidedly different when it comes to the current Linux-Mac relationship: The OSes' shared Unix underpinnings and Apple's partial embrace of the open-source principles on which Linux is founded spells a more permeable, symbiotic relationship between the two environments. What's more, the availability of Linux distros for the PowerPC platform means that many Linux advocates have happily adopted Apple's hardware