Apple Denies Linux Access To Its Movie Trailers | Hacker News Reader

Apple Denies Linux Access To Its Movie Trailers

linux-blog.org

4 pointslhorn7 comments

Title should be "Apple Denies A Linux User Access to Its Movie Trailers". The comments on the page are filled with Linux users who have no problems.

The user in question can download the .mov file manually and view it, but somewhere between hist click and the view his system is not passing a version check.

This is just an uninformed rant. There's no need to even download the file if you use the Gecko Media Player; I'm watching Apples Transporter 3 trailer as I write this in 720p in-browser.

... which is very "nice" on their part, especially after milking the OSS community for 90% of the code for their OS.

Erm, not really. Of the core bits of the OS, lots of them are open sourced as well; Darwin is open source as well (and loosely based on NeXT, which isn't that closely related to BSD). The kernel is open source, bonjour, launchd, webkit, and so on. Apple contributes a lot to open source. Oh, most recent addition: http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.5.5/autozone... - the ObjC GC.

The biggest part of the OS that isn't open source is Aqua. But, really. Thats just the UI. And I'm always hearing about how good Compiz Fusion is supposed to be. So, shrug.

You said "not really" and then agreed with me. Moreover, you only confirmed my theory that when people say "open source" it usually means commercial companies milking OSS developers, or releasing their code "contributions" for products that have no commercial value to them (Obj-C, Chrome).

Where is the code for Aperture? Final Cut Pro? Numbers/Pages? Even iTunes? I also want to see the code for Google's page rank, BigTable and gmail.

I also want to see scribd code for converting MS Office documents to iPaper. 90% of their solution consists of Open Office code that they took freely and haven't released theirs in return.

I don't understand your disconnect between the licensing for the OSS projects in question and what you're saying, since I have yet to see Apple and others flagrantly ignore licensing terms. If this was such a big problem, change the license.

Besides, I can think of lots of projects where employees at corporations and "commercial companies" are being paid to work on OSS projects. I frankly doubt that OSS would have gone this far without such people.

I was trying to say that a significant portion of the OS is open-source - not just GPL'd. It's hardly "milking the community" if a good portion is returned back in a similar manner.

I wouldn't say that WebKit is worthless; its the primary rendering engine behind several browsers - which are gaining in popularity due to the success of OSS in general.

If the web was so worthless, MS wouldnt have bothered with IE and Netscape wouldn't have open sourced the code for Mozilla. Nor would a majority of the HN startups exist for that matter.

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