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.
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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.
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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