Mac, Windows, lock in, Linux, freedom, got it?

Stan Beer
Sunday, 23 April 2006 17:38

Opinion and Analysis

The Windows on a Mac story just seems to be one that refuses to go away. It seems that the whole world is going cock-a-hoop and doing back flips over the new-found ability of the Intel Mac to run Windows natively. What few seem to be saying is that it’s a crock.
 

What you have with Apple’s Boot Camp is the ability to have a dual boot choice between Windows and Mac OSX. Wow! Let’s get this straight. You can choose to boot one operating system, shut down, and reboot the other operating system. So, as some pundits say, when you’re in the office you no longer need both a Mac and a PC. Utter rubbish.

For a start, hands up everyone who knows someone working in an office, who uses both a PC and a Mac. Let’s see, that’s one, two, three, four….not many. OK, those of you that do need to use two different types of computer, how many times do you reckon you could stand powering down your machine, rebooting it, powering down and rebooting it again before you go storming into your boss’s office demanding that you get back your second machine. By the way, why do you need two machines anyway? I thought the Mac could do pretty everything a PC does and more.

So what we have is a situation where, if we so choose, we can have two separate and totally independent proprietary operating systems running on the same computer. However, we can’t have them both running at the same time and they can’t interact with other because they’re isolated in separate universes. The users in each universe are locked into their own system and have to reboot to get into the other system. And we’re supposed to be excited about that?

I also have a dual boot system. I can boot Windows or Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10.0 (beta). It works in a similar way to the Mac and Windows dual boot system with one crucial difference. When I’m running Linux, I can see my Windows files and, guess what, I can open and run all of the Microsoft Office applications in a look-alike suite of opens source applications called Open Office.org. I can also import all my Outlook data to a similar email and calendaring client called Evolution. I can do all of this without rebooting and getting into Windows.

It is true that I still can’t run all my favourite Windows applications on Linux. However, more are getting ported across by the independent software vendors every day and, for those that are not, there are some pretty good open source equivalents.

The system isn’t perfect yet, but this is the difference between locked into a proprietary software platform and a free software platform. Free does not mean it costs no money. Novell and Red Hat sell their Linux distributions for money. Free means the freedom to choose an alternative to the proprietary systems that vendors like Microsoft and Apple have done their best to lock us into for all these years.