Blog commenter James pointed out to me that the esteemed Mark Pilgrim has recently moved back to Linux for his desktop OS as well. Since Mark’s blog post doesn’t have to be conformed to fit conventions of a major technical publishing site, the style is more conversational. His take on the faux openness of the Mac platform is insightful. My favorite two paragraphs from the entry are the following:

I would like to point out that it is entirely Apple’s choice that their operating system does not run on my new Lenovo ThinkCentre. I’m not saying it was a bad business decision — they are a hardware company, after all — but it is particularly galling to realize that if I bought a new Mac, I would be subsidizing the development of an operating system that contains code whose sole purpose is to lock me into a specific hardware platform. I realize that most people don’t look at it that way, but there it is.

In many ways, the tale of my switch is more of the same old story. Mac OS X was “free enough” to keep me using something that was not in my long-term best interest. But as I stood in the Apple store last weekend and drooled over the beautiful, beautiful hardware, all I could think was how much work it would take to twiddle with the default settings, install third-party software, and hide all the commercial tie-ins so I could pretend I was in control of my own computer. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and to my eye Apple isn’t beautiful anymore. I’ve worked around it or ignored it for a long time, but eventually the bough breaks.

Spot on, Mark. I still kick myself for thinking it perfectly normal at one time to have to own a PCMCIA network card just to be able to use WLAN with my Aluminum PowerBooks equipped with “Airport Extreme”. Deciding to “switch back” was almost like realizing I was in this relationship with someone who was taking without giving back, and using manipulative schemes to win my allegiance.

Oh yeah, and more Mac zealot whinging in the comments, apparently enough for Mark to have turned off comments on that post.

Every now and then you come across an article or blog entry that makes you exclaim “Yes, I know exactly what you mean!” I try to only do that with my inside-the-head voice. I spotted an entry from chromatic on O’Reilly’s LinuxDevCenter RSS feed this morning on switching back to desktop Linux from Mac OS X. This is an excellent writeup that captures all the reasons I had for moving to Linux on my laptops instead of Mac OS X.

Desktop Linux is not for everyone, but neither is OS X. Judging from some of the Mac zealots’ whinging, that’s hard for some folks to accept.

A Coronation

Surreal, just surreal.

A Cascade

An unbelievable rain came, and eventually overwhelmed the roof and came down the wall like a waterfall.

A Calamity

Imagine a black square here. The power went out, and we all just rolled with it. It was kind of fun, actually.

A Cleanup

In the spirit of community, numbers of Debian people collaborated for a quick cleanup.

I was too sick to go on the day trip for DebConf, but staying at the conference location had its benefits. After visiting the doctor and getting a prescription, I headed in to town to get the medicine. I ended up discovering the building known as Ex-Convento, a former Catholic convent next to our conference center. It has a quaint little museum and the local public library. I recommend taking a visit if you’re here for DebConf6; it can be a welcome break for the proceedings. A walkthrough of my visit can be found in my flickr set titled Wednesday in Oaxtepec.

I ran into Micah, Matt, and the rest of the HP posse on their way to the market. We had a most enjoyable lunch together, plus a little bit of discussion about the thread on debian-devel in response to the announcement message yesterday.

So it’s finally OK to mention it now; Java has made it explicitly possible (read legal) to distribute the Sun Java JRE/JDK on a GNU/Linux distrubtion. The new license is for Java SE 5 on Linux only, called the Operating System Distribution License for Java, or DLJ for short. You can read the license in text or pdf form. The FAQ for the DLJ is also available in text and pdf. Heck, go through the README for the JRE and JDK while you’re at it.

So what does that mean? Well, GNU/Linux distrubtions like Debian can now package a Java runtime environment or Java development kit in their repositories. That was previously not possible due to restrictions present in Java licensing. Users still have to accept the Java SE 5 binary code license that is totally not free and has the same restrictions Java has always had, but this at least makes packaging and supporting Java less painful for distributions.

Sun is coordinating the efforts via a java.net project, jdk-distros. This is an unprecedented level of cooperation from Sun with external parties in anything related to Java. I consider myself fortunate to have been a founding member of the project. It has been a pleasant and refreshing experience to meet a few optimistic and forward-thinking people from Sun who have a keen interest in Free Software; a big thanks to Simon Phipps and Tom Marble. I was encouraged that they allowed our contributions to be covered under the MIT license. If you would have told me that a month ago I would have laughed at you.

The Debian announcment should be posted on the debian-devel-announce list today. I am sure this will draw both praise and ire from the Debian community. That’s cool, though; the rich diversity is part of what makes it such a vibrant organism.