LAST week was a fairly slow news week, but Muktware covered an upcoming film where the role of glorified bully Steve Jobs may be assigned to the same guy who portrayed American Psycho. That would be a good fit, wouldn't it? Jobs' successor continues to treat Apple like some kind of religion, dismissing any sort of criticism as though it's blasphemous. As Muktware put it: "It’s not unusual for Apple CEO Tim Cook to blast anything that is not pro Apple. As a result, few were surprised when Tim Cook labeled Yukari Iwatani Kane’s book “Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs” as “nonsense.” Iwatani Kane claims that Apple is no longer the company they were under Jobs, and that we have already seen the best that they have to offer."
Meanwhile, tells us a reader, Microsoft spinner "Enderle is still around. Who paid him to write that and why?"
He has a history of Apple bashing and his latest column says that "Apple’s Problem [is] It Can’t Handle the Truth" (don't feed Enderle by clicking). What Enderle conveniently ignores is that his darling Microsoft is not much better. We'll provide examples in a moment.
Apple, like Microsoft, hardly ever ported any applications to GNU/Linux, but Muktware says that iTunes might be coming to Android (hence Linux). This is significant because Apple hardly ever ported anything to GNU/Linux and "Apple broke the monopoly of record labels, which forced users to buy entire album even if a user wanted just one song. It made music affordable, which brought down ‘piracy’. Apple actually shook the entire music industry with its iTunes, the way it changed the mobile industry with iPhone."
Here is another report about "Apple considering releasing an iTunes app for Android" (it's not final yet).
Apple and Microsoft both thrive in marketing and commercial propaganda, as well as revisionism (fairly new example in [1]). Just watch this disgraceful deceit (placement) which speaks of "redemption" but is actually about subjugation. "Neocolonialism, keeping a foot on Africa's neck" is what iopkh calls it. It's gross beyond words. Africa has long been exploited not just by Microsoft but also by Bill Gates. To say this is sometimes a taboo (especially for the latter).
In addition, iophk asks: "Do Microsoft EULAs still forbid product evaluation, benchmarking and comparison to competing products? Almost none of the XP or MSO articles mention better options." He refers to old articles [1, 2] which say people "may not without Microsoft's prior written approval disclose to any third party the results of any benchmark test."
We covered that several years ago.
The bottom line is, proprietary software not only forbids access to information (such as source code); it often also forbids expression of certain ideas. It is a form of tyranny. ⬆
Related/contextual items from the news:
Stephen is plainly unaware, to begin with, that CP/M was not a piece of IBM software. It was actually created by Digital Research founder Dr Gary Kildall. With CP/M Dr Kildall (not Bill Gates) had truly pioneered the portable operating system for microcomputers – an operating system capable of running on different kinds of hardware that created a common platform for application developers and users – and the low-cost licensing model that went with it.
Worse, it seems clear that Mr Fry is also unaware that the QDOS which Gates so hastily bought up to offer to IBM under the name MS-DOS was a poor-quality effort (QDOS actually stands for Quick and Dirty Operating System) which had been created by simply copying code straight out of CP/M.