OT: Mac vs Win partisanship is unnecessary

[Peter Alcibiades]

Wise comment.  Mac and Windows seems from my perspective to be basically a
matter of personal preference with Apple being the more restrictive of the
two in the ways in which Open Source people care about.  Its Coke and Pepsi,
both having too much sugar, one a bit more than the other.  

Open Source is genuinely different, and reasonable people can differ, and
differ strongly, with its approach and values and its aims for the role of
computing and media in our society.  This is the source of some genuine
tensions for Rev.  But Curry is right, one needs to keep the issues with Rev
or Rodeo to the level of what makes business sense for everyone.  It is very
interesting that one result of the WebKit approach for Rodeo is that it puts
all OSs on the same level as far as accessing the applications once written.

The thing I remain cautious about with regard to iPhone and iPad is what
Apple's ultimate reaction will be when and if webkit based apps, from Rodeo
and other sources, start to bypass the app store on any scale.  Maybe they
never will, maybe the store is well enough established by now.  Maybe
corporate vertical market applications are where the money is, anyway. 
Jerry also takes the view there will be nothing they can or will do about
it, even if it happens.  Maybe so.  

The Rodeo vision however is genuinely cross platform, with a lot of the
heavy lifting done by stuff that is out there already in the form of
standards.  And when one thinks about Firefox and Explorer in this context,
they are in quite different situations, though neither one is webkit: 
Firefox could change, since webkit is OSS and so is webkit.  Explorer
obviously could not.  After all, Gnome changed with the new Galeon.  This
looked like a significant development.

You may not have been around during the wars of religion between Gnome and
KDE?  Gnome were the purists on OSS, and issued fatwas on KDE because KDE
were using Trolltech development environment, QT, which Gnome considered to
be not authentically open.  Which in some ways it really was not.  The
counter argument was that Gtk was unusable.  All this eventually got
amicably resolved when QT became open beyond reproach.  Even so, for Gnome
to adopt webkit looks like an interesting development which lends support to
the Rodeo peoples argument about it being the browser, not the OS, that you
need to write for.

The sleeper may be Apple.  The business model they have in mind is not one
where apps are written once and run equally on all OSs and desktop
environments, and where people access whatever content and apps they want
from whatever source they choose, any more than that is the model MS have in
mind.  But that is the logical end point of Rodeo and similar products. 
We'll see.
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