Open Source Hypocrisy

Several blogs point to an article by Matt Asay at C|Net News.com titled The ironic rise of the Mac among open source developers.

The money quote:

“Maybe the open-source world isn’t as religious about freedom as is thought? I have a hard time with this answer, since I’m sometimes dubbed a zealot for believing that the GPL is the best open-source license yet I’m a hard-core Mac freak. I can’t really explain the contradiction, except that I found the Linux desktop difficult to use back when I used it (2004 and 2005), and I never liked Windows beyond Windows 2000. At a certain point, I just want something that works well. Maybe I’m not alone?”

You are not alone. Yeah baby, yeah!

I’m a MacBook Pro user myself, and noticed that a huge number of the Rails (and Ruby) developer community prefer the fruity computer experience as well.

Being that I started my technology career at Apple – longer ago than I want to admit in public – I’m somewhat biased though.

Another curiosity is that most of the Apple-powered developers I know also favor Debian on the server side of things. It’s a pretty solid majority of folks polled. Hmm.