binary blobs

apparently, GNU have said that Linux is a breach of the terms of the GNU General Public License, by far the most popular license for open source software. The reason is that Linux includes 'binary blobs': drivers and whatnot for hardware, namely video cards, that the source code isn't freely available to view, study, modify and redistribute of, as the GPL states it should be. But the companies that provide these closed source drivers are NOT willing to release the source code (read: don't give a sh!t about linux). This causes a dillemma: either we have closed source drivers and breach the true open source spirit, or we stick to open source software, at a price (e.g no hardware video acceleration). It's a choice that us Linux users have to make.

The GIMP

The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a open source program for image editing that rivalls Adobe Photoshop in features. If you are thinking of getting Photoshop®, I suggest that you try the GIMP first, as it's totally free (and you can get the source code if you want to help develop it). If you want to run the GIMP under OS X, you will have to install Apple's X11 (if not already installed). You can do this from the system disk that came with your Mac. (or PC if you hackintoshed ;D). Download page is here.

The other Adobe program that there is a very popular open source alternative for is Adobe Illustrator. The alternative is Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org/), which I have found to be in a way better than Illustrator (the version that I use is CS3), as when I opened an image that was 4707x4000 px in Illustrator it just wouldn't open, whereas in Inkscape the same image would work just fine on my PowerMac G5 2.5GB SDRAM. Both the GIMP and Inkscape are multiplatform (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux), and other UNIXes such as FreeBSD, and of course the source code tarball is available.

Open source always has the original ideas

Apple is so, so totally ripping off open source stuff. For instance, compare the new features of Safari 3 with Firefox 2: 1) Rip off tabs. Firefox has had them for a while. 2) Web inspector: Firefox has a very popular extension called Firebug, and the new Safari web inspector is so totally ripped off straight from Firebug, with a nice iTunesy GUI. 3) Restore previous session. I believe Firefox 1 had this, and Firefox 2+ definitely has it. So totally ripped off. In fact I think apple is very into open source, as you can see: 1) The Mac OS X kernel, Darwin, is open source. You can get the source code straight from apple. 2) Mac OS X uses OpenGL graphics software, which is self-explanatarily open source. 3) The apple developing software, XCode, uses GCC C compiler for compiling (which I believe is developed by GNU and is open source). 4) Mac OS X's shell is GNU Bash, and alot of other GNU tools come with OS X, such as: nano; emacs; and a few others. So to a certain extent, Apple is incorporating open source into their own software, and also incorporate features into their proprietary software that were originally in open source projects a long time ago. See what I mean? Open source always has the original ideas. But when you take microsoft into the argument, apple suddenly seem like the open source people. Microsoft, undoubtedly, rips off apple and that doesn't even need any examples, work them out yourself. So you can think of it as a kind of chain: first open source projects such as firefox develop the original ideas; then apple rips them off; then M$ rip off apple. Now that's what I call third rate, literally. Hooray for open source!!! And fuck M$.