No, it's not.

Listen, I abhor adobe. Acrobat and Photoshop's terrible design has required users run as administrator on my windows systems. It has means that using Photoshop under multiple users can cause profile corruption, and it stores gigabytes of temp files in places that get replicated off to the server when using roaming profiles. IF for no other reasons than these, Adobe can die screaming.

THAT SAID...Adobe have some exceptionally good and very valid points. Apple is up-and-coming; they’re Unix based, which means a real command line with some honest-to-god power behind it. (Seriously, powershell? DIAF.) With the advent of Steam For Mac, you can begin to actually game on a Mac! Since Macs started to pick up in popularity in the US, developers are starting to code for it…there’s a chance it may one day pass from being a Fisher-Price computer that runs a bunch of pretty (but ultimately useless) pre-loaded apps into a real computer platform that can run any of millions of applications for any conceivable purpose.

The problem is that to pass from the realm of Fisher-Price computing into the grow-up world the platform needs to be “open.” (Seriously, we need a better word than “open.”) I’ll define open: open is anyone being able to write anything for that “platform” using any language they know how, attaching any hardware they can code drivers for FOR ANY PURPOSE. Anything else is an attempt to impose your own moral judgements on others, and is nothing more than an expensive but restricted child’s toy.

In this failing, Apple aren’t remotely alone. I’ll gladly take the piss out of almost anyone on this. Apple act as “moral police” and “experience purity” police whilst trying desperately to use their success in one area to cement dominance in another. (If they had 75%+ of the market, this would be consider monopolistic behaviour, no questions asked. As it is it’s simply irritating and disqualifies them as a serious consideration for business computing. It also disqualifies them from my personal consideration for home computing.)

Microsoft and Oracle have ridiculous policies of “you can only use our software in combination with our other software.” You’ll never get an official licence from MS to run office on Linux, despite the fact that everything except Outlook runs great under wine. You aren’t allowed to use Office Floaty Cloud Edition from a browser in Linux, and for that matter you technically aren’t legally allowed to RDP into a windows computer from a Linux system.

If you want an example of the mainframe childishness, just watch IBM get their panties in a bunch when someone tries to run their O/S on hardware they didn’t lock you in to. If HP had an ounce of caring about the good of their customers, they’d have ported htier O/Ses off of the Itanic ages ago, and be helping their customers access a range of new hardware options that aren’t technological dead ends.

Linux distributions (and most Linux nerds) are perhaps the worst of the lot. They recognise all of the above, and so back an open source set of alternatives on one hand, while running holy jihads against the use of anything “closed” on their precious OS on the other. The irony is completely lost on them. The important part isn’t if the source is open or not, but what you can DO with the computer that is in front of you. What control do you have over you own software or hardware? If I write a closed-source driver for my New Widget, this isn’t a bad thing. It’s not as good as if I open sourced that driver, but without some form of driver you can’t use the New Widget, so I have at least opened up some form of Choice to you. As the provider of the New Widget, I may have my reasons for not open sourcing my code, but so long as I don’t unfairly restrict what my New Widget can interact with, there’s nothing to get uppity about. If Adobe finally wrote Photoshop For Linux, yet did it as a closed source application, again this WOULDN’T BE A BAD THING. I wouldn’t be AS GOOD as if it were released open source, but the mere fact that this existed for this platform has increased the choices available. There are a stupendous number in the Linux community completely unable to think like that, and they seem to spend the majority of their time fighting holy Jihads against those that do. Thus Linux stagnates and for every three steps forward it takes, it takes two steps back.

So where does this really leave me, as a business user or as an Individual? Anything running on Apple is only allowed to run at the whims of a megalomaniac, whims which are subject to change if he sees a competitive or PR advantage to be had. Microsoft/Oracle and similar will spend eternity sucking you into their “ecosystem.” Once there you learn that everything you own must be made by them or, while it may technically function, they hang the threat of litigation of the heads of everyone. The Mainframe world is similar, with the additional bonus that you are hardware locked as well as software locked. Oh, and FLOP per FLOP, it’s significantly more expensive than just about any other options, barring perhaps trying to build a super out of iPhones. Linux? A bunch of infighting children who can’t play nice amongst themselves, let alone the rest of the world.

The closest I have been able to find tolerable amongst the lot of them is Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It’s still Linux, so there’s still a lot of cursing, things not working, and running up against ridiculous moral Puritanism when trying to do just about anything…but at least I can code whatever I want for it, and Red Hat does long-term maintenance on the distro. (As opposed to the spasmodic offerings of Ubuntu or Fedora, where you are flat out better off nuking and re-installing, and then learning how /everything/ works all over again with each new revision.)

It’s ALL pants. All of it. Apple isn’t in the right, Adobe isn’t in the right, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, even Linux....PANTS, ALL OF IT.

So I level at the entirety of the software industry the very same comment I level at ISPs:

SHUT UP AND BE DUMB PIPES ALREADY.

You’re getting in my way of doing cool stuff with technology.

Thank you all, and good day.