Nosce te ipsum

Rob Feria from the Manila Bulletin Online has written about something near and dear to my heart, using a Mac while remaining true to the ideals of Open Source.

From the article:

Friends often ask me why I am using an Apple powerbook whilst still advocating Linux. The truth is, I advocate both. However, there are some things that may require a little explanation as to why I chose one over the other.

One Ring to Rule Them All

The beauty of Open Source is that anybody can modify the source code and redistribute it. A side-effect of this, however, is the tendency of forking, i.e. having several versions rising from a single root. Although Linux does not suffer from this since only one kernel version is released at a time, the number of distributions, however, are quite astounding. Check out distrowatch.com or linuxiso.org and you will see dozens and dozens of distributions available for download. The problem will be in choosing the best one for your use but evaluating all distributions will eat up a quarter of your life! [OK, I exaggerate] You can, of course, create your own but then again, that is on a different level that is higher than the ordinary user.

Contrast this to the Mac OS X - it is not free but it is only distributed by one entity and provides support for the product.

It was not all that long ago that the world of Mac users and the Open Source community were literally about as different as night and day yet today when you attend any serious industry conference and the view from the stage shows a plethora shining white Apple logos staring back at you from the audience and their iBooks and (more likely) Powerbooks. I never thought I'd see the day when I'd see a Kernel hacker doing real development work on our beloved Macintosh platform but that day is here and I think the contributions that both sides bring to the community is fantastic.

I've said this many times before but of the many things that the Mac has done for me, one of the greatest is that it made technology fun for me again. After decades of designing and supporting Windows based networks, software and users, I was terribly close to getting forever turned off on technology. It had just gotten to the point where it was completely uninspiring and more trouble than it was worth (and this is coming from a guy who lives and breathes technology and has since 1978). Then on that fateful afternoon back in 2001 when I stumbled into a local Apple store and re-learned about this beautiful alternative universe where the hardware was sleek and sexy and the OS was nothing short of stelar. As an added bonus, it was completely Microsoft-free (although at the time IE was still the default browser).

That was the beginning of a beautiful journey and today I'm more psyched about technology and development than I've ever been. Apple continues to crank out one great innovation after another and I get to spend my days using the greatest computer on the planet.