Over at ongoing, Tim Bray asks Time to Switch? and cites Mark “Diving into” Pilgrim's recent series of blogs where Mark has chosen to walk away from decades of Apple development and move to an Open Source platform. Full disclosure: Tim works for Sun MicroSystems but his voice is his own, as is Mark's, who's an IBM employee, and I own both a ThinkPad and an iMac, invest in all of these companies, and am divided if my next laptop should be a ThinkPad or MacBookPro. If you're considering replacing your current machine, there's lots of food for thought in these articles even if you aren't considering an Apple machine. Some of the most insightful comments were in Marks second post where he expresses legitimate concerns about being able to access documents over a long period of time, when the hardware is long gone, the DRM may not be supported, the applications that wrote the original data are nowhere to be found. Long Now Thinking is worth considering.
Tim's post follows:
Early this month, Mark Pilgrim made waves when he went shopping for a new Mac, but decided not to buy one, and, in When the bough breaks, wrote at length about switching to Ubuntu. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, and now John Gruber’s written And Oranges, a fine excursus on Mark’s piece. I’m pondering the switch away myself, too, and maybe sharing my thoughts will be helpful. [Update: Lots of feedback on the state of the Ubuntu art.] [Update: More from Mark. I feel sick, physically nauseated, that Apple has hidden my email—the record of my life—away in a proprietary undocumented format. I’ve had this happen once before (the culprit was Eudora); fool me twice, shame on me. Hear a funny sound? That’s a camel’s back, breaking.] …