Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

Monday 6 June 2005

The dark side ?

I think I'm having a good laugh. I don't know if it is because they had the gun pointed to the head or just that everybody, including me, said it wouldn't happen, but Apple decided to switch to Intel processors. They'll deliver SDK to developers starting today (but USD$999), and plan to finish transition by the end of 2007. The other funny thing is that they'll provide Intel C/C++ compiler (what about Objective-C) perhaps to avoid having Microsoft using the GNU C Compiler and have people make fun of them with that :-) Let's hope they didn't drop GCC at the same time.

So what about free software with that ? It is clear that open source project can show reactivity by providing Intel builds of their software as soon as they can, unlike proprietary vendors that may take some time (remember how long it took for Adobe to provide Photoshop native on PPC ?).

How long before Linux run on this hardware ? I suspect you'll be able to have Intel based hardware with a decent firmware, but don't expect it to be cheap. And don't expect to be able to run MacOS X on the same PC as you can run Windows. I myself am happy to have made the choice of GNU/Linux and GNOME.

GUADEC 6 slides online

Murray, I did put my slides online.

The slides from my talk at GUADEC are online. PDF (1.9MB) and sxi (4.1MB)

And to stop any gossip, I didn't use AbiWord this time, but OpenOffice, because:

  • AbiWord is not really suited to make slides as it is a word processor
  • perhaps I should try something else to see what should be put in AbiPresent or whatever its name end up to be
  • I was almost guaranteed to be able to use someone else laptop for the talk, thanks to seb128 from Ubuntu in that case

Maybe next time I'll try KPresenter.