Rui CarmoWhile reading through Mark Pilgrim's comeback to John Gruber (if you haven't read his deconstruction of Mark's Un-Switching and follow-up, I recommend it wholeheartedly), there were five things that crossed my mind:
- I still understand what he's on about. Some of my early work (stuff I did in PageMaker and FreeHand) has gone the way of the dodo - although I can find it in my backup images, the formats themselves are about as useful as cuneiform writing on clay tablets. Never again.
- I, too, loathe DRM, for mostly the same reasons. I still rip all my music to high-grade MP3 for maximum portability, avoid copy-protected CDs like the plague and have yet to make a single iTunes Music Store purchase, precisely because I want to make sure that the content I buy is under my control - and that includes migrating with me to new formats, if needed be.
- I wonder what the zealots and partisans will make of his take on the GIMP, especially after nearly having made him an Ubuntu poster child.
- Although I still think that he could accomplish all he wants atop Mac OS X, the sentence "Some day there will be no hardware that can run Mac OS X, and because of Apple’s DRM it will be illegal to emulate it in software." struck a chord. He's right, and I ought to know it - after all, I ran the course newspaper off System 6 and Windows 286. And all that, like my VMS and NeXT stuff, is gone (except a few PostScript files and e-mails).
- I could do it, but the amount of CTD involved to set up a minimally usable environment on Linux is a hassle I don't want to face - at least not for now, and not with Mac OS X's lead on usability. For now, Apple's current hardware is more off-putting than the software (with a stream of bad news that just keeps on coming these days), but still not quite to the point where I fancy running Xfce or Gnome on a vanilla PC. Yet.
But I must confess all of this has been on my mind of late, and more so as I wade through the Ubuntu minefield (deliberately, both at home and at work). I'm still committed to Fedora, but you have to experience some things to truly understand them - even the brittle, unfinished ones.
What I don't get (and probably never will) is why Mark didn't just use IMAP (with whatever sort of mailbox format) as a long-term mail store instead of trying to migrate to (and from) Mail.app's .emlx format.
Heck, he's Mark Pilgrim - I'm just a random UNIX guy, and I figured it out years ago...