A couple of days ago I talked about the Pine64 and embedded community being now powerful enough to do everyday work. I am getting a pine64 board and will report on if it can handle what I do, from photo processing to running statistics packages. But there are consequences.
One is that Apple is failing. Badly.
Net Applications measures operating system user share — an estimate of the proportion of all personal computer owners who run a device powered by a specific OS — by counting systems whose browsers reach websites of its clients.
The Mac’s 6.1% user share in December was the lowest mark recorded by Net Applications since August 2011, more than five years ago. Although the Mac number fluctuates month to month — as do all estimates from the metrics firm — its general trend has been up for two-thirds of a decade: In 2009, for example, the Mac accounted for only about 5% of all personal computers.
User share does not equal sales — the former resembles the installed base more than anything — but Apple’s own data fits the view of a shrinking Mac. In October, the company reported sales of 4.9 million Macs for the September quarter, a 14% year-over-year decline and the fourth straight quarterly downturn.
Apple’s sales slide during the past 12 months has been steeper than for the personal computer industry as a whole, according to industry researchers from IDC and Gartner, a 180-degree shift from the prior 30 or so quarters, when the Mac’s growth rate repeatedly beat the business average. The long string of successes selling Macs — fueled by Microsoft’s stumbles with Windows 8 and a race-to-the-bottom mentality among rival OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) — resulted in Apple’s computers gaining user share.
But the converse has been true more recently, meaning that as sales of Macs fell faster than of Windows PCs, Cupertino’s share shrunk as well.
In part this is concentrating on virtue signalling and not being productive. Apple used make good hardware. Their GUI was the mos stable out there. Not any more. I’m dong more work — during the holiday — on my Acer Aspire (running Antergos Linux) than my Mac Pro.
The effect of this is easy to see where it is open. The most recent example is Libreboot. This project has been destroyed by Leah Rowe, because she has decided the Free Software Foundation does badthink. She requested that Libreboot would be removed from GNU. Since it is a fork of Coreboot, this is not going to break systems. Stallman knows what to do in these circumstances. Sack the SJW.
When a program becomes a GNU package, in principle that relationship is permanent. The program’s maintainers undertake the responsibility to develop it on behalf of the GNU Project. Usually the initial maintainers are the developers that brought it into the GNU Project.
A package maintainer can decide to step down, to stop maintaining the package for the GNU Project. Many GNU packages have been in use for many years and are no longer maintained by their original developers.
When a package’s maintainer steps down, that doesn’t by itself break the relationship between GNU and the package. If it is left without a maintainer but is still useful, the GNU Project will usually look for new maintainers to work on it. However, we can instead drop ties with the package, if that seems the right thing to do.
A few months ago, the maintainer of GNU Libreboot decided not to work on Libreboot for the GNU Project any more. That was her decision to make. She also asserted that Libreboot was no longer a GNU package — something she could not unilaterally do. The GNU Project had to decide what to do in regard to Libreboot.
We have decided to go along with the former GNU maintainer’s wishes in this case, for a combination of reasons: (1) it had not been a GNU package for very long, (2) she was the developer who had originally made it a GNU package, and (3) there were no major developers who wanted to continue developing Libreboot under GNU auspices. Given these circumstances, to continue development of Libreboot within GNU would not be useful, so we are not going to do so.
Thus, Libreboot is no longer a GNU package. It remains free software.
GNU runs by goodwill and the hacker ethic. The larger corporations need to emulate this. Libreboot has not taken off. (and if free software, you can use it anyway). Apple needs to get rid of those who would converge. For convergence is the lowest common denominator, and within there is nothing but hate.