Comments on: The Illegal use of Safari http://davmac.wordpress.com/2008/03/28/the-illegal-use-of-safari/ Hasty insults from a frustrated user and developer Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:28:14 +0000 http://wordpress.com/ hourly 1 By: Lawrence http://davmac.wordpress.com/2008/03/28/the-illegal-use-of-safari/#comment-19 Lawrence Tue, 01 Apr 2008 05:46:53 +0000 http://davmac.wordpress.com/?p=22#comment-19 Whilst I can see why a software company might once have wanted to tie their software to particular hardware, I can see no clear benefit in doing so now. For instance, apple's marketing strategy could go something along the lines of "we want to be selling a complete computer solution. Since the software and hardware aren't to good to the end user without each other, we would like to be seen as selling the whole lot as a solid, reliable package." I'm no programmer, but it makes sense to me that software is more likely to be stable if it knows the hardware it's dealing with. However, this does seem useless now. For a number of reasons. 1. I've installed Ubuntu’s linux distro on a number of systems: it works great no matter what the hardware. 2. Apple will still sell hardware because people like it. But it will sell additional software if people could run it on their PCs (legally), and avoid being draconian in the way you have illustrated. Whilst I can see why a software company might once have wanted to tie their software to particular hardware, I can see no clear benefit in doing so now. For instance, apple’s marketing strategy could go something along the lines of “we want to be selling a complete computer solution. Since the software and hardware aren’t to good to the end user without each other, we would like to be seen as selling the whole lot as a solid, reliable package.” I’m no programmer, but it makes sense to me that software is more likely to be stable if it knows the hardware it’s dealing with.

However, this does seem useless now. For a number of reasons. 1. I’ve installed Ubuntu’s linux distro on a number of systems: it works great no matter what the hardware. 2. Apple will still sell hardware because people like it. But it will sell additional software if people could run it on their PCs (legally), and avoid being draconian in the way you have illustrated.

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