Two months ago, I took a new job with Rally Software. I’ll write a post about the company some other time, but I do want to highlight one aspect of the company: the usage of Apple products.
I spent most of my youth in Windows, but I switched to Linux a few years back and greatly enjoyed it. It annoyed me that I didn’t know my way around Mac OS, the only remaining one of the “big three” with which I was not proficient. When I took the job at Rally, I was excited to find out that they were an Apple shop. All of the developers had powerful mac machines, the pairing stations were all iMacs, and pretty much everyone owned a Macbook or iPhone, or both. Rally was going to be a good place to learn my way around the world of Apple, so I was excited.
To give a little background on myself, I am a bit of an open source zealot. Even when I was a Windows user (for a while, I worked as a Flash programmer and Flash didn’t run in Linux), I replaced the Windows shell with LiteStep, an open source shell. I ran open source Windows software almost exclusively - my goal was to make the Windows Kernel the only proprietary thing running on my machine.
The only Apple product I had owned up until I took the new job had been an iPod, but I replaced the iPod firmware with Rockbox, which is open source. A year ago I wanted to upgrade my iPod Nano to the newer, smaller model, but when I brought it home and tried to install Rockbox on it, I found out that the newer Nanos had some kind of protection that prevented firmware replacement. My response was to actually return the Nano to the store and keep my old one, which I still use.
So suffice it to say, ‘closed’ systems irritate me, and Apple products are arguably the most closed hardware/software products available for purchase. I decided to go into this process with an open mind, since I wanted to learn my way around Mac OS X, but the odds were definitely stacked against Apple, so take what I say here as a fundamentally biased view of the world.
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