Comments on: gOS Space 2.9: Blatant OS X Leopard Rip-Off, Linux for the Masses, Or Both?

By: HalfSight

HalfSight — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:37:44 +0000

Wow. What a horrible, uninformed article. OSX is Based from BSD which is based on unix which linux is based off of. I mean seriously Apple and MS stole their window design from xerox. MAC and MS constantly rip off open source communities. And to the person that says you have to be a programmer to run linux. I have never done any programming and I run linux on a regular basis. In ubuntu there is the Add/Remove function which makes installing apps a breeze. Actually by your statement I would guess that you have only seen 1 linux distro and not actually used it.

By: Ted

Ted — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 06:17:24 +0000

You dont seem to have done any research on this. Apple are well known for stealing open source code, OS X is a well known Linux rip off. Apple spend all their time making flashy adverts to fool suckers like you. And it works. They have no time to program.

By: SonicFreak94

SonicFreak94 — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 04:17:12 +0000

OS X is Unix based which is pretty much the same as linux, of course they got all this stuff.

By: Tom

Tom — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 14:45:44 +0000

uh… os x rips off linux ALL the time. so apple came up with a cool dock … so some open source generous programmers made some great apps like kiba dock for linux. mind you they did it far better than apple too.

it’s very hard to compare linux gnome / compiz to any other operating system’s window manager because it’s far more advanced with opengl support and such.

there are hardly any opengl effects in windows vista or os x leopard. just some translucency stuff pretty much and some basic basic transition effects (new vista feature for switching tasks).

i’m glad someone is releasing a distro that’s a bit more pretty because most aren’t. they are functional. linux is designed to be functional…but it’s really usually up to the user to make it pretty. so don’t think of it as a rip off of leopard so much as inspired by. because believe me, the software running this is WAYYYY more advanced than what leopard has.

and besides there much better looking stuff for linux than this.
though yes you are correct that this does look exactly like leopard’s dock and yes it was made after leopard.

By: Rayven

Rayven — Tue, 13 May 2008 00:02:17 +0000

Well it Look nice but its got one problem its Linux and with any linux OS its a pain in the A** to install anything on. Ok so i have a problem with Linux I know Linux is a great OS and its got some good stuff on it but for an average user who uses Mac OS X or WIndows will find Linux painful to work with they can put Many Bells and Whistles on it Linux but its still Linux & not every one in the world is a Computer Programmer and I feel you need to be a programmer to use Linux. Linux Creators Need to Make it Easy to use if they want to take it further in the OS market they only haver 2% of the OS market which is a Joke For any OS

By: Mike Cane

Mike Cane — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:14:44 +0000

>>>gOS Space 2.9 (a tweaked version of Ubuntu using Compiz-Fusion and GNOME)

You nearly lost me right there. I’ve heard of Ubuntu (the cultists are endless!) but Compiz-Fusion and GNOME?

Groan.

Maybe you should put stuff like that in a footnote. It just makes my head spin. And I think that’s the case for most people who simply want Something That Works.

By: Dave Liu

Dave Liu — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:34:11 +0000

I agree with yochai. @yochai, thanks for pointing this out.

Thanks for the honest review, albeit the title is a bit of a sensation! A lot of people in the open source community feel that Apple ripped off the open source community, not the other way around. If there were more awareness of the true origins of GUI elements, I think one might be surprised that the majority of them are from the open source community, not Apple.

This does spotlight something I would like to engage the open source community on… marketing, showcasing our work for the world to see and be educated about. We’re excited about projects like Compiz-Fusion, Avant Windows Navigator, etc. for bringing Linux closer to the masses. We hope in time credit will be given to the open source community for everything they’ve freely developed and made freely available so that everyone can enjoy them, even if it is through the filter of proprietary products like Windows and Mac OSX.

-Dave

By: Tarasu Oliver

Tarasu Oliver — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 08:56:17 +0000

We can always find some antecedents to anything in this world, but lets face it – its a shameless ripoff – but hey… why not!! They – **ple have done the same!! More over one is charging money for it.

By: yochai

yochai — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:15:33 +0000

Interesting article. I have a few contentions, though. While I agree that there are some definite similarities with Leopard (albeit quite a few more with Mac OS X in general) I would disagree with the notion that it’s “ripping off” anything. The “dock” has been around longer than apple; all the way back to RISC OS II —- and some version of the dock has been utilized in the unix world ever since. NextStep (a steve jobs production) developed the dock heavily, and it eventually made its way into the popular closed-source OS. Lastly, I find the dock to be largely counter-intuitive to computer use; I generally have more than a few windows open and I like to see what I’m going to click on — not just it’s icon. For example, I typically have two firefox windows, a text document, an openoffice document/spreadsheet, and internet explorer (running in wine, of course). It’s simply easier to control if I can see what page each program is displaying. So I don’t see how that makes it a superior framework, stacks or no. Finally, the concept of “Stacking” has been a gnome idea for years; prevalent in both BSD and Linux. OS X just recently caught up.