That's the thing, he gets the credit when things are working and some other shlub gets the credit when things don't work. Sometimes that's valid, but you don't hear folks talking much about the Lisa these days or the fact that OSX has been in a gradual retreat from the server market over the last decade or so. At this point, I'd have to look up whether they even offer a server version of OSX anymore.

Catch-22 from the very beginning.

I hate DRM, but have grown accustomed to circumvent it however I can, while still buying the original copy. Thankfully, these tittles usually plummet in value quite quickly in retail. Gee, I wonder why? Could it be because "requires constant Internet connection" or "associated with subscription account" for the average customer equals "gives you gangrene and explosive diarrhea"?

Have you downloaded any of Apple's software from the Mac App Store? The option of FairPlay protection is provided to 3rd party developers but Apple is kind of leading by example, offering all their own software DRM free.


How is that cynical, a ploy or an unfair advantage? They negotiated conditions to offer their customers DRM free music. Isn't that what GOG is doing for games? Is that unfair as well?

They don't, it's now a set of applications you install to any machine running OS X Lion.

Also, they lowered the price by over 90%. I bought Leopard (10.5) server limited to 10 users for about 500€ (the unlimited version cost double that), the next version - Snow Leopard (10.6) - scrapped the 10-user version and set the unlimited-user price to 500€. Now, the application bundle for Lion (10.7) costs less than 50€. That tells something of how popular (or not, rather) the system is with large corporations.

Also, yeah, despite OS X Server being an interesting experiment, I'm going BSD with my next server.

Apple refused to license it's Apple only DRM scheme to other manufacturers making the ITMS effectively iPod only unless you went to the step of burning a copy to rip. They then made a turn around at the point where the iPod was itself more or less synonymous with MP3 player.

In other words, what you're missing is the part where Apple was using it's own DRM scheme to harm the competition and opted not to remove it until they had a really strong position in the field.
I started using FreeBSD for my workstation in the late 90s, it's a solid product. It's not necessarily the only one to choose, OpenBSD has it's advantages.

Chances are good that if you can administer an OSX server that you'll be well on your way to handling a *BSD server without too many gotchas. Especially considering that OSX uses what is basically a FreeBSD userland on top of a Mach kernel.

I think you might be forgetting publishers insisted on DRM and iTunes would have failed without it. They played the game and managed to change the rules in favour of the consumer. I don't see anything wrong with that.

OS X has it's own proprietary admin tools though, even when going in through the terminal. Which is quite annoying, and one of the reasons I would rather use BSD or Linux where I can get closer to the applications actually doing the work and more easily edit config files by hand since the Apple CLI/GUI layer doesn't give me the settings I want to change (the other being easier upgrade paths, so I won't have to get a new machine just to upgrade PHP or Apache - yes, you can install a new version of Apache compiled for Darwin, but there's no way to nicely integrate it with the server admin tool, it'll still be wired to the old apache).

EDIT - this has nothing to do with DRM, though it could certainly be considered vendor lock-in even if the underlying stuff is open source and available for multiple platforms.

I'm not forgetting about it, at that time there was at least two different DRM formats available for license that Apple could have chosen. Most folks were using WMA for that purpose and Apple deliberately chose an incompatible format that it wouldn't license to other folks. And IIRC Real also had their own DRM format for license.

You're entitled to your opinion, but it was clearly unfair, especially towards the later stages when the iPods were dominant in the market. I can't confirm it, but my suspicions are that Apple didn't have much choice but to either remove the DRM outright or license it to other companies at that point.

This is why the Samsung lawsuits make me laugh instead of being pissed (the world would still be better off without patent hindrance).