“In ‘The ‘Mac OS X Closed by Pirates’ Myth,’ I took apart the
idea that Apple was backpedaling on their open source efforts
because of fears of piracy. The article prompted a fierce reaction
from certain open source advocates, who ignored the point I was
making in order to profess their devout, fundamentalist faith in
the world conquering manifesto of the open source revolution. Part
of that faith requires vilifying any who dare defend the release of
any binary code without its accompanying source.“The opinion that Apple’s binary-only kernel for Intel involves
a huge coverup, or misleading advertising on Apple’s part, or is
otherwise a broken promise on the level of massive fraud, has been
thoroughly beaten into the ground by certain political advocates,
who scour the web like an army of GNU-bots, looking for venues to
unleash their political screed on open source as a political
philosophy. That’s the clan Tom Yager was exploiting when he
cranked up the sensationalism with ‘no story is more timely, or
more broadly relevant, than this one…'”