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Because they don't.

Saying that Miguel de Icaza represents open source developers is just wrong. I respect the guy very much. But he's a completely different beast than the average open source programmer joe

Now most of the ones in academia do use mac (and used SGI workstations before that) just because they have a fat allowance for gear and they have no idea how to waste. so mac is the obvious way to go if what you need is to waste money.




Where do you go to get a dual socket hex-core westmere desktop machine with 32GB of RAM? The only one I've seen is Apple's Mac Pro.

People who crunch a lot of numbers like those machines. They aren't that expensive when compared with the alternatives (racked servers)


From my few experiences at open source software programmery events over the past few years, I'd disagree. Always seems that a little fewer than half of attendees have macs in front of them. I explain part of it to myself by noticing that the numbers skew even higher than half when it's something 'webby,' and attributing that to the closeness to graphic design-media-marketing types.

With other systems programmer types, I still see plenty of macs, but I blame that on the fact that those programmers are spending all of their important time on the server and some don't feel like futzing around on their laptop with a more fiddly OS like Linux or Windows. The only thing that all programmers seem to like to fiddle with endlessly is IDEs and text editors, and there seem to plenty of mac options for that.




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