Why Apple does not offer support for linux?

Question

We all know the history of Apple. It clearly shows a trend to be open source, excepting for the licenses they share with Microsoft. In my personal case, I love open source because it has solved several of my problems. Just to share this with everyone, I am the network manager of a educational institution and I used to have my servers running on windows platform. Since we used to buy it all from Microsoft, they would give us free software for or labs, software like Visual Studio. They even assigned us engineers to plan everything for our servers, free of cost. Guess what? It was a disaster. We had our database destroyed by an external attack. We were “lucky” to have Microsoft in our servers and in our firewalls.
We had to take action, so I decided to switch to Debian, and to use IPCOP (a great dedicated firewall, if there is anyone interested, the link is: http://ipcop.org/ , please note, I am NOT affiliated with them, and I will receive no compensation or benefit if you chose to access it or not ). Both open source. The result, no external attack has been able to pass trough. After that, we switched most* of our e-learning platforms to open source, and guess what? We are saving over 60,000 yearly just in software. So for those who are looking for a good way to get good security without loosing an eye, try open source.
Now back to the point, I do not fully support any operative system. They all have their good features, or at least they should. The ones I know, are because I use them. My home network is composed by computers running in five different versions of Linux, two running in Mac OS X Tiger, and some others running in XP pro. My main computer is running in Ubuntu, and is really sad to see that there is no software from apple available for Linux. That is honestly the worst part of Linux, having no iTunes or QuickTime available. No way to see multimedia in the web, etc. A suggestion for apple would be, give support for Linux, there are a lot of us wanting the same.

Answer 1

Apple makes software and hardware. Therefore they
offer a total solution. Now they even can have
windows xp running on their hardware. Making a
version of mac os to run on linix isn't practically.
Under a mac is unix and you can run unix software
with the mac so you could do ever thing you are
doing with a mac.
I did not know Linux was one type of computer, like Mac...
Next topic, If I was willing to pay for it, this thread would not exist, because I can actually use a commercial software to adapt the windows web plug ins to Linux... If I was in charge of Apple, I would propose to develop free software support of my products, - plug ins and so - to other operative systems... But of course, even if I did, it would not be up to me. It would have to pass trough several layers of bureaucracy, and it would take a lot of time to be approved or rejected.
Anyway, the main issue is, the three most important OS's are Windows, Linux, and Mac. And that can't be denied. Now you can even run Windows in a Mac PC, and vice versa... besides being fancy, what else could I do with a Mac PC using Windows, when I can build a machine able to run Windows for less than 300 bucks? OK if you want to try a Mac in a i386 or a x86... but I still rather to be the proud owner of a PowerMac G5 than the owner of a Pentium 4 / AMD using Mac OS.
Also, I thought it would be fun to see the reactions and opinions of other people with this topic, hence, I was not expecting anyone from Mac to read it, and really do something about it, because I know they won't.