3 ms·

If Apple takes a stance against GPL because they don't perceive it as in their commercial best interest, that doesn't mean Stallman was wrong even in a 'tactica

• geofft 11y ago
  Of course Apple does not perceive the GPL as in their commercial best interest. Back when NeXT was writing what would eventually become Apple's toolchain, Steve Jobs tried to convince Stallman that he could come up with a plugin architecture and keep the Objective-C bit private. Stallman went to his lawyer and came back and said, no, you can't do that. Steve Jobs' perception, and NeXT/Apple's perception, never changed. What changed is that in the NeXT days, GCC was so much better that Apple said, we'll make the tradeoff of using GCC even though we don't want the GPL. A few years ago Apple said, we'll make the tradeoff of avoiding the GPL even though we want GCC. And they went and invested significant resources into LLVM. The GPL was meant to be a tool to get people who did not perceive free software as in their best interest to contribute to free software anyway. It might not have changed whether they were "haters" as a matter of opinion, but it was definitely intended to change their concrete actions. And it did -- for a very long time.