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Apple does sell some proprietary software for a fee, and they give away a lot of proprietary software for no cost. But it seems to me that most of their busines

• thomastjeffery 9y ago
  > they give away a lot of proprietary software for no cost. That is explicitly not the definition of free software, which is "free" as in "freedom", not "free beer". The monetary exchange for software copies is a separate topic. I do wish Stallman picked a less ambiguous word like "libre", but here we are. > But it seems to me that most of their business model is selling hardware. That's what I'm talking about. IOS is explicitly designed to be a "walled garden". That design is directly contradictory to free software design. It requires that users are unable to do certain things in IOS, meaning it requires IOS to be proprietary, and irriplaceable. > I wonder what impact moving to all Free Software would actually have on their business? That is a good question. Unfortunately, Apple (as it exists today) will quite certainly never show is. > Or at least, making all of the software that they don't charge for, Free Software? Any user level software would not be needed for their "walled garden" approach, so there is nothing but Apple's current mindset preventing them from releasing the source. Maybe someday they will realize this, after all, their current open source projects (LLVM/clang, etc.) have certainly flourished.