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> That Apple freely releases anything is tied directly to Stallman resisting Jobs's snowjobs during the '90s, and later Jobs's Flash snuff. What does this mean

> That Apple freely releases anything is tied directly to Stallman resisting Jobs's snowjobs during the '90s, and later Jobs's Flash snuff. What does this mean?

kick 7y ago
One of the excuses Jobs used for not putting Flash on the iPhone was that it was closed-source, and that he believed that web standards should always be "open-source." This was a convenient excuse to snuff Adobe that he only got to use because Webkit was LGPL'd (by KDE's doing, not Apple's), but it did stop critics from complaining as much. Most free software that Apple has released around the web was because of this. Jobs was notorious for snowing out free software people. If you don't know what that means: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/snow%20job https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/snow%20job A primary example was when Jobs tried to convince Stallman to allow NeXT to break the GPL, Stallman resisted, and a bit of NeXT got released under a GPL-compatible license. From a mail exchange between him and the developer of clisp: I say this based on discussions I had with our lawyer long ago. The issue first arose when NeXT proposed to distribute a modified GCC in two parts and let the user link them. Jobs asked me whether this was lawful. It seemed to me at the time that it was, following reasoning like what you are using; but since the result was very undesirable for free software, I said I would have to ask the lawyer. What the lawyer said surprised me; he said that judges would consider such schemes to be "subterfuges" and would be very harsh toward them. He said a judge would ask whether it is "really" one program, rather than how it is labeled. So I went back to Jobs and said we believed his plan was not allowed by the GPL. The direct result of this is that we now have an Objective C front end. They had wanted to distribute the Objective C parser as a separate proprietary package to link with the GCC back end, but since I didn't agree this was allowed, they made it free. So I don't think the GPL actually requires a correction for this. But perhaps it would be a good idea to add a note explaining this.

> That Apple freely releases anything is tied directly to Stallman resisting Jobs's snowjobs during the '90s, and later Jobs's Flash snuff. What does this mean?

kick 7y ago

One of the excuses Jobs used for not putting Flash on the iPhone was that it was closed-source, and that he believed that web standards should always be "open-source." This was a convenient excuse to snuff Adobe that he only got to use because Webkit was LGPL'd (by KDE's doing, not Apple's), but it did stop critics from complaining as much. Most free software that Apple has released around the web was because of this. Jobs was notorious for snowing out free software people. If you don't know what that means: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/snow%20job https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/snow%20job A primary example was when Jobs tried to convince Stallman to allow NeXT to break the GPL, Stallman resisted, and a bit of NeXT got released under a GPL-compatible license. From a mail exchange between him and the developer of clisp: I say this based on discussions I had with our lawyer long ago. The issue first arose when NeXT proposed to distribute a modified GCC in two parts and let the user link them. Jobs asked me whether this was lawful. It seemed to me at the time that it was, following reasoning like what you are using; but since the result was very undesirable for free software, I said I would have to ask the lawyer. What the lawyer said surprised me; he said that judges would consider such schemes to be "subterfuges" and would be very harsh toward them. He said a judge would ask whether it is "really" one program, rather than how it is labeled. So I went back to Jobs and said we believed his plan was not allowed by the GPL. The direct result of this is that we now have an Objective C front end. They had wanted to distribute the Objective C parser as a separate proprietary package to link with the GCC back end, but since I didn't agree this was allowed, they made it free. So I don't think the GPL actually requires a correction for this. But perhaps it would be a good idea to add a note explaining this.