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Various companies, Apple most notably, clearly avoid GPLv3. For years Mac OS X has had the last GPLv2 version of bash.
by CJefferson 6y ago
Various companies, Apple most notably, clearly avoid GPLv3. For years Mac OS X has had the last GPLv2 version of bash.
- Twirrim 6y agoAmazon had GPLv3 blacklisted when I worked there. Nothing new by way of legal concerns about GPLv3. No lawyer is going to advise a company to take actions that will likely see the company go to court to explore just how much of a license is legally enforceable, and just what it actually means.
- ragnese 6y agoAnd they also avoided GPLv2. Sure, they had bash, but all of the "coreutils" were the BSD flavors. That an exception was made for one or a couple of things doesn't exactly counter my claim very strongly.
- dwaite 6y agoThey accepted the sister LGPLv2 license as the basis of WebKit, and had other tools like Samba integrated. They may have avoided the GPLv2 when easy, but they outright banned GPLv3 (froze bash and gcc on the last version while working to remove them; wrote their own from-scratch CIFS implementation to drop samba).
- ragnese 6y agoThey accepted those things because they had nothing else. The forked WebKit from KHTML, which was LGPL. It's not like they chose that license. Same with Samba. It was either take those things or invent something new. Especially at that point in Apple's history, they probably didn't have the resources to NIH everything. Today, that would be a different story, I'm sure. I understand your point about outright banning GPLv3 vs just avoiding GPLv2. But I have to wonder what would have happened in an alternate timeline where KHTML, Samba, and GCC were all GPLv3 at the point in time where this universe's Apple adopted them. Would they have just skipped making their own browser and integrating with SMB?
- zests 6y agoDarwin is a BSD so maybe there is another explanation for that.
- CountSessine 6y agoThat’s probably more because of MacOS’s FreeBSD heritage. They used BSD tools where they could get them and used gnu where they must.
- toast0 6y agoRunning GNU coreutils with a highly BSD kernel is a recipe for sadness. If you don't believe me, try Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.
- pjmlp 6y agoAnd as we all know, FreeBSD has enjoyed plenty of Apple contributions upstream. Without GPL, all commercial UNIXes would be around and Linux would be just another school clone.