4 ms·

For no reason at all. The main requisite of the GPL license is that if you do some modifications to a GPL licensed software you must give back that changes to t

For no reason at all. The main requisite of the GPL license is that if you do some modifications to a GPL licensed software you must give back that changes to the community, i.e. publish the modified source code (only of the GPL licensed parts, not the whole source code of the project). To me it seems reasonable enough. Apple not wanting to include GPL software doesn't make a lot of sense to me, since they still release the source code of the low level components as the Darwin project. And still they include some GPL software.

detaro 5y ago
If you only look at "GPL or not", you are missing the detail indeed. Apple doesn't want to include GPLv3 software, and thus stuck with GPLv2 versions.
yyyk 5y ago
You described GPLv2. GPLv3 has also anti-tivo and patent related clauses which I guess Apple is not keen to comply with.
lightdot 5y ago
You don't actually need to give the changes back to the community, you only need to give the changed code to those you distribute the modified software to. In other words: - if you don't publish the modified software, you don't need to give the changed code to anyone - if you distribute the modified software to a single entity, you only need to give the changed code to that single entity (and they absolutely do not need to publish it) - etc. I know people mostly view this through the eyes of large public projects, forks, etc., but there more to it then that.