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It is -because- Apple is opposed to Open Source that they are unable to even ship a version of bash from the past 10 years out of fear of the big bad GPLv3 lice
by lrvick 5y ago
It is -because- Apple is opposed to Open Source that they are unable to even ship a version of bash from the past 10 years out of fear of the big bad GPLv3 licensing might make them actually allow public auditing of their proprietary OS.
The Apple commitment to Open Source is mostly one direction and largely limited to cased where they have no legal choice such as GPL. They allow some contributions to happen to appease Apple engineers they want to retain, but as a whole Apple is fundamentally committed to walled gardens.
https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/bash/tree/bash-123.40.1 https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/bash/tree/bash-12...
- new_realist 5y agoDarwin, Apple's OS, is open source.
- snazz 5y agoCalling it an OS is a bit generous—although XNU is open-source, actually getting it running on hardware from just the publicly released parts is not particularly feasible. PureDarwin exists, but it's mostly just a curiosity to run in QEMU at this point.
- makeitdouble 5y agoIt is, but it's also a complicated story that doesn't seem to go well. Basically past honeymoon period, the open source part of the project just was increasingly left on the side of the road. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
- webmobdev 5y agoSince macOS is / was a port of xBSD, how much difference is there between Darwin and xBSD kernel?
- bch 5y agoThe userland was largely BSD, but the Mac kernel was a Mach kernel w a BSD shim for syscalls, iiuc.
- heavyset_go 5y agoA significant part of the FreeBSD kernel was used in XNU.
- lrvick 5y agoAnd yet it is not possible to run a single MacOS targeted GUI application on it without many proprietary components on top.
- lokar 5y agoWhat about FDB?
- nojito 5y agoGPL != OpenSource
- karmakaze 5y agoGPL == OpenestSource
- cwp 5y agoNah. That's probably MIT.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoDepends on whether you think "openest" means "most free to do whatever you want with" or "most guaranteed to remain open" ...
- cwp 5y agoYeah, I'm familiar with the FSF's philosophy. Limiting freedom in order to protect it. No thanks. It leads to exactly the sort of problem pointed out by the GGGGP comment - Apple shipping an ancient version of bash because of license incompatibility. Apple cannot open source all of their software. They'd go out of business. So instead we have GNU folks high-fiving because they stopped Apple from using their work without giving back, but millions of users are also prevented from using their work.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoNobody is prevented from using newer versions of Bash. They just don't ship from Apple.
- jw14 5y agoUntil this moment I didn't know the Apple version of bash was outdated, I reluctantly started using zsh when Apple defaulted to that. Now I don't care about bash. Was that good for bash?
- outside1234 5y agoThey do contribute to Kubernetes, albeit at a pretty low level, and for self serving needs.
- rvz 5y agoWithout WebKit being open source and maintained, Chrome would never have existed.
- VWWHFSfQ 5y agowasn't that just a fork of khtml. what exactly did apple do
- olliej 5y agoRewrote the entirety of it, added most of the new features for the web over more than a decade? Or do you believe chromium is also “just a fork of khtml”?
- VWWHFSfQ 5y agoyes they're all derived from the fork of khtml. is that what you're asking?
- olliej 5y agoNo, I was asking about "just a fork of khtml". That implies that there wasn't meaningful work. WebKit is at this point (and probably a decade ago) a functionally complete rewrite. When webkit forked KHTML, KHTML couldn't render the vast majority of the top 100 websites properly, just by the time the first safari was released webkit was already able to render those correctly, or in many cases even usably. When I say WK rendered correctly, I mean matching Firefox/Explorer, not just a bare "is useable".
- djxfade 5y agoNot saying you are wrong, but I remember that KHTML was the first renderer that was able to pass the ACID2 test. So this doesn't sound right to me
- randomdata 5y agoIn in alternate universe Chrome would have adopted KHTML.
- tw04 5y ago>out of fear of the big bad GPLv3 licensing might make them actually allow public auditing of their proprietary OS. Or because, you know, they make money selling that OS. And they understandably have no desire to make the entire thing GPLv3. And they also have countless contractual obligations to other vendors whose closed-source code is also bundled in OSX. I find this attitude kind of troubling around here when every other day there's some "open source" project that has had to change licensing because insert cloud provider is stealing their lunch making it impossible for them to make a living. It turns out that someone has to pay the bills, and giving all of your software away isn't a great way to do that. Outside of Redhat, barely anyone has figured out how to make a business out of giving away software, and I'd argue the sale to IBM shows that even Redhat saw the gorilla that was AWS standing in the corner and decided it was time to throw in the towel.
- Rebelgecko 5y agoApple hasn't made money from selling their OS for almost a decade
- wk_end 5y agoYes and no. I'm sure they'd lose approximately some customers if were as easy to install macOS on commodity hardware as it is to install, say, Linux.
- lrvick 5y agoThat is already true anyway with OSX86. I have known a number of people too poor to afford macs that rig up a hackintosh. Apple has never stopped the DIY crowd. Their core market is the people that want the support and the branded aluminum.
- bigfudge 5y agoThat’s not strictly true. It’s hard work keeping a hackintosh working. I think apple is part of that.
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- Sophistifunk 5y agoThis is a pile of horseshit not even worth refuting in detail.