4 ms·

The NeXT Operating system, upon which OS X is based, was created in the 1980s. It's not accurate to say it "wouldn't exist" without Richard Stallman. I am gla

• joejohnson 15y ago
  Wasn't the NeXT OS based off BSD? I believe that is open source.
  • nirvana 15y ago
    Not at the time, but it is now. It was owned by the Regents of The University of California, and in the intervening decades, it has gone from being a license you had to pay for, or otherwise negotiate, to a generally open source license.
    • protomyth 15y ago
      Wikipedia puts the BSD (open source) at 1988 introduction with the GPL being 1989. NeXTSTEP was released September 18, 1989. So, I would say your dates do not mesh and joejohnson's comment is correct.
      • flomo 15y ago
        BSD wasn't completely open source until much later, so I would assume that NeXT purchased a license, just as they did for Display PostScript and other pieces. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi
  • gujk 15y ago
    Open source yes, but not RMS's version. It is debatable whether Stallman was instrumental in creating the free BSD license.
• diminish 15y ago
  this is wrong, please read the below threads about this; "There is plenty of GPL software available legally on Apple devices, particularly Macs. On iOS devices the conflict is the EULA only. The approval process has nothing to do with it. GNU/Linux distributions have approval processes too. More about how the EULA conflicts with the GPL: http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-gpl-enforcement http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-...
  • nirvana 15y ago
    Right, so because someone adopted a license, the GPL, that forbids distributing the software under the EULA, you guys are going to blame the EULA, rather than the GPL? And then say that it is Apple's fault? Apple didn't write the GPL. And at this point, I'm reminded once again, never to debate facts with people advancing an ideology. You can have the last word.
    • _delirium 15y ago
      I don't see any real reason, apart from ire for the GPL, for Apple to insist on attaching its EULA to the app (as opposed to the use of the platform, say, which is GPL-compatible), for a free-software app where the author doesn't want to add a EULA, and where the source code is freely available. The purpose of the EULA for proprietary apps is to ban various kinds of reverse-engineering/piracy, which is a pointless thing to ban if the source and app are given away and the app author doesn't care about reverse engineering. It seems perfectly reasonable to me for a software author to say: I give this app away for free, and you can redistribute it, but you can't attach an EULA to my app if you do. If you, for some reason, are so pigheaded that you insist on adding no-reverse-engineering conditions to my app, which has no actual effect because the damn thing is open-source anyway, I'd blame you for the pointless ideological policy.
      • sipefree 15y ago
        As someone who's just had their app approved this very day, Apple don't force their EULA on you. There's a box where you can paste in your own EULA during the upload process.
• sagarm 15y ago
  NeXTstep may have been started in the 1980s, but it was still built on many open source (generally BSD licensed at that time) components. Apple hired Chris Lattner, who started LLVM when he was a graduate student at UIUC. It may be funding development now, but it wasn't "Apple's" innovation. Apple's primary reason for funding LLVM development was likely to be able to integrate their proprietary software more closely with the compiler, something that GCC is designed to discourage. The GPL and the Apple store EULA are incompatible. Considering that the GPL has been around for decades, the incompatibility can be considered intentional.
  • fluidcruft 15y ago
    Don't forget the NeXT's failed attempts to steal GCC.
    • gillianseed 15y ago
      Steal is inacurrate, however Jobs tried to combine GCC's backend with Next's proprietary ObjC frontend. He wasn't legally able to do so (he tried to sneak past GPL by distributing them as separate packages and claim that the end-user would do the actual linking) and since he really needed the GCC backend this meant that GCC got ObjC support.
    • nirvana 15y ago
      How can you "steal" something that is given away for free? Your accusation contains the truth of the matter. No "Free software" is actually free. The F stands for Fascism. Stallman gets to dictate who uses it and who doesn't without regard to what the GPL actually says. At least, thats how it operates. Notice how, Apple using and supporting free software has resulted no end in dishonest accusations from you and others in this thread? This is why I will have nothing to do with your "movement" and oppose it at every turn.
      • fluidcruft 15y ago
        I don't see how commenting on NeXT's attempts to circumvent the GPL was criticizing Apple at all. NeXT's goal was to wrap GCC with a proprietary wrapper thereby appropriating the FSF's work and denying users the freedom to modify and adapt it for their own purposes. Copyright laws are reality. Free software is pragmatically protected by copyright. Misappropriation of copyrighted works is considered "theft"/"stealing" by the groups with which Apple chooses to associate and for which Apple forces restrictive DRM on end users.
• gillianseed 15y ago
  Last time I checked Apple still shipped OSX with GCC 4.2 as the default compiler. And no, Apple did NOT help create LLVM, it was already 5 years into it's development when Apple came aboard. As for Apple's EULA and it's GPL conflict, the EULA sets a limit on how many devices you can install the program where GPL explicitly grants you the right to make any number of copies of said program. This makes the Apple's EULA and GPL incompatible.
• gujk 15y ago
  Who is making these claims of hypocricy? The complaint I recall was when Apple was violating the KHTML license for a while before releasing their source properly.