15 ms·

Apple’s great GPL purge

241 points by jamesbritt 15y ago

deleted 15y ago
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alwillis 15y ago
BTW, anyone who wants GCC for Mac OS X can easily do so using the OS X GCC installer: https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer
- scott_s 15y ago
  You can also just install XCode, which is free with the OS. Yes, I know the complaint is that it's "too large" just for gcc and related toolchain. But that's not true for me. I find it far, far easier to just download one thing from Apple and install it, then to spend cycles of my own to figure out how to save myself a little bit of disk space.
  - jeremymcanally 15y ago
    The newest Xcode actually doesn't ship with gcc, which is the complaint here I suppose. It hasn't impacted me all that much, but I don't use a ton of non-OSX specific software (and none outside of homebrew/ports).
    - scott_s 15y ago
      Huh? Sure it does. That's how I got it. See: https://devimages.apple.com.edgekey.net/downloads/xcode/xcode_42_for_lion_readme.pdf https://devimages.apple.com.edgekey.net/downloads/xcode/xcod...
      - heresy 15y ago
        It installs a "gcc" command-line wrapper which actually calls the LLVM compiler.
        scott_s 15y ago
        Hmm, it looks like it's actually a gcc frontend that uses LLVM as its backend - more than just a command-line wrapper. But I hadn't realized that it wasn't standard gcc.
        farmdawgnation 15y ago
        Heh, I've been using the gcc command on my mac since I switched and I, quite literally, have never come across a program that wouldn't compile for me. That level of compatibility is... well... staggering. heh.
        scott_s 15y ago
        Same here, hence why I assumed it was standard gcc. In fact, I just did "sudo port install python27 py27matplotlib" which pulled in a lot of code and there were zero problems.
        danieldk 15y ago
        You do know that MacPorts installs plain gcc as a dependency for many packages?
        rsynnott 15y ago
        This shouldn't be too surprising; it _is_ GCC, but using an LLVM backend (it's not clang).
        stephencanon 15y ago
        It also installs "gcc-4.2", which is actually the gcc-4.2 driver.
    - atopuzov 15y ago
      Gcc binary is the gcc+llvm, but you also have gcc-4.2 gcc --version i686-apple-darwin11-llvm-gcc-4.2 (GCC) 4.2.1 (Based on Apple Inc. build 5658) (LLVM build 2336.1.00) Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. but gcc-4.2 is the real deal gcc-4.2 --version i686-apple-darwin11-gcc-4.2.1 (GCC) 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5666) (dot 3) Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
  - heresy 15y ago
    The new XCode 4.2 and presumably the next versions of it do not ship with a real GCC, which is one of the things mentioned in the article. This causes problems for software that doesn't compile right with LLVM yet (arguably bugs in the software, but tell that to someone who can't use the LLVM compiled binaries any more). Eventually, the version of Xcode that includes GCC will be too old to do anything useful with. So then you wouldn't be able to "just install XCode", unfortunately.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - X-Istence 15y ago
      They will ship with a different compiler, clang, and then with homebrew you can compile and install GCC to your hearts content. For all of my personal projects and projects at work I am using clang because the errors and warnings it gives me are clearer, pinpoint the problem and it compiles my codebase almost 30% faster than GCC.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
Hemospectrum 15y ago
I wasn't aware Bash had also moved to GPLv3. Wonder how long till that gets removed.
- jrockway 15y ago
  Anything whose copyright is owned by the FSF and was GPL2 is now GPL3.
  - nilsbunger 15y ago
    Yup. Only option would be to fork from the last GPL2 release and evolve it as GPL2.
    - el_presidente 15y ago
      Or use a different shell, like ksh or zsh.
    - Hemospectrum 15y ago
      More likely they'll just switch to a new default shell. Perhaps that will be zsh, or perhaps they'll just go back to tcsh. Or perhaps Terminal will no longer be installed by default by the time they complete their purge.
    - X-Istence 15y ago
      Or move on to another shell. Such as zsh, or tcsh, csh or countless others that exists.
- natesm 15y ago
  Is there any reason not to make zsh the default? Better license, better shell.
  - Hemospectrum 15y ago
    There really isn't. I hope they do that.
getsat 15y ago
Businesses don't like GPLv3 because... it's (arguably) bad for them. BSD licenced software surges. News at 11.
- moonchrome 15y ago
  >BSD licenced software surges. News at 11. Actually if you listened to the GPL fanatics that are all over some tech forums (note: I'm not implying that all people using GPL are fanatics, just that there is a subset that's fanatical about it, ironically they are usually technically ignorant) this shouldn't happen - instead everyone should just "steal" BSD software and not contribute (let alone create) stuff back.
  - KaeseEs 15y ago
    This does happen, though. How much of Apple's kernel code has made it back into other BSD kernels?
    - sdkmvx 15y ago
      That's not a fair comparison. Apple's kernel is Mach/XNU, which is a completely different architecture than the 4.4BSD derived kernels used by Free-, Net-, Open-, etc. BSD. That said, the API for kauth has been implemented (albeit not via open code from apple) on NetBSD. https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#technotes/tn2127/_index.html https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#technotes/tn2127/_i... http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?kauth++NetBSD-current http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?kauth++NetBSD-current Apple guides development for WebKit and releases code for mDNSResponder (Avahi is admittedly used more in OSS operating systems, although NetBSD-current notably uses mDNSResponder), Darwin Streaming Server (the backend to their proprietary QuickTime Streaming Server, and ALAC. They don't release everything as open source, but they certainly don't disregard its importance.
      - chalst 15y ago
        Webkit is mostly LGPL. This is a bad example, because the codebase is derived from KDE. mDNSResponder is Apache. This was released to drive industry acceptance of Bonjour/Zeroconf. Darwin Streaming Server is APSL (the Darwin license) and patent encumbered. IIRC, there was talk of it being open sourced to drive H264 acceptance. Darwin mostly does count as sharing code for the sake of being open, and to their credit Apple does keep updating it, but I struggle to think of other Apple releases for which this appears to be the most important consideration.
sudont 15y ago
This isn't to say that Apple's implementations were that great, though. I know a few IT techs happy to see something other than the buggy install of Samba for CIFS. Personally, Apple's exclusion of the "nounix" option in mount_smbfs was a HUGE pain in the ass, to the point where I was a click away from submitting it as a bug. Not that it got better with Lion.
redthrowaway 15y ago
Apple's PC sales are a rapidly diminishing part of their business, and the share made up by hackers far smaller still. They're perfectly happy to let those devs for whom up-to-date tools and FOSS are important go elsewhere; look at any college classroom and you'll see they have way more new customers to replace them. This isn't to say they'll actively discourage hackers from using their products, but if it comes down to a product being hack-friendly or adhering to Apple's core principles, hack-friendliness doesn't stand a chance.
- alwillis 15y ago
  Actually, Apple's PC business has never been better. They sold 5,198,000 Macs last quarter, a record. Mac sales are up 26% compared to the same quarter last year. Of course they sold 37 million iPhones, but the amount of revenue the Mac generates isn’t small by any means. I don’t have a problem with them not shipping software that’s incompatible with how they do business; I suspect hackers and other clueful users will continue using the available tools like Homebrew to install whatever they want.
  - nilsbunger 15y ago
    If Apple is driven by profit, then the main purpose of Mac, iPod, and even iPad these days is to sell more iPhones (brand halo and integration). Isn't that crazy? Macs were only 14% of revenue last quarter ($6.6B/46.3B). By contrast, iPhones were 52% ($14.4B). And Macs have ~28% gross margin, while iPhones have ~60%, so they add even less than 14% to the profit picture. While any other PC manufacturer would die to have Apple's Mac business, it's mouse-nuts to Apple.
    - batista 15y ago
      Its also a stable base. The iPad might or the iPhone might die off to some competitive product, Andoid or whatever, but, as long as PC = Windows, there will be a large market for Macs (no, most people wont consider Linux)
      - 15y ago
dorianj 15y ago
>I’m also intrigued to see how far they are prepared to go with this. They already annoyed and inconvenienced a lot of people with the Samba and GCC removal. Having wooed so many developers to the Mac in the last decade, are they really prepared to throw away all that goodwill by shipping obsolete tools and making it a pain in the ass to upgrade them? The answer is: all the way. I don't understand any other conclusion you could draw from this. Other than a few non-essential command line tools (like emacs), Apple will clean the system of anything they can't control. A lot of code is shared between OS X and iOS, so the 'tivoisation' clause means that they can't use GPLv3 on iOS, so best to avoid it on Mac OS X too. Homebrew will still be around to install all the command-line goodies you need. No pain in the ass required. Regardless of Apple's goals in this action, a lot of the OSS world is moving to permissive licenses, so this isn't a terribly surprising move.
- probonogeek 15y ago
  >Regardless of Apple's goals in this action, a lot of the OSS world is moving to permissive licenses, so this isn't a terribly surprising move. Guess I hadn't noticed "a lot of the OSS world moving to permissive licenses". The GPL is still the workhorse of many free systems with code coming out all the time. I mean, if you're counting web development code (like the Rails ecosystem), I suppose you could make the argument that the MIT license is surging... but there's a whole world of code beyond generating dynamic HTML that continues to be licensed under the old-guard licenses.
  - batista 15y ago
    Most major new projects seem to come with non GPL licenses...
    - xyzzyz 15y ago
      I didn't have this impression. Could you give some examples?
      - nikcub 15y ago
sc68cal 15y ago
Apple's failure to update GNU software was actively impacting the security of OS X. Charlie Miller made mincemeat of OS X because of the sorry state of security of 3rd party utilities (http://rixstep.com/1/20080422,00.shtml http://rixstep.com/1/20080422,00.shtml). As Charlie Miller noted in his '07 BH presentation: (https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-07/Miller/Presentation/bh-usa-07-miller.pdf https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-07/Miller/Pres...) How to Find a Mac OS X 0-Day: 1) Find some open source package they use that is out of date 2) Read the change log for that software 3) Find a good bug 4) Profit! "The Samba on Mac OS X (on Monday) had an exploitable remote root vulnerability in it...it hadn’t been updated since February 2005!" If anything, Apple removing GPL software creates a better situation, because fink/macports/homebrew will be available to pick up the slack and provide more timely updates. Plus, it seems like FreeBSD is trying to get rid of as much GNU stuff as they can, so that more of what they release is covered under a BSD license (see BSD grep, for example). It may be that Apple is just picking up some of these changes from FreeBSD and doing a little bit of housekeeping on their end.
- fluidcruft 15y ago
  > It's not like Apple were keeping this stuff updated Well, obviously as the major point of the article is that Apple clearly refuses to ship software covered by GPLv3, so you're getting the rapidly ancient, last GPLv2 versions. It's quite a rare exception for updated GNU software to be available under GPLv2--the FSF basically moved their entire code base from GPLv2+ to GPLv3+ when GPLv3 was released and that has cascading effects since GPLv2 and GPLv3 are incompatible. I was unaware of the sorry state of things on MacOS actually as I don't use Apple products, but it at least enlightened me about all the bash bashing we tend to see on HN.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    Yeah, I recently realized why various bash examples I tried out don't work on OSX. I guess it's an obvious thing to check, but somehow it never occurred to me that OSX's bash would be five years old.
    - 15y ago
TheAmazingIdiot 15y ago
We only have the iPod, iPod touch/iPhone, apple TV, battery covers on newer Apple laptops, and Apple's hardware for their computers to show where they are headed. Some may accuse me of a slippery slope argument; I look at it as a continuation of a linear regression and projection. And where that's going doesn't look peachy. It is a rather interesting point they do not have any GPL 3 software distributed, and for probably for both the reasons stated. However, the way the whole Mac feel is as it was a curated device (regardless the actual platform). Both Apple and Microsoft seem to want to converge on a "trusted platform"; where the trust is against you.
- rsynnott 15y ago
  > Some may accuse me of a slippery slope argument; I look at it as a continuation of a linear regression and projection. So, er, a slope-related argument of some sort, then. It could be friction-y, I suppose.
  - nknight 15y ago
    "Slippery slope" is a specific type of usually-fallacious argument that relies only on what is possible, not what is likely based on actual evidence and trends. It's not a generic term for any argument that seeks to prove "X is heading toward Y".
- fennecfoxen 15y ago
  Why, any man whose purse has been let blood By sharpers, when he finds all drained away Must compare how he stands with how he stood. / If a quack doctor's breezy ineptitude Has cost me a leg, must I forget straightway All that I can't do now, all that I could?
rsynnott 15y ago
He missed this one, which may also be problematic: > You may not convey a covered work if you are a party to an arrangement with a third party that is in the business of distributing software, under which you make payment to the third party based on the extent of your activity of conveying the work, and under which the third party grants, to any of the parties who would receive the covered work from you, a discriminatory patent license. This was intended to avoid situations similar to the Microsoft/Novell patent grant agreement, but could have quite broad scope.
- rhizome 15y ago
  It sounds more like they won't sign any non-exclusive patent agreements, like an IP monopsony.
  - rsynnott 15y ago
    As far as I can see, the main case this covers is, for instance, say Apple adopts GPLv3 Bash. IBM decided to sue over their patent on causing the letter 'w' to be displayed on a computer screen (or whatever). Currently, Apple can do three things; fight it, settle, or stop using bash (the last is impractical, of course). This clause of GPLv3 almost removes the settlement option; IBM would be highly unlikely to license the patent to, not only Apple, but anyone redistributing the redistributable source from MacOS. For a slightly more realistic example (most of the GPL stuff Apple uses, except for GCC, is not really all that vulnerable to patents), take the bluez Bluetooth stack, used by Android. There's a very real risk that one of the many holders of Bluetooth related patents may assert one against Google or against an OEM over bluez, and in that case, if the patent was valid, licensing it would be the obvious solution. This would work, because bluez is GPLv2; it wouldn't necessarily work if it were GPLv3. I can see what the FSF was going for with this clause, but it does make it substantially riskier for companies to depend upon GPL(v3) components.
    - rhizome 15y ago
      it does make it substantially riskier for companies to depend upon GPL(v3) components. I think we can call GPLv3 a success, then!
deleted 15y ago
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i386 15y ago
Reposted here since it seems the page linked is no longer visible (at least for me). ------------ Apple’s great GPL purge Posted on 5 February 2012 by meta Apple obligingly allows you to browse and download the open source software they use in OS X. Since they have listings for each version of OS X, I decided to take a look at how much software they were using that was only available under the GNU public license. The results are illuminating: 10.5: 47 GPL-licensed packages. 10.6: 44 GPL-licensed packages. 10.7: 29 GPL-licensed packages. This clearly supports the idea that Apple is aggressively trying to remove all GPL-licensed software from OS X. While the removal of Samba and GCC got some attention, the numbers show that there’s a more general purging going on. The 29 remaining GPL-licensed packages aren’t too healthy either. Lion apparently ships with bash 3.2. That’s from 2006. The current version is 4.2.10. Why no upgrade? Because Apple’s shipping the last version of bash that was under the GPL version 2. The message is pretty obvious: Apple won’t ship anything that’s licensed under GPL v3 on OS X. Now, why is that? There are two big changes in GPL v3. The first is that it explicitly prohibits patent lawsuits against people for actually using the GPL-licensed software you ship. The second is that it carefully prevents TiVoization, locking down hardware so that people can’t actually run the software they want. So, which of those things are they planning for OS X, eh? I’m also intrigued to see how far they are prepared to go with this. They already annoyed and inconvenienced a lot of people with the Samba and GCC removal. Having wooed so many developers to the Mac in the last decade, are they really prepared to throw away all that goodwill by shipping obsolete tools and making it a pain in the ass to upgrade them?
- knieveltech 15y ago
  Make no mistake, Apple could give a rat's ass about the developer community, and why should they? We represent a vanishingly small fraction of the total consumer space and we are orders of magnitude more demanding.
  - jseliger 15y ago
    Developers are also disproportionately useful for a platform, since they're the ones who build the stuff people want to use; for more on that, see http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html , as well as the bazillion other writers pointing out similar things.
revertts 15y ago
This is nothing new. A number of large companies avoid GPLv3 because the potential of losing IP is too high; it's a difficult license to interpret, and the legal implications of some of its clauses haven't been fully defined yet (eg. what all is covered by "convey"?). So, I wouldn't say that them avoiding it suggests anything sinister like some of the posters are mentioning... they're probably just playing it safe.
- Jach 15y ago
  You hit the nail on the head with the "convey" question. A fairly large number of people think there's a good chance that the AGPL is redundant because the GPLv3 is broad enough in its range of likely court interpretations. I've flip flopped back and forth on the BSD/GPL side of the fence a number of times, lately I've started moving back to BSD-land again. (Especially with things like the "Do what the fuck you want" license, version 3.)
  - kevinpet 15y ago
    I don't buy that. I find it hard to believe that a court could find that a slightly ambiguous clause means something so different from what the people publishing their code under it understand it to mean. If AGPL didn't exist, and if everyone using GPL claimed "convey" included a hosted service, then there'd be a case. But given that AGPL exists, and given that the intent of most people who use this license is not to prohibit hosted services, that's a major stretch.
    - rsynnott 15y ago
      Interpretation of contracts is not necessarily based on intent, especially if you're using someone else's contract, and especially if it's not a consumer contract (where, in many cases, a contract deemed to be deliberately misleading may not be valid).
farmdawgnation 15y ago
I don't really see any malicious intent here. I've started avoiding the GPLv3 myself just because it makes code that I publish harder for people to take advantage of. What's the point of me writing some code if it's only going to sit on Github, as if it were ment for some sort of museum? Apache and MIT Licenses are generally my goto these days.
X-Istence 15y ago
This comes as no surprise at all. At least to those of us who have been looking at the various BSD projects, and how businesses are shunning the GPLv3. On paper the GPLv3 is awesome, but it adds some major restrictions that make it unappealing to corporations. I did some contract work for a company whose lawyers forbid the use of LGPL'ed libraries in their software even-though it means re-inventing the wheel a couple of times or using inferior libraries. They were deadly afraid that their code would somehow become infected and that they would have to open source they wouldn't allow it. Quite a bit of the code I ended up writing was later released under the BSD license free for use by the world, and one could replicate their product with their own libraries and a couple of weekends. (Company not named because 1, my name isn't attached to it so it won't be easy to find, and 2, I am under NDA still) Why wouldn't it be in Apple's best interest to use BSD replacements for GPL licensed software if those are available and are comparable. Apple's LLVM/clang compiler for example is available under a BSD license and even-though they hired the project lead the entire project is still open source and being openly developed. There has in the past (I haven't paid attention lately) been code sharing between Apple's Darwin Kernel/Userland back to FreeBSD and vice-versa. The same movement to remove GPL licensed software is being done in two major BSD based projects, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Both for very different reasons but with the same end result. I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing, more competition is a good thing. I am still hoping that FreeBSD picks up the CIFS stuff that Sun released with OpenIndiana because it works much faster/better compared to Samba and I've had WAY less issues with it. The GPL isn't so much fostering or creating an atmosphere for open source development, it creates traps and makes it harder to use the end product. btrfs will most likely never be available within any OS other than Linux. Isn't that the opposite of what you'd want as an open source developer, isn't the idea to spread your code as far and wide as possible, to have people use it no matter where? ZFS by comparison is available in FreeBSD, it is now available on Linux and Mac OS X. If I release something as open source I want people to use it, modify it, play with it and spread it around as far and wide. Would I like for people to contribute their changes, absolutely, but do I think that forcing them to do so under a license is the best way to go about asking for changes? No.
- jpk 15y ago
  As the author of a program/library, it just depends on what's important to you. If you want wide use of your code, a permissive license is the way to go. If you want to ensure your users offer the same freedom to users of their modifications that you gave them with the original, then a license like the GPL is the way to go. For you, it sounds like a license more permissive than the GPL would be appropriate. For others, I think a GPL-like license is a valid move. When you're choosing a library or framework to build on top of, you pick the right tool for the job. Licensing is the same way, they're tools that have appropriate uses some of the time.
robbyt 15y ago
Google's Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-r0zoo92bO8J:meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-r0zoo9...
- danielson 15y ago
  Slightly shorter ... http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-r0zoo92bO8J:meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-r0zoo9...
vog 15y ago
Unfortunately, the article is no longer available. The page shows "Access Forbidden". Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-r0zoo92bO8J:meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/+http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/&cd=1&hl=de&ct=clnk&client=iceweasel-a http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-r0zoo9...
chj 15y ago
I vote for BSD. If only I can enjoy good food, why should I care about the recipe used? It is the working software that matters, I could not care less for source code. Open source is important only after the people working on the software decide they will no longer work on it. From that point on, I do hope they open source the whole thing so other people can carry on. However if we impose a GPL-like license on the code, it may discourage people from taking the project full time and doing more interesting stuff. Again, what matters most is the survival of the software.
- __alexs 15y ago
  > It is the working software that matters, I could not care less for source code. Working software doesn't matter at all. It's your users interests that matter, and GPL compatible licenses are the only ones that guarantee their freedom.
  - rimantas 15y ago
    There are hundreds of millions of users of Apple devices now. Ask them what matters more: working software, or GPL compatible licenses. Your first sentence is stupid beyond belief.
    - __alexs 15y ago
      > There are hundreds of millions of users of Apple devices now. How is this relevant? > Ask them what matters more: working software, or GPL compatible licenses. This is a false dichotomy. Try harder.
      - stephencanon 15y ago
        Yes, that would be a false dichotomy. However, the post you quote does not set it up as a dichotomy. My reading of it is that it asks the question "which of these two things is more important?" I would suggest that it would be better framed as "is the guarantee of future source access sufficiently important that it effects their choice of tools?" GPL advocates tend to believe that access to source is sufficiently important to effect their choice of tools. You are entitled to that opinion. There is clearly also a significant body of users don't particularly care about access to source, and simply want tools that work. You may argue that this is shortsighted, but they are entitled to that opinion. It is entirely reasonable to discount future use of your tool of choice vs. current use of your tool of choice. There is a group of GPL advocates (not all of them, happily) who advance the argument that this is because the people who don't care are stupid and/or ignorant, and that if they only knew what the GPL advocates know, they would of course have the same preferences as do said GPL advocates. This is an incredibly egotistical position, without a place in serious discussion -- a line of reasoning that requires the assumption that a significant population is entirely irrational or entirely composed of people stupider than the individual advancing the line of reasoning cannot be taken seriously.
forgottenpaswrd 15y ago
What about Google's great GPL purge? Also called "Android". Google modified all what was going to interface with the programs, like the libc so they did not have to use GPL. There is nothing bad on this, people is free to use whatever they want. As a company, GPL sometimes is too restrictive.
deleted 15y ago
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ck2 15y ago
cache: http://google.com/search?strip=1&q=cache:http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/ http://google.com/search?strip=1&q=cache:http://meta.ath...
wadesworld 15y ago
GPL purge would be a good thing, since GPL has done more to hurt free software than help it.
binarycrusader 15y ago
They're smart -- several organisations I know of stopped contributing upstream to projects once they went GPLv3. They're now looking for BSD-licensed alternatives and plan to contribute to them instead. A few game development projects I follow also switched from LGPL licenses to BSD licenses (and saw contributions go up!). (See SDL, Ogre3D, etc.) It's actually kind of refreshing to see many people going back to the basics.
idspispopd 15y ago
This is a GPLv3 problem, and it's not limited to Apple. v3 is incompatible with many existing business policies. The trend of dumping GPL will continue in many of the for-profit tech businesses.
ejfinneran 15y ago
Everyone is battling over why corporations or Apple specifically doesn't like GPLv3, and noone has mentioned Linus has said he doesn't like GPLv3 either and will stick with v2 for Linux. Linux is still shipping under GPLv2. http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git;a=blob;f=COPYING;h=ca442d313d86dc67e0a2e5d584b465bd382cbf5c;hb=dcd6c92267155e70a94b3927bce681ce74b80d1f http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stabl...
pconf 15y ago
OSX has always been based primarily on BSD-licensed open source. Obviously they don't want their deep pockets to attract lawsuits. The lesson here should be obvious, make the GPL too onerous and fewer companies will risk using it. The FSF suing Cisco was an example that Apple took seriously.

241 points by jamesbritt 15y ago

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

BTW, anyone who wants GCC for Mac OS X can easily do so using the OS X GCC installer: https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer

scott_s 15y ago
You can also just install XCode, which is free with the OS. Yes, I know the complaint is that it's "too large" just for gcc and related toolchain. But that's not true for me. I find it far, far easier to just download one thing from Apple and install it, then to spend cycles of my own to figure out how to save myself a little bit of disk space.
- jeremymcanally 15y ago
  The newest Xcode actually doesn't ship with gcc, which is the complaint here I suppose. It hasn't impacted me all that much, but I don't use a ton of non-OSX specific software (and none outside of homebrew/ports).
  - scott_s 15y ago
    Huh? Sure it does. That's how I got it. See: https://devimages.apple.com.edgekey.net/downloads/xcode/xcode_42_for_lion_readme.pdf https://devimages.apple.com.edgekey.net/downloads/xcode/xcod...
    - heresy 15y ago
      It installs a "gcc" command-line wrapper which actually calls the LLVM compiler.
      - scott_s 15y ago
        Hmm, it looks like it's actually a gcc frontend that uses LLVM as its backend - more than just a command-line wrapper. But I hadn't realized that it wasn't standard gcc.
        farmdawgnation 15y ago
        Heh, I've been using the gcc command on my mac since I switched and I, quite literally, have never come across a program that wouldn't compile for me. That level of compatibility is... well... staggering. heh.
        scott_s 15y ago
        Same here, hence why I assumed it was standard gcc. In fact, I just did "sudo port install python27 py27matplotlib" which pulled in a lot of code and there were zero problems.
        danieldk 15y ago
        You do know that MacPorts installs plain gcc as a dependency for many packages?
        rsynnott 15y ago
        This shouldn't be too surprising; it _is_ GCC, but using an LLVM backend (it's not clang).
      - stephencanon 15y ago
        It also installs "gcc-4.2", which is actually the gcc-4.2 driver.
  - atopuzov 15y ago
    Gcc binary is the gcc+llvm, but you also have gcc-4.2 gcc --version i686-apple-darwin11-llvm-gcc-4.2 (GCC) 4.2.1 (Based on Apple Inc. build 5658) (LLVM build 2336.1.00) Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. but gcc-4.2 is the real deal gcc-4.2 --version i686-apple-darwin11-gcc-4.2.1 (GCC) 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5666) (dot 3) Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
- heresy 15y ago
  The new XCode 4.2 and presumably the next versions of it do not ship with a real GCC, which is one of the things mentioned in the article. This causes problems for software that doesn't compile right with LLVM yet (arguably bugs in the software, but tell that to someone who can't use the LLVM compiled binaries any more). Eventually, the version of Xcode that includes GCC will be too old to do anything useful with. So then you wouldn't be able to "just install XCode", unfortunately.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - X-Istence 15y ago
    They will ship with a different compiler, clang, and then with homebrew you can compile and install GCC to your hearts content. For all of my personal projects and projects at work I am using clang because the errors and warnings it gives me are clearer, pinpoint the problem and it compiles my codebase almost 30% faster than GCC.
deleted 15y ago
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Hemospectrum 15y ago

I wasn't aware Bash had also moved to GPLv3. Wonder how long till that gets removed.

jrockway 15y ago
Anything whose copyright is owned by the FSF and was GPL2 is now GPL3.
- nilsbunger 15y ago
  Yup. Only option would be to fork from the last GPL2 release and evolve it as GPL2.
  - el_presidente 15y ago
    Or use a different shell, like ksh or zsh.
  - Hemospectrum 15y ago
    More likely they'll just switch to a new default shell. Perhaps that will be zsh, or perhaps they'll just go back to tcsh. Or perhaps Terminal will no longer be installed by default by the time they complete their purge.
  - X-Istence 15y ago
    Or move on to another shell. Such as zsh, or tcsh, csh or countless others that exists.
natesm 15y ago
Is there any reason not to make zsh the default? Better license, better shell.
- Hemospectrum 15y ago
  There really isn't. I hope they do that.

getsat 15y ago

Businesses don't like GPLv3 because... it's (arguably) bad for them. BSD licenced software surges. News at 11.

moonchrome 15y ago
>BSD licenced software surges. News at 11. Actually if you listened to the GPL fanatics that are all over some tech forums (note: I'm not implying that all people using GPL are fanatics, just that there is a subset that's fanatical about it, ironically they are usually technically ignorant) this shouldn't happen - instead everyone should just "steal" BSD software and not contribute (let alone create) stuff back.
- KaeseEs 15y ago
  This does happen, though. How much of Apple's kernel code has made it back into other BSD kernels?
  - sdkmvx 15y ago
    That's not a fair comparison. Apple's kernel is Mach/XNU, which is a completely different architecture than the 4.4BSD derived kernels used by Free-, Net-, Open-, etc. BSD. That said, the API for kauth has been implemented (albeit not via open code from apple) on NetBSD. https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#technotes/tn2127/_index.html https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#technotes/tn2127/_i... http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?kauth++NetBSD-current http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?kauth++NetBSD-current Apple guides development for WebKit and releases code for mDNSResponder (Avahi is admittedly used more in OSS operating systems, although NetBSD-current notably uses mDNSResponder), Darwin Streaming Server (the backend to their proprietary QuickTime Streaming Server, and ALAC. They don't release everything as open source, but they certainly don't disregard its importance.
    - chalst 15y ago
      Webkit is mostly LGPL. This is a bad example, because the codebase is derived from KDE. mDNSResponder is Apache. This was released to drive industry acceptance of Bonjour/Zeroconf. Darwin Streaming Server is APSL (the Darwin license) and patent encumbered. IIRC, there was talk of it being open sourced to drive H264 acceptance. Darwin mostly does count as sharing code for the sake of being open, and to their credit Apple does keep updating it, but I struggle to think of other Apple releases for which this appears to be the most important consideration.

sudont 15y ago

This isn't to say that Apple's implementations were that great, though. I know a few IT techs happy to see something other than the buggy install of Samba for CIFS. Personally, Apple's exclusion of the "nounix" option in mount_smbfs was a HUGE pain in the ass, to the point where I was a click away from submitting it as a bug. Not that it got better with Lion.

redthrowaway 15y ago

Apple's PC sales are a rapidly diminishing part of their business, and the share made up by hackers far smaller still. They're perfectly happy to let those devs for whom up-to-date tools and FOSS are important go elsewhere; look at any college classroom and you'll see they have way more new customers to replace them. This isn't to say they'll actively discourage hackers from using their products, but if it comes down to a product being hack-friendly or adhering to Apple's core principles, hack-friendliness doesn't stand a chance.

alwillis 15y ago
Actually, Apple's PC business has never been better. They sold 5,198,000 Macs last quarter, a record. Mac sales are up 26% compared to the same quarter last year. Of course they sold 37 million iPhones, but the amount of revenue the Mac generates isn’t small by any means. I don’t have a problem with them not shipping software that’s incompatible with how they do business; I suspect hackers and other clueful users will continue using the available tools like Homebrew to install whatever they want.
- nilsbunger 15y ago
  If Apple is driven by profit, then the main purpose of Mac, iPod, and even iPad these days is to sell more iPhones (brand halo and integration). Isn't that crazy? Macs were only 14% of revenue last quarter ($6.6B/46.3B). By contrast, iPhones were 52% ($14.4B). And Macs have ~28% gross margin, while iPhones have ~60%, so they add even less than 14% to the profit picture. While any other PC manufacturer would die to have Apple's Mac business, it's mouse-nuts to Apple.
  - batista 15y ago
    Its also a stable base. The iPad might or the iPhone might die off to some competitive product, Andoid or whatever, but, as long as PC = Windows, there will be a large market for Macs (no, most people wont consider Linux)
    - 15y ago

dorianj 15y ago

>I’m also intrigued to see how far they are prepared to go with this. They already annoyed and inconvenienced a lot of people with the Samba and GCC removal. Having wooed so many developers to the Mac in the last decade, are they really prepared to throw away all that goodwill by shipping obsolete tools and making it a pain in the ass to upgrade them? The answer is: all the way. I don't understand any other conclusion you could draw from this. Other than a few non-essential command line tools (like emacs), Apple will clean the system of anything they can't control. A lot of code is shared between OS X and iOS, so the 'tivoisation' clause means that they can't use GPLv3 on iOS, so best to avoid it on Mac OS X too. Homebrew will still be around to install all the command-line goodies you need. No pain in the ass required. Regardless of Apple's goals in this action, a lot of the OSS world is moving to permissive licenses, so this isn't a terribly surprising move.

probonogeek 15y ago
>Regardless of Apple's goals in this action, a lot of the OSS world is moving to permissive licenses, so this isn't a terribly surprising move. Guess I hadn't noticed "a lot of the OSS world moving to permissive licenses". The GPL is still the workhorse of many free systems with code coming out all the time. I mean, if you're counting web development code (like the Rails ecosystem), I suppose you could make the argument that the MIT license is surging... but there's a whole world of code beyond generating dynamic HTML that continues to be licensed under the old-guard licenses.
- batista 15y ago
  Most major new projects seem to come with non GPL licenses...
  - xyzzyz 15y ago
    I didn't have this impression. Could you give some examples?
    - nikcub 15y ago

sc68cal 15y ago

Apple's failure to update GNU software was actively impacting the security of OS X. Charlie Miller made mincemeat of OS X because of the sorry state of security of 3rd party utilities (http://rixstep.com/1/20080422,00.shtml http://rixstep.com/1/20080422,00.shtml). As Charlie Miller noted in his '07 BH presentation: (https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-07/Miller/Presentation/bh-usa-07-miller.pdf https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-07/Miller/Pres...) How to Find a Mac OS X 0-Day: 1) Find some open source package they use that is out of date 2) Read the change log for that software 3) Find a good bug 4) Profit! "The Samba on Mac OS X (on Monday) had an exploitable remote root vulnerability in it...it hadn’t been updated since February 2005!" If anything, Apple removing GPL software creates a better situation, because fink/macports/homebrew will be available to pick up the slack and provide more timely updates. Plus, it seems like FreeBSD is trying to get rid of as much GNU stuff as they can, so that more of what they release is covered under a BSD license (see BSD grep, for example). It may be that Apple is just picking up some of these changes from FreeBSD and doing a little bit of housekeeping on their end.

fluidcruft 15y ago
> It's not like Apple were keeping this stuff updated Well, obviously as the major point of the article is that Apple clearly refuses to ship software covered by GPLv3, so you're getting the rapidly ancient, last GPLv2 versions. It's quite a rare exception for updated GNU software to be available under GPLv2--the FSF basically moved their entire code base from GPLv2+ to GPLv3+ when GPLv3 was released and that has cascading effects since GPLv2 and GPLv3 are incompatible. I was unaware of the sorry state of things on MacOS actually as I don't use Apple products, but it at least enlightened me about all the bash bashing we tend to see on HN.
- _delirium 15y ago
  Yeah, I recently realized why various bash examples I tried out don't work on OSX. I guess it's an obvious thing to check, but somehow it never occurred to me that OSX's bash would be five years old.
  - 15y ago

TheAmazingIdiot 15y ago

We only have the iPod, iPod touch/iPhone, apple TV, battery covers on newer Apple laptops, and Apple's hardware for their computers to show where they are headed. Some may accuse me of a slippery slope argument; I look at it as a continuation of a linear regression and projection. And where that's going doesn't look peachy. It is a rather interesting point they do not have any GPL 3 software distributed, and for probably for both the reasons stated. However, the way the whole Mac feel is as it was a curated device (regardless the actual platform). Both Apple and Microsoft seem to want to converge on a "trusted platform"; where the trust is against you.

rsynnott 15y ago
> Some may accuse me of a slippery slope argument; I look at it as a continuation of a linear regression and projection. So, er, a slope-related argument of some sort, then. It could be friction-y, I suppose.
- nknight 15y ago
  "Slippery slope" is a specific type of usually-fallacious argument that relies only on what is possible, not what is likely based on actual evidence and trends. It's not a generic term for any argument that seeks to prove "X is heading toward Y".
fennecfoxen 15y ago
Why, any man whose purse has been let blood By sharpers, when he finds all drained away Must compare how he stands with how he stood. / If a quack doctor's breezy ineptitude Has cost me a leg, must I forget straightway All that I can't do now, all that I could?

rsynnott 15y ago

He missed this one, which may also be problematic: > You may not convey a covered work if you are a party to an arrangement with a third party that is in the business of distributing software, under which you make payment to the third party based on the extent of your activity of conveying the work, and under which the third party grants, to any of the parties who would receive the covered work from you, a discriminatory patent license. This was intended to avoid situations similar to the Microsoft/Novell patent grant agreement, but could have quite broad scope.

rhizome 15y ago
It sounds more like they won't sign any non-exclusive patent agreements, like an IP monopsony.
- rsynnott 15y ago
  As far as I can see, the main case this covers is, for instance, say Apple adopts GPLv3 Bash. IBM decided to sue over their patent on causing the letter 'w' to be displayed on a computer screen (or whatever). Currently, Apple can do three things; fight it, settle, or stop using bash (the last is impractical, of course). This clause of GPLv3 almost removes the settlement option; IBM would be highly unlikely to license the patent to, not only Apple, but anyone redistributing the redistributable source from MacOS. For a slightly more realistic example (most of the GPL stuff Apple uses, except for GCC, is not really all that vulnerable to patents), take the bluez Bluetooth stack, used by Android. There's a very real risk that one of the many holders of Bluetooth related patents may assert one against Google or against an OEM over bluez, and in that case, if the patent was valid, licensing it would be the obvious solution. This would work, because bluez is GPLv2; it wouldn't necessarily work if it were GPLv3. I can see what the FSF was going for with this clause, but it does make it substantially riskier for companies to depend upon GPL(v3) components.
  - rhizome 15y ago
    it does make it substantially riskier for companies to depend upon GPL(v3) components. I think we can call GPLv3 a success, then!

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

i386 15y ago

Reposted here since it seems the page linked is no longer visible (at least for me). ------------ Apple’s great GPL purge Posted on 5 February 2012 by meta Apple obligingly allows you to browse and download the open source software they use in OS X. Since they have listings for each version of OS X, I decided to take a look at how much software they were using that was only available under the GNU public license. The results are illuminating: 10.5: 47 GPL-licensed packages. 10.6: 44 GPL-licensed packages. 10.7: 29 GPL-licensed packages. This clearly supports the idea that Apple is aggressively trying to remove all GPL-licensed software from OS X. While the removal of Samba and GCC got some attention, the numbers show that there’s a more general purging going on. The 29 remaining GPL-licensed packages aren’t too healthy either. Lion apparently ships with bash 3.2. That’s from 2006. The current version is 4.2.10. Why no upgrade? Because Apple’s shipping the last version of bash that was under the GPL version 2. The message is pretty obvious: Apple won’t ship anything that’s licensed under GPL v3 on OS X. Now, why is that? There are two big changes in GPL v3. The first is that it explicitly prohibits patent lawsuits against people for actually using the GPL-licensed software you ship. The second is that it carefully prevents TiVoization, locking down hardware so that people can’t actually run the software they want. So, which of those things are they planning for OS X, eh? I’m also intrigued to see how far they are prepared to go with this. They already annoyed and inconvenienced a lot of people with the Samba and GCC removal. Having wooed so many developers to the Mac in the last decade, are they really prepared to throw away all that goodwill by shipping obsolete tools and making it a pain in the ass to upgrade them?

knieveltech 15y ago
Make no mistake, Apple could give a rat's ass about the developer community, and why should they? We represent a vanishingly small fraction of the total consumer space and we are orders of magnitude more demanding.
- jseliger 15y ago
  Developers are also disproportionately useful for a platform, since they're the ones who build the stuff people want to use; for more on that, see http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html , as well as the bazillion other writers pointing out similar things.

revertts 15y ago

This is nothing new. A number of large companies avoid GPLv3 because the potential of losing IP is too high; it's a difficult license to interpret, and the legal implications of some of its clauses haven't been fully defined yet (eg. what all is covered by "convey"?). So, I wouldn't say that them avoiding it suggests anything sinister like some of the posters are mentioning... they're probably just playing it safe.

Jach 15y ago
You hit the nail on the head with the "convey" question. A fairly large number of people think there's a good chance that the AGPL is redundant because the GPLv3 is broad enough in its range of likely court interpretations. I've flip flopped back and forth on the BSD/GPL side of the fence a number of times, lately I've started moving back to BSD-land again. (Especially with things like the "Do what the fuck you want" license, version 3.)
- kevinpet 15y ago
  I don't buy that. I find it hard to believe that a court could find that a slightly ambiguous clause means something so different from what the people publishing their code under it understand it to mean. If AGPL didn't exist, and if everyone using GPL claimed "convey" included a hosted service, then there'd be a case. But given that AGPL exists, and given that the intent of most people who use this license is not to prohibit hosted services, that's a major stretch.
  - rsynnott 15y ago
    Interpretation of contracts is not necessarily based on intent, especially if you're using someone else's contract, and especially if it's not a consumer contract (where, in many cases, a contract deemed to be deliberately misleading may not be valid).

farmdawgnation 15y ago

I don't really see any malicious intent here. I've started avoiding the GPLv3 myself just because it makes code that I publish harder for people to take advantage of. What's the point of me writing some code if it's only going to sit on Github, as if it were ment for some sort of museum? Apache and MIT Licenses are generally my goto these days.

X-Istence 15y ago

This comes as no surprise at all. At least to those of us who have been looking at the various BSD projects, and how businesses are shunning the GPLv3. On paper the GPLv3 is awesome, but it adds some major restrictions that make it unappealing to corporations. I did some contract work for a company whose lawyers forbid the use of LGPL'ed libraries in their software even-though it means re-inventing the wheel a couple of times or using inferior libraries. They were deadly afraid that their code would somehow become infected and that they would have to open source they wouldn't allow it. Quite a bit of the code I ended up writing was later released under the BSD license free for use by the world, and one could replicate their product with their own libraries and a couple of weekends. (Company not named because 1, my name isn't attached to it so it won't be easy to find, and 2, I am under NDA still) Why wouldn't it be in Apple's best interest to use BSD replacements for GPL licensed software if those are available and are comparable. Apple's LLVM/clang compiler for example is available under a BSD license and even-though they hired the project lead the entire project is still open source and being openly developed. There has in the past (I haven't paid attention lately) been code sharing between Apple's Darwin Kernel/Userland back to FreeBSD and vice-versa. The same movement to remove GPL licensed software is being done in two major BSD based projects, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Both for very different reasons but with the same end result. I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing, more competition is a good thing. I am still hoping that FreeBSD picks up the CIFS stuff that Sun released with OpenIndiana because it works much faster/better compared to Samba and I've had WAY less issues with it. The GPL isn't so much fostering or creating an atmosphere for open source development, it creates traps and makes it harder to use the end product. btrfs will most likely never be available within any OS other than Linux. Isn't that the opposite of what you'd want as an open source developer, isn't the idea to spread your code as far and wide as possible, to have people use it no matter where? ZFS by comparison is available in FreeBSD, it is now available on Linux and Mac OS X. If I release something as open source I want people to use it, modify it, play with it and spread it around as far and wide. Would I like for people to contribute their changes, absolutely, but do I think that forcing them to do so under a license is the best way to go about asking for changes? No.

jpk 15y ago
As the author of a program/library, it just depends on what's important to you. If you want wide use of your code, a permissive license is the way to go. If you want to ensure your users offer the same freedom to users of their modifications that you gave them with the original, then a license like the GPL is the way to go. For you, it sounds like a license more permissive than the GPL would be appropriate. For others, I think a GPL-like license is a valid move. When you're choosing a library or framework to build on top of, you pick the right tool for the job. Licensing is the same way, they're tools that have appropriate uses some of the time.

robbyt 15y ago

Google's Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-r0zoo92bO8J:meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-r0zoo9...

danielson 15y ago
Slightly shorter ... http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-r0zoo92bO8J:meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-r0zoo9...

vog 15y ago

Unfortunately, the article is no longer available. The page shows "Access Forbidden". Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-r0zoo92bO8J:meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/+http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/&cd=1&hl=de&ct=clnk&client=iceweasel-a http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-r0zoo9...

chj 15y ago

I vote for BSD. If only I can enjoy good food, why should I care about the recipe used? It is the working software that matters, I could not care less for source code. Open source is important only after the people working on the software decide they will no longer work on it. From that point on, I do hope they open source the whole thing so other people can carry on. However if we impose a GPL-like license on the code, it may discourage people from taking the project full time and doing more interesting stuff. Again, what matters most is the survival of the software.

__alexs 15y ago
> It is the working software that matters, I could not care less for source code. Working software doesn't matter at all. It's your users interests that matter, and GPL compatible licenses are the only ones that guarantee their freedom.
- rimantas 15y ago
  There are hundreds of millions of users of Apple devices now. Ask them what matters more: working software, or GPL compatible licenses. Your first sentence is stupid beyond belief.
  - __alexs 15y ago
    > There are hundreds of millions of users of Apple devices now. How is this relevant? > Ask them what matters more: working software, or GPL compatible licenses. This is a false dichotomy. Try harder.
    - stephencanon 15y ago
      Yes, that would be a false dichotomy. However, the post you quote does not set it up as a dichotomy. My reading of it is that it asks the question "which of these two things is more important?" I would suggest that it would be better framed as "is the guarantee of future source access sufficiently important that it effects their choice of tools?" GPL advocates tend to believe that access to source is sufficiently important to effect their choice of tools. You are entitled to that opinion. There is clearly also a significant body of users don't particularly care about access to source, and simply want tools that work. You may argue that this is shortsighted, but they are entitled to that opinion. It is entirely reasonable to discount future use of your tool of choice vs. current use of your tool of choice. There is a group of GPL advocates (not all of them, happily) who advance the argument that this is because the people who don't care are stupid and/or ignorant, and that if they only knew what the GPL advocates know, they would of course have the same preferences as do said GPL advocates. This is an incredibly egotistical position, without a place in serious discussion -- a line of reasoning that requires the assumption that a significant population is entirely irrational or entirely composed of people stupider than the individual advancing the line of reasoning cannot be taken seriously.

forgottenpaswrd 15y ago

What about Google's great GPL purge? Also called "Android". Google modified all what was going to interface with the programs, like the libc so they did not have to use GPL. There is nothing bad on this, people is free to use whatever they want. As a company, GPL sometimes is too restrictive.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

ck2 15y ago

cache: http://google.com/search?strip=1&q=cache:http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/ http://google.com/search?strip=1&q=cache:http://meta.ath...

wadesworld 15y ago

GPL purge would be a good thing, since GPL has done more to hurt free software than help it.

binarycrusader 15y ago

They're smart -- several organisations I know of stopped contributing upstream to projects once they went GPLv3. They're now looking for BSD-licensed alternatives and plan to contribute to them instead. A few game development projects I follow also switched from LGPL licenses to BSD licenses (and saw contributions go up!). (See SDL, Ogre3D, etc.) It's actually kind of refreshing to see many people going back to the basics.

idspispopd 15y ago

This is a GPLv3 problem, and it's not limited to Apple. v3 is incompatible with many existing business policies. The trend of dumping GPL will continue in many of the for-profit tech businesses.

ejfinneran 15y ago

Everyone is battling over why corporations or Apple specifically doesn't like GPLv3, and noone has mentioned Linus has said he doesn't like GPLv3 either and will stick with v2 for Linux. Linux is still shipping under GPLv2. http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git;a=blob;f=COPYING;h=ca442d313d86dc67e0a2e5d584b465bd382cbf5c;hb=dcd6c92267155e70a94b3927bce681ce74b80d1f http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stabl...

pconf 15y ago

OSX has always been based primarily on BSD-licensed open source. Obviously they don't want their deep pockets to attract lawsuits. The lesson here should be obvious, make the GPL too onerous and fewer companies will risk using it. The FSF suing Cisco was an example that Apple took seriously.