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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 pape
by 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 agoAs 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.
- sirclueless 15y agoWaffling on which is appropriate gets you nowhere. After all, the whole debate around this article is whether Apple choosing one side of this argument is equivalent to a malicious action. To say "Well, the GPL is appropriate sometimes and not in other cases" is completely unhelpful either way, and nearly a tautology anyways.
- DougBTX 15y agoHe's quite clear that he considers GPL and permissive licenses as both non-evil choices, implying that Apple's preference for permissive licenses also isn't evil.
- shareme 15y agosame movement is in Mobile .. it might even be the innocent Apple re-aligning with mobile industry trends which are to use anything that is not GPL3
- X-Istence 15y agoA lot of the reason why the same movement exists in mobile is because the GPL v 3 could require manufacturers to release binary blobs that they are not allowed to release, for example for their boot loaders or for the GSM chips and all that sort of fun stuff... The Tivozation clause that was added is dangerous to companies that use proprietary chips that are not open sourced and there are no open drivers available for it.