4 ms·

This was basically the justification I was told when I was at Apple. The GPLv3 is too viral for the liking of Apple's legal department. They do not want to be t

This was basically the justification I was told when I was at Apple. The GPLv3 is too viral for the liking of Apple's legal department. They do not want to be the test case for the license.

quotemstr 2y ago
The funny thing is that the rest of the world has moved on and is no longer afraid of the GPLv3. The reality that people aren't, as Apple's legal people predicted, being legally obliterated hasn't changed Apple legal's stance. Doomsday cults actually get stronger when doomsday fails to drive.
- arccy 2y ago
  I think the rest of the world is very much moving in Apple's direction: look at what Ubuntu is doing, and any big open source project with more than a single corporate backer (i.e. not just using open source as a marketing channel) isn't using GPL.
  - applied_heat 2y ago
    What is Ubuntu doing?
    - WD-42 2y ago
      There was an Ubuntu engineer recently talking about using the rust coreutils which are bsd licensed instead the old gpl ones. But he made it clear it was more about “rust is better” than anything to do with the license.
  - pama 2y ago
    Not sure what you mean about ubuntu… there is tons of GPL there. https://ubuntu.com/legal/open-source-licences?release=jammy https://ubuntu.com/legal/open-source-licences?release=jammy
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - anonfordays 2y ago
      Replacing GPL coreutils with Rust reimplementations. The conspiracy theorists say that's the reason behind the huge RiiR push. There's effectively zero GPL'ed Rust software.
      - quotemstr 2y ago
        It makes me sad to realize that it was possible that the GPL was necessary to bootstrap free software culture and that we no longer need it now that we've won.
        johannes1234321 2y ago
        Is there a win? One large side of the industry is turning to managed services. They run free/libre software, but build lock-in on higher level and avoid giving direct contact. On the other market, the desktop free/libre software won as with Android and free/libre parts of MacOS/iOS. However they don't do that to benefit the free/libre software in any way, but for getting software cheap or even for free. The amount by which this flows in one direction, there isn't a win.
        pabs3 2y ago
        We definitely have not won, locked-down consumer device vendors like Apple are the prime example of how we lost.
        pjmlp 2y ago
        MIT and BSD predates it, and GPL only had a go at it for two reasons: 1 - Sun decided to inovate by spliting UNIX into user and developer SKUs, thus making the until then irrelevant GCC, interesting to many organisations not willing to pay for UNIX development SDK. 2 - AT&T tried to get control back over UNIX's destiny, and made BSD's future uncertain
- giantrobot 2y ago
  Most organizations don't have many billions of dollars at stake. I doubt you'll find many Fortune 500 companies with a flippant attitude towards the GPLv3. You don't even see the GPLv3 used much by the "we love Open Source" crowd. Most externally released FOSS is under non-viral Open Source licenses. No big company wants to spend a million(s) dollars defending themselves from an NPE with an East Texas mailbox in a frivolous licensing suit. Worst case is a judge deciding the license infects their proprietary code because they're built on the same cluster. The rest of the world has hardly moved on. I've heard of multiple companies with the same GPLv3 policy as Apple for largely the same reasons.
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  The reason why doomsday never came is that the GPLv3 bomb was never dropped. Linux, Android, and busybox all rejected v3, because it's basically a ban on embedded development[0], and that's all the FOSS most embedded developers care about using. Likewise, if you don't do any embedded, you don't need to worry about v3, it's functionally identical to v2 except the compliance story is slightly easier (you don't immediately lose your license if you fuck up a source release). There's very few companies that have their fingers in both the embedded and desktop markets; those are the ones that need to worry about GPLv3 doomsday. AFAIK that's only Apple and Microsoft[1], both of which have very hostile attitudes towards v3 as a result. [0] To be clear, when you hear "embedded development", think "TiVoization". The business model of embedded development is putting your proprietary software in a box to sell. GPLv3 wants to make it so that if you do that, you can't stop someone from modifying the OS around the software by making the software detect that and break. But that also makes it significantly harder to defend your business model. Remember: the embedded landscape is chock full of very evil DRM schemes, many of which would break trivially if the app had to support running on arbitrarily modified OSes or with arbitrarily modified libraries. [1] Microsoft controls the signing keys for UEFI, and while they are willing to sign stuff to let Linux boot, they will not sign GRUB because that's GPLv3 and they worry signing any v3 software will obligate them to release their signing keys.
  - pabs3 2y ago
    GPLv2 requires allowing modification too, some discussion: https://lwn.net/Articles/858905/ https://lwn.net/Articles/858905/
- hnfong 2y ago
  The rest of the world has moved on and no longer using GPLv3. In the early 2000s all the miscellaneous small projects on sourceforge used GPLv2 (v3 was not out yet). These days you'll be hard pressed to find any new projects using GPLv3, except the ones with close ties to the GNU or FSF. The GPL is getting more irrelevant and more easy to avoid. That's why nobody is afraid of GPLv3 any more.
  - rs186 2y ago
    Exactly. I am surprised this isn't talked more. The web stack is such an example. Almost everything you use -- chrome, webpack, electron, babel, React etc all adopted the permissive license. Not quite so for other areas, but I can count with one hand the number of GPLv3 licenses I have seen in new projects.
    - skydhash 2y ago
      Most of those projects are from corporate settings and were created for corporate projects.

This was basically the justification I was told when I was at Apple. The GPLv3 is too viral for the liking of Apple's legal department. They do not want to be the test case for the license.

quotemstr 2y ago

The funny thing is that the rest of the world has moved on and is no longer afraid of the GPLv3. The reality that people aren't, as Apple's legal people predicted, being legally obliterated hasn't changed Apple legal's stance. Doomsday cults actually get stronger when doomsday fails to drive.

arccy 2y ago
I think the rest of the world is very much moving in Apple's direction: look at what Ubuntu is doing, and any big open source project with more than a single corporate backer (i.e. not just using open source as a marketing channel) isn't using GPL.
- applied_heat 2y ago
  What is Ubuntu doing?
  - WD-42 2y ago
    There was an Ubuntu engineer recently talking about using the rust coreutils which are bsd licensed instead the old gpl ones. But he made it clear it was more about “rust is better” than anything to do with the license.
- pama 2y ago
  Not sure what you mean about ubuntu… there is tons of GPL there. https://ubuntu.com/legal/open-source-licences?release=jammy https://ubuntu.com/legal/open-source-licences?release=jammy
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - anonfordays 2y ago
    Replacing GPL coreutils with Rust reimplementations. The conspiracy theorists say that's the reason behind the huge RiiR push. There's effectively zero GPL'ed Rust software.
    - quotemstr 2y ago
      It makes me sad to realize that it was possible that the GPL was necessary to bootstrap free software culture and that we no longer need it now that we've won.
      - johannes1234321 2y ago
        Is there a win? One large side of the industry is turning to managed services. They run free/libre software, but build lock-in on higher level and avoid giving direct contact. On the other market, the desktop free/libre software won as with Android and free/libre parts of MacOS/iOS. However they don't do that to benefit the free/libre software in any way, but for getting software cheap or even for free. The amount by which this flows in one direction, there isn't a win.
      - pabs3 2y ago
        We definitely have not won, locked-down consumer device vendors like Apple are the prime example of how we lost.
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        MIT and BSD predates it, and GPL only had a go at it for two reasons: 1 - Sun decided to inovate by spliting UNIX into user and developer SKUs, thus making the until then irrelevant GCC, interesting to many organisations not willing to pay for UNIX development SDK. 2 - AT&T tried to get control back over UNIX's destiny, and made BSD's future uncertain
giantrobot 2y ago
Most organizations don't have many billions of dollars at stake. I doubt you'll find many Fortune 500 companies with a flippant attitude towards the GPLv3. You don't even see the GPLv3 used much by the "we love Open Source" crowd. Most externally released FOSS is under non-viral Open Source licenses. No big company wants to spend a million(s) dollars defending themselves from an NPE with an East Texas mailbox in a frivolous licensing suit. Worst case is a judge deciding the license infects their proprietary code because they're built on the same cluster. The rest of the world has hardly moved on. I've heard of multiple companies with the same GPLv3 policy as Apple for largely the same reasons.
kmeisthax 2y ago
The reason why doomsday never came is that the GPLv3 bomb was never dropped. Linux, Android, and busybox all rejected v3, because it's basically a ban on embedded development[0], and that's all the FOSS most embedded developers care about using. Likewise, if you don't do any embedded, you don't need to worry about v3, it's functionally identical to v2 except the compliance story is slightly easier (you don't immediately lose your license if you fuck up a source release). There's very few companies that have their fingers in both the embedded and desktop markets; those are the ones that need to worry about GPLv3 doomsday. AFAIK that's only Apple and Microsoft[1], both of which have very hostile attitudes towards v3 as a result. [0] To be clear, when you hear "embedded development", think "TiVoization". The business model of embedded development is putting your proprietary software in a box to sell. GPLv3 wants to make it so that if you do that, you can't stop someone from modifying the OS around the software by making the software detect that and break. But that also makes it significantly harder to defend your business model. Remember: the embedded landscape is chock full of very evil DRM schemes, many of which would break trivially if the app had to support running on arbitrarily modified OSes or with arbitrarily modified libraries. [1] Microsoft controls the signing keys for UEFI, and while they are willing to sign stuff to let Linux boot, they will not sign GRUB because that's GPLv3 and they worry signing any v3 software will obligate them to release their signing keys.
- pabs3 2y ago
  GPLv2 requires allowing modification too, some discussion: https://lwn.net/Articles/858905/ https://lwn.net/Articles/858905/
hnfong 2y ago
The rest of the world has moved on and no longer using GPLv3. In the early 2000s all the miscellaneous small projects on sourceforge used GPLv2 (v3 was not out yet). These days you'll be hard pressed to find any new projects using GPLv3, except the ones with close ties to the GNU or FSF. The GPL is getting more irrelevant and more easy to avoid. That's why nobody is afraid of GPLv3 any more.
- rs186 2y ago
  Exactly. I am surprised this isn't talked more. The web stack is such an example. Almost everything you use -- chrome, webpack, electron, babel, React etc all adopted the permissive license. Not quite so for other areas, but I can count with one hand the number of GPLv3 licenses I have seen in new projects.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    Most of those projects are from corporate settings and were created for corporate projects.