7 ms·
I don't really think you can say that. It's not because they did something particularly positive, but more because they did something negative that had positive
by gmrple 13y ago
I don't really think you can say that. It's not because they did something particularly positive, but more because they did something negative that had positive side effects. A positive externality maybe?
- epistasis 13y agoWhat was the negative thing that had LLVM as a side effect?
- LukeShu 13y agoBanishing GPLv3 from Mac OS.
- D9u 13y agoI consider it a positive effect. (BSD fan here)
- jlgreco 13y agoHave they replaced bash with a good BSD licensed shell, or are they still rolling with an ancient version of bash? Hard to see that as a "positive" if they are...
- D9u 13y agoMy most recent installation of FreeBSD came with tcsh by default. But since installing whichever shell one prefers is so easy, I don't see any real problems there.
- LukeShu 13y agoMac OS is still shipping with Bash 3.
- riotingpscifis 13y agoNope it's still an old Bash, with a really slow grep!
- davexunit 13y agoApple wants the "freedom" to take free software and use it for their own purposes without having to pass the freedom onto their users. It's unfortunate that people see this "banishing" and think its a good thing when it's really a bad thing.
- ewillbefull 13y agoLiberal licenses like BSD are enormously free for everybody involved. The people putting work into software using the open-source code can contribute if they want, which encourages more businesses (who would otherwise be working with proprietary alternatives) to work with the software in the first place. The increased amount of participation probably far outweighs whatever benefit is involved from the "freedom" in forcing others to publish their changes, which actually just discourages participation from the industry and only marginally improves the ecosystem in the process.
- tspiteri 13y agoThe FSF freedom is not about giving freedom to developers, BSD-style licenses give more freedom to developers. The FSF wants to give freedom to the users, not the developers, and believes that code which is not open and free is a threat to the personal freedom of the users and has every chance of being malicious.
- epistasis 13y agoThat doesn't make sense to me. How much freedom does a non-programming user gain by having the source code? Such users can hire others to work with the source code for them. And interestingly enough, non-programming users have this same freedom whether it's BSD code or GPL code. Even more, these same non-programming users have greater freedom with BSD code, because it's more permissive. I think what you're arguing, obliquely, is that users benefit because there's more source code around when there's GPL than when there's BSD. This is still the core debate between GPL and BSD; does being permissive and trusting people result in less or more source code? For me, personally, I always contribute back to BSD projects, and avoid GPL projects where there are alternative. I want the freedom BSD gives me, even if I don't exercise it, and even if I never plan to exercise it. But it's why defining GPL as "free" software comes across as double-speak to me. I think that many people share my goal of having more source code out there, with the freedom to modify it for one's own purposes, but it's definitely not universally agreed that GPL is the best way to achieve this.
- rsynnott 13y agoBanishing? GPLv3 was never in MacOS (and Apple's first use of LLVM, though not their creation of Clang, predates the first draft of the GPLv3 by a year or so).
- axman6 13y agoAs a user of OS X, I'm highly in favour of this move. I profer the greater openness that BSD licenced alternatives give, and as a BSD fan the benefits to the BSD community have been fantastic. Please don't state opinion as fact.