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Jobs got pwned by the GPL during his NeXT day That sounds like a fun story. What happened?

• jordigh 12y ago
  Consider GNU Objective C. NeXT initially wanted to make this front end proprietary; they proposed to release it as .o files, and let users link them with the rest of GCC, thinking this might be a way around the GPL's requirements. But our lawyer said that this would not evade the requirements, that it was not allowed. And so they made the Objective C front end free software. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html Specifically, as I've spoken about in my many talks on GPL compliance, the earliest publicly discussed major GPL violation was by NeXT computing when Steve Jobs attempted and failed (thanks to RMS' GPL enforcement work) to make the Objective C front-end to GCC proprietary. Everything for everyone involved would have gone quite differently if that enforcement effort had failed. http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/01/26/llvm.html http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/01/26/llvm.html
  • legulere 12y ago
    And yet apple is basically responsible for creating the non-copyleft free objective c fronted for llvm. They could have just kept it closed source.
    • jordigh 12y ago
      They're basically achieving their dream now with Swift, though. I don't expect them to ever release that source. I don't think there is any precedent for Apple releasing source code after the fact.