[Discuss] os x = poop?

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 1:16 AM, Richard Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/12/2015 4:16 PM, Martin Owens wrote:
>>
>> No, that's what the general public does. Apple is anti-foss, not just
>> neutral to FOSS when you tot up their track record.
>
>
> https://www.apple.com/opensource/
> http://www.opensource.apple.com/
>
> The first link is a list of all of the FOSS projects that Apple ships with
> OS X. Some like GCC and LLVM are projects that Apple has contributed
> improvements. Others like CUPS are projects that Apple has opened up from
> within.
>
> The second link is the top level reference to the source code to the core
> Unix OS (Darwin) for every OS X and iOS release ever published.
>
> Apple isn't anti-FOSS. Apple is anti-GPLv3, and I for one don't blame them
> for that.

You've been drinking the Apple kool-aid, Rich.

While Apple hasn't been 100% anti-FOSS, I would suggest that they are
not only anti-GPLv3; they have historically been anti-GPLv2 as well.

Looking at CUPS: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS): It had been
around for 3 years (and GPLed) before Apple even started using it.  It
was about 8 years after CUPS was first available that Apple
essentially "bought" the main CUPS programmer (and all his rights to
the software).  I'm not sure how you can interpret that as Apple
"opening up CUPS from the inside".   It seems to me that they found
themselves in a situation where they had become dependent on a GPLed
piece of software and essentially bought themselves out of having to
publicly release their internal changes due to GPLv2 requirements.  If
they had simply wanted specific changes made to the software, they
could have commissioned the developer to make the changes and there
would have been no need to buy all rights to the software.

As for GCC, I don't feel like looking into too many details of Apple,
GCC, and Objective-C; but this article seems to match up with my
memory fairly well:

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1390172

It looks like Apple only reluctantly abided by GPLv2.   Given the
above, I would say that Apple might be okay with "open software" they
have real problems with "free software" in the FSF sense.

Bill Bogstad