Apple’s great GPL purge

http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/

by jamesbritt • 14 years ago

241 205 14 years ago

meta.ath0.com

getsat• 14 years ago

Businesses don't like GPLv3 because... it's (arguably) bad for them. BSD licenced software surges. News at 11.

moonchrome3• 14 years ago

>BSD licenced software surges. News at 11.

Actually if you listened to the GPL fanatics that are all over some tech forums (note: I'm not implying that all people using GPL are fanatics, just that there is a subset that's fanatical about it, ironically they are usually technically ignorant) this shouldn't happen - instead everyone should just "steal" BSD software and not contribute (let alone create) stuff back.

KaeseEs• 14 years ago

This does happen, though. How much of Apple's kernel code has made it back into other BSD kernels?

joe_the_user• 14 years ago

"Businesses don't like GPLv3 [blah, blah]..." except for the ones who use and benefit from it.

Especially. The wide GPLv3 provides greater protection from certain players controlling markets via patents. Businesses that would otherwise be threatened by this would seem to benefit from GPLv3. And sure business aspiring to these monopoly positions via patents indeed wouldn't benefit. I think was already clear where Apple stood on this "spectrum" of patented-focused-ness.

sudont• 14 years ago

This isn't to say that Apple's implementations were that great, though. I know a few IT techs happy to see something other than the buggy install of Samba for CIFS.

Personally, Apple's exclusion of the "nounix" option in mount_smbfs was a HUGE pain in the ass, to the point where I was a click away from submitting it as a bug. Not that it got better with Lion.

redthrowaway3• 14 years ago

Apple's PC sales are a rapidly diminishing part of their business, and the share made up by hackers far smaller still. They're perfectly happy to let those devs for whom up-to-date tools and FOSS are important go elsewhere; look at any college classroom and you'll see they have way more new customers to replace them.

This isn't to say they'll actively discourage hackers from using their products, but if it comes down to a product being hack-friendly or adhering to Apple's core principles, hack-friendliness doesn't stand a chance.

alwillis3• 14 years ago

Actually, Apple's PC business has never been better. They sold 5,198,000 Macs last quarter, a record. Mac sales are up 26% compared to the same quarter last year. Of course they sold 37 million iPhones, but the amount of revenue the Mac generates isn’t small by any means.

I don’t have a problem with them not shipping software that’s incompatible with how they do business; I suspect hackers and other clueful users will continue using the available tools like Homebrew to install whatever they want.

nilsbunger4• 14 years ago

If Apple is driven by profit, then the main purpose of Mac, iPod, and even iPad these days is to sell more iPhones (brand halo and integration). Isn't that crazy?

Macs were only 14% of revenue last quarter ($6.6B/46.3B). By contrast, iPhones were 52% ($14.4B). And Macs have ~28% gross margin, while iPhones have ~60%, so they add even less than 14% to the profit picture.

While any other PC manufacturer would die to have Apple's Mac business, it's mouse-nuts to Apple.

redthrowaway3• 14 years ago

My statement, which was apparently unclear, is that PCs represent a declining share of Apple's business, and that hackers represent a declining share of that. That's not to say both aren't growing, but that neither is the keystone of Apple's future growth and success.

YooLi2• 14 years ago

"Apple's PC sales are a rapidly diminishing part of their business..."

Flat out BS. Take a second and look up the numbers.

ghshephard3• 14 years ago

Actually - that part is quite true - but it's only because the iPhone (and iPad) is such a rapidly _increasing_ part of their business.

nilsbunger4• 14 years ago

Actually, it is true. In particular, profit-wise the Mac business is tiny, less than 10% of profits. They could shut down Mac and you would barely notice in their next earnings statement.

I wish it weren't so, because I love my Mac. But Apple's future is iOS, not Mac OS. Maybe someday they'll merge and it'll all be one thing?

YooLi2• 14 years ago

The Mac sales are not diminishing at all. They are INCREASING. The fact the iOS is also increasing, and increasing at a much higher rate, doesn't mean Mac sales are decreasing.

ghshephard3• 14 years ago

"the share made up by hackers far smaller still."

Apple laptops like the MacBook Air are pretty popular amongst your average hacker crowd. You still get a reasonable Terminal Application and most of what you are (basically) looking for from a Unix text environment.

hollerith• 14 years ago

Grandparent said hackers make up a small fraction of Apple's customers, not that Apple is unpopular among hackers.

rikf• 14 years ago

Its important to note that one of the main things that differentiates between platforms is the quality and quantity of the available content. If you want to build a platform the first things to do is build great development tools for that platform at making it a platform that is attractive to developers and power users. This strategy has been critical in resurgence of Apple and I doubt that they would want to become a less attractive development platform.

dorianj• 14 years ago

>I’m also intrigued to see how far they are prepared to go with this. They already annoyed and inconvenienced a lot of people with the Samba and GCC removal. Having wooed so many developers to the Mac in the last decade, are they really prepared to throw away all that goodwill by shipping obsolete tools and making it a pain in the ass to upgrade them?

The answer is: all the way. I don't understand any other conclusion you could draw from this. Other than a few non-essential command line tools (like emacs), Apple will clean the system of anything they can't control.

A lot of code is shared between OS X and iOS, so the 'tivoisation' clause means that they can't use GPLv3 on iOS, so best to avoid it on Mac OS X too.

Homebrew will still be around to install all the command-line goodies you need. No pain in the ass required.

Regardless of Apple's goals in this action, a lot of the OSS world is moving to permissive licenses, so this isn't a terribly surprising move.

probonogeek• 14 years ago

>Regardless of Apple's goals in this action, a lot of the OSS world is moving to permissive licenses, so this isn't a terribly surprising move.

Guess I hadn't noticed "a lot of the OSS world moving to permissive licenses". The GPL is still the workhorse of many free systems with code coming out all the time. I mean, if you're counting web development code (like the Rails ecosystem), I suppose you could make the argument that the MIT license is surging... but there's a whole world of code beyond generating dynamic HTML that continues to be licensed under the old-guard licenses.

batista2• 14 years ago

Most major new projects seem to come with non GPL licenses...

rsynnott8• 14 years ago

> Guess I hadn't noticed "a lot of the OSS world moving to permissive licenses". The GPL is still the workhorse of many free systems with code coming out all the time.

I don't have the stats handy right now, but in general the percentage of new projects using permissive licenses has increased sharply, and many non-FSF GPLv2 products have not made the jump to GPLv3.

nirvana• 14 years ago

Interestingly, Homebrew is broken right now, at least for me, given that I've installed Xcode 4.2 and it didn't seem to install GCC (instead installing LLVM) while homebrew recipes seem to require GCC. (or at least homebrew is complaining about it.)

falling• 14 years ago

You can get it here https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer

X-Istence10• 14 years ago

Homebrew is warning about it, but should still attempt to compile. There is also an homebrew recipe for installing GCC v 4.6 so you can always install that...

throwaway5048• 14 years ago

I solved this problem by uninstalling Xcode 4.2, downloading Xcode 4.1 from Apple's site <https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action>; and then redownloading 4.2 and updating. You'll probably need to register to download, but it's free.

cbs• 14 years ago

>are they really prepared to throw away all that goodwill by shipping obsolete tools and making it a pain in the ass to upgrade them?

Why the hell would they care? Apple has been been gradually squeezing the techie more and more for ages.

sc68cal• 14 years ago

Apple's failure to update GNU software was actively impacting the security of OS X. Charlie Miller made mincemeat of OS X because of the sorry state of security of 3rd party utilities (http://rixstep.com/1/20080422,00.shtml).

As Charlie Miller noted in his '07 BH presentation: (https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-07/Miller/Pres...)

How to Find a Mac OS X 0-Day:

1) Find some open source package they use that is out of date

2) Read the change log for that software

3) Find a good bug

4) Profit!

"The Samba on Mac OS X (on Monday) had an exploitable remote root vulnerability in it...it hadn’t been updated since February 2005!"

If anything, Apple removing GPL software creates a better situation, because fink/macports/homebrew will be available to pick up the slack and provide more timely updates.

Plus, it seems like FreeBSD is trying to get rid of as much GNU stuff as they can, so that more of what they release is covered under a BSD license (see BSD grep, for example). It may be that Apple is just picking up some of these changes from FreeBSD and doing a little bit of housekeeping on their end.

fluidcruft2• 14 years ago

> It's not like Apple were keeping this stuff updated

Well, obviously as the major point of the article is that Apple clearly refuses to ship software covered by GPLv3, so you're getting the rapidly ancient, last GPLv2 versions. It's quite a rare exception for updated GNU software to be available under GPLv2--the FSF basically moved their entire code base from GPLv2+ to GPLv3+ when GPLv3 was released and that has cascading effects since GPLv2 and GPLv3 are incompatible. I was unaware of the sorry state of things on MacOS actually as I don't use Apple products, but it at least enlightened me about all the bash bashing we tend to see on HN.

_delirium• 14 years ago

Yeah, I recently realized why various bash examples I tried out don't work on OSX. I guess it's an obvious thing to check, but somehow it never occurred to me that OSX's bash would be five years old.

earl• 14 years ago

to upgrade bash on OS X: brew install bash then follow directions at [1]

[1] http://concisionandconcinnity.blogspot.com/2009/03/upgrade-b...

bouncing3• 14 years ago

GPL2 and GPL3 are compatible. You just can't make GPL2 derivatives of GPL3 software.

Quequau3• 14 years ago

I've been a Apple & FreeBSD user for decades and it really looks to me like Apple is coming up for a long cycle of public and embarrassing security failures because of this...

Or perhaps I should say, I don't think Apple is going to either update the lagging GNU utilities to current or put for the effort to migrate to current BSD alternatives until they have a protracted public shaming which demonstrably impacts the bottom line of iOS sales. Which sort of reminds me of what MS went through before they started taking security more seriously. (I haven't used Windows in years, so I can't really comment on the state of MS security today).

Which is a shame because there is a lot of opportunity in the eddies of GNU, BSD, and Darwin. We all could benefit from an Apple sponsored security focused FOSS code review / bug hunt / development effort. Sort of like what Google does only focused on Security.

X-Istence10• 14 years ago

I don't think that is the case, there won't be a requirement for public shaming, Apple is already removing more and more GPL licensed tools each release cycle and it won't be long until they are using more up-to-date BSD licensed tools.

Also, one thing I have noticed is that Apple has started reacting faster to security threats and is at least willing to acknowledge the researchers behind them in their updates, which is much better compared to what previously happened. Not only that but before Lion was released many security researchers received an advanced copy.

The other thing is that almost all of the GPL utilities are command line utilities and are not shipped with iOS so even if there are vulnerabilities in them it is highly unlikely that there will be a target painted on iOS's back. I don't foresee that there will be any major impact on their iOS product line.

alwillis3• 14 years ago

I've been a Apple & FreeBSD user for decades and it really looks to me like Apple is coming up for a long cycle of public and embarrassing security failures because of this...

Apple isn't going to allow Mac OS X security to degrade. Apple does a lot of behind the scenes activity with security that they don't talk about much.

Every Mac OS X and iOS update addresses many security vulnerabilities; here's the list for 10.7.3 as an example: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5130

diminish5• 14 years ago

I am only using Linux on both server and client and I am happy to have a consistent development experience since 6 years.

I am interested why isnt just Apple or just FreeBSD enough for your purposes? Why do you need to use both? Just as a hobby or do both have any use special case?

ryannielsen• 14 years ago

"The Samba on Mac OS X (on Monday) had an exploitable remote root vulnerability in it...it hadn’t been updated since February 2005!"

If anything, Apple removing GPL software creates a better situation, because fink/macports/homebrew will be available to pick up the slack and provide more timely updates.

First, a nit pick: Samba doesn't exist on current releases of Mac OS X. They've rewritten their SMB stack and it's under a dual BSD/ASPL license: http://opensource.apple.com/source/smb/smb-552.3/

Second: bingo.

Why should Apple relinquish any control over their platform? If their eyes, removing GPL code reduces risk to their platform. There's going to be a constant fear that GPL code could "contaminate" non-GPL code. Why bother?

As you note, other BSD platforms are undertaking the same endeavor, so Apple's not alone and can support that effort. Which seems to be exactly what they're doing. They remove a perceived major risk to their products and continue helping the OSS community.

Finally, again as you note, there are better ways to keep rarely used software up to date. (Rarely used by the majority of Apple's user base.) I bet Apple desperately wants to get out of the business of shipping updates to command-line-only software, just as they've gotten out of the business of shipping Flash and Java updates. Why should they exert significant effort to try and update software that's rarely used on their platform and is better kept up to date via other mechanisms. Apple can provide the base, and anyone who needs OSS libraries, utilities or apps not provided by that base can use something like Homebrew and much more easily stay up to date. And if Apple stops vending that software, systems like Homebrew are far less likely to be broken by Apple OS updates. Win-win.

jacobolus• 14 years ago

For what it’s worth, the guy who writes Rixstep.com is a vitriolic asshole who has been periodically bashing nice projects for incredibly lame reasons for a decade now, and who seems to bear unreasonable grudges and fixate on them.

What he’s saying in this particular example might be legitimate, but he’s just not a credible source, in general.

TheAmazingIdiot• 14 years ago

We only have the iPod, iPod touch/iPhone, apple TV, battery covers on newer Apple laptops, and Apple's hardware for their computers to show where they are headed. Some may accuse me of a slippery slope argument; I look at it as a continuation of a linear regression and projection. And where that's going doesn't look peachy.

It is a rather interesting point they do not have any GPL 3 software distributed, and for probably for both the reasons stated. However, the way the whole Mac feel is as it was a curated device (regardless the actual platform). Both Apple and Microsoft seem to want to converge on a "trusted platform"; where the trust is against you.

rsynnott8• 14 years ago

> Some may accuse me of a slippery slope argument; I look at it as a continuation of a linear regression and projection.

So, er, a slope-related argument of some sort, then. It could be friction-y, I suppose.

nknight• 14 years ago

"Slippery slope" is a specific type of usually-fallacious argument that relies only on what is possible, not what is likely based on actual evidence and trends. It's not a generic term for any argument that seeks to prove "X is heading toward Y".

fennecfoxen• 14 years ago

Why, any man whose purse has been let blood

By sharpers, when he finds all drained away

Must compare how he stands with how he stood.

If a quack doctor's breezy ineptitude

Has cost me a leg, must I forget straightway

All that I can't do now, all that I could?

rsynnott8• 14 years ago

He missed this one, which may also be problematic:

> You may not convey a covered work if you are a party to an arrangement with a third party that is in the business of distributing software, under which you make payment to the third party based on the extent of your activity of conveying the work, and under which the third party grants, to any of the parties who would receive the covered work from you, a discriminatory patent license.

This was intended to avoid situations similar to the Microsoft/Novell patent grant agreement, but could have quite broad scope.

rhizome2• 14 years ago

It sounds more like they won't sign any non-exclusive patent agreements, like an IP monopsony.

rsynnott8• 14 years ago

As far as I can see, the main case this covers is, for instance, say Apple adopts GPLv3 Bash. IBM decided to sue over their patent on causing the letter 'w' to be displayed on a computer screen (or whatever). Currently, Apple can do three things; fight it, settle, or stop using bash (the last is impractical, of course). This clause of GPLv3 almost removes the settlement option; IBM would be highly unlikely to license the patent to, not only Apple, but anyone redistributing the redistributable source from MacOS.

For a slightly more realistic example (most of the GPL stuff Apple uses, except for GCC, is not really all that vulnerable to patents), take the bluez Bluetooth stack, used by Android. There's a very real risk that one of the many holders of Bluetooth related patents may assert one against Google or against an OEM over bluez, and in that case, if the patent was valid, licensing it would be the obvious solution. This would work, because bluez is GPLv2; it wouldn't necessarily work if it were GPLv3.

I can see what the FSF was going for with this clause, but it does make it substantially riskier for companies to depend upon GPL(v3) components.

alwillis3• 14 years ago

BTW, anyone who wants GCC for Mac OS X can easily do so using the OS X GCC installer: https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer

scott_s4• 14 years ago

You can also just install XCode, which is free with the OS.

Yes, I know the complaint is that it's "too large" just for gcc and related toolchain. But that's not true for me. I find it far, far easier to just download one thing from Apple and install it, then to spend cycles of my own to figure out how to save myself a little bit of disk space.

jeremymcanally• 14 years ago

The newest Xcode actually doesn't ship with gcc, which is the complaint here I suppose. It hasn't impacted me all that much, but I don't use a ton of non-OSX specific software (and none outside of homebrew/ports).

heresy2• 14 years ago

The new XCode 4.2 and presumably the next versions of it do not ship with a real GCC, which is one of the things mentioned in the article.

This causes problems for software that doesn't compile right with LLVM yet (arguably bugs in the software, but tell that to someone who can't use the LLVM compiled binaries any more).

Eventually, the version of Xcode that includes GCC will be too old to do anything useful with.

So then you wouldn't be able to "just install XCode", unfortunately.

Hemospectrum3• 14 years ago

I wasn't aware Bash had also moved to GPLv3. Wonder how long till that gets removed.

jrockway• 14 years ago

Anything whose copyright is owned by the FSF and was GPL2 is now GPL3.

nilsbunger4• 14 years ago

Yup. Only option would be to fork from the last GPL2 release and evolve it as GPL2.

natesm• 14 years ago

Is there any reason not to make zsh the default? Better license, better shell.

Hemospectrum3• 14 years ago

There really isn't. I hope they do that.

i386• 14 years ago

Reposted here since it seems the page linked is no longer visible (at least for me).

------------

Apple’s great GPL purge

Posted on 5 February 2012 by meta Apple obligingly allows you to browse and download the open source software they use in OS X. Since they have listings for each version of OS X, I decided to take a look at how much software they were using that was only available under the GNU public license. The results are illuminating:

10.5: 47 GPL-licensed packages. 10.6: 44 GPL-licensed packages. 10.7: 29 GPL-licensed packages. This clearly supports the idea that Apple is aggressively trying to remove all GPL-licensed software from OS X. While the removal of Samba and GCC got some attention, the numbers show that there’s a more general purging going on.

The 29 remaining GPL-licensed packages aren’t too healthy either. Lion apparently ships with bash 3.2. That’s from 2006. The current version is 4.2.10. Why no upgrade? Because Apple’s shipping the last version of bash that was under the GPL version 2.

The message is pretty obvious: Apple won’t ship anything that’s licensed under GPL v3 on OS X. Now, why is that?

There are two big changes in GPL v3. The first is that it explicitly prohibits patent lawsuits against people for actually using the GPL-licensed software you ship. The second is that it carefully prevents TiVoization, locking down hardware so that people can’t actually run the software they want.

So, which of those things are they planning for OS X, eh?

I’m also intrigued to see how far they are prepared to go with this. They already annoyed and inconvenienced a lot of people with the Samba and GCC removal. Having wooed so many developers to the Mac in the last decade, are they really prepared to throw away all that goodwill by shipping obsolete tools and making it a pain in the ass to upgrade them?

knieveltech2• 14 years ago

Make no mistake, Apple could give a rat's ass about the developer community, and why should they? We represent a vanishingly small fraction of the total consumer space and we are orders of magnitude more demanding.

jseliger• 14 years ago

Developers are also disproportionately useful for a platform, since they're the ones who build the stuff people want to use; for more on that, see http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html , as well as the bazillion other writers pointing out similar things.

X-Istence10• 14 years ago

That isn't necessarily true. Xcode is a very awesome IDE, it has had its growing pains but with the new clang based backend it can go far and fast. Not being reliant on older and more stagnant and more tightly coupled GCC to get there.

It is in Apple's best interest to have a compiler that is also used to do the checking of code in real time within the IDE be the same. It makes more sense because otherwise you get differing results in the IDE versus compile time. It is within Apple's best interest to help developers develop and make it easy to find issues, clang's output for errors are absolutely fantastic. If you type something wrong it provides suggestions for what you may have meant (and most of the time they are accurate).

I think Xcode is one location where Apple is showing that it does care about developers by building a better product with better integrated tools (git for example ...). Are there things we miss from the old Xcode, sure, but overall it is clear that Apple understand they need to provide developers with tools that help them get their job done.

---

Clang though is helping the ENTIRE development community. It is an BSD licensed compiler with some absolutely awesome features.

1. Their human readable error messages. I've spent a lot less time Googling random compiler failures or trying to parse GCC's or MSVC's output so that I can understand it and fix the error (especially in heavily templated C++ code) just by having the compiler give me human readable errors. This goes a long way for a developer that misplaced a semicolon or is attempting to use a const variable into some Boost code that expects a non-const variable thereby causing thousands of lines of template errors to be thrown. 2. The LLVM allows for very interesting "languages" to be easily prototyped and tested, and JIT compilation and a few other things can be created. 3. clang can read incomplete code files and make code completion suggestions. Not just tied to Xcode, but as a library. clang_complete for Vim is absolutely fantastic and by far my favourite Vim script.

---

Why exactly should Apple be required to ship GPL versions of the software when they could ship BSD licensed utilities without having to worry about being GPL compliant. Just because a few people prefer the GPL version they can't remove it from their system? They believe the GPL licensed tools to be inferior (and with the GPLv3 causes more legal headaches than it is worth) and thus they are replacing them with a set of tools that fit their requirements. Why does that mean that they "could give a rat's ass about the developer community"? Why exactly would they continue to develop clang/llvm as an open source project?

rimantas3• 14 years ago

How many billions have Apple already paid out to iOS and Mac App Store developers? How many attendees did they have at WWDC? Getting rid of GPL in now way means getting rid of developers.

feralchimp2• 14 years ago

> Apple could give a rat's ass about the developer community, and why should they? We represent a vanishingly small fraction of the total consumer space and we are orders of magnitude more demanding.

This is a popular refrain, but I don't think it holds up well at all under scrutiny:

1. By your logic, who should care about developers? Only open source projects or ISVs? And yet everyone does, a lot.

2. iOS platform developers buy Macs (and often multiple iOS devices) to develop iOS apps.

3. Xcode, warts and all, is basically free. Same with all of the OS X and iOS developer documentation. Have you priced Visual Studio or an MSDN subscription lately?

4. No one who feels this way has had Quinn the Eskimo answer a Core OS or Networking question for them in the Apple Dev Forums. If you don't care about developers, you don't pay folks like him to dispense wisdom to a bunch of yahoos who each paid $99/year.

DarkShikari• 14 years ago

Developers make the software that goes on their platform. Microsoft didn't gain their huge market share in the 90s through magical spells; they won by being extremely developer-friendly. Without a "developer community", Apple wouldn't exist as a company.

rmc2• 14 years ago

are they really prepared to throw away all that goodwill by shipping obsolete tools and making it a pain in the ass to upgrade them?

Apple has made fantastic amounts of money and become the daring of the media & tech world since they went down the route of the closed iPhone/iOS buisiness.

Angostura2• 14 years ago

> So, which of those things are they planning for OS X, eh?

Fairly, clear I would have thought. There is substantial overlap between the OS X and iOS codebases. Having anti- TiVoization clauses in code central to OS X poses problems whenever they want to use a funky feature in iOS, or indeed on the AppleTV. It makes things much simpler if this type of code can be avoided.

revertts• 14 years ago

This is nothing new. A number of large companies avoid GPLv3 because the potential of losing IP is too high; it's a difficult license to interpret, and the legal implications of some of its clauses haven't been fully defined yet (eg. what all is covered by "convey"?).

So, I wouldn't say that them avoiding it suggests anything sinister like some of the posters are mentioning... they're probably just playing it safe.

Jach• 14 years ago

You hit the nail on the head with the "convey" question. A fairly large number of people think there's a good chance that the AGPL is redundant because the GPLv3 is broad enough in its range of likely court interpretations. I've flip flopped back and forth on the BSD/GPL side of the fence a number of times, lately I've started moving back to BSD-land again. (Especially with things like the "Do what the fuck you want" license, version 3.)

kevinpet• 14 years ago

I don't buy that. I find it hard to believe that a court could find that a slightly ambiguous clause means something so different from what the people publishing their code under it understand it to mean. If AGPL didn't exist, and if everyone using GPL claimed "convey" included a hosted service, then there'd be a case. But given that AGPL exists, and given that the intent of most people who use this license is not to prohibit hosted services, that's a major stretch.

farmdawgnation2• 14 years ago

I don't really see any malicious intent here. I've started avoiding the GPLv3 myself just because it makes code that I publish harder for people to take advantage of. What's the point of me writing some code if it's only going to sit on Github, as if it were ment for some sort of museum?

Apache and MIT Licenses are generally my goto these days.

X-Istence10• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

As 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• 14 years ago

Waffling 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.

shareme• 14 years ago

same 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-Istence10• 14 years ago

A 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.

gillianseed3• 14 years ago

>'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. '

Of course it is, it actually ENSURES that the source code stays OPEN. 'traps'??

>'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?'

I believe a huge amount of programmers want to provide open source code to open source code projects, not for proprietary projects. Which is why GPL is such a popular licence.

Apple wants to incorporate open source into their proprietary products, that is why they don't like GPL. Apple sponsoring Clang/LLVM development makes perfect sense since they are stuck at gcc 4.2.1 due to not accepting GPLv3, and they will eventually need to update their compiler toolchain (gcc 4.2 branch is old).

Don't take me wrong, I think Clang/LLVM are great projects and although the compile speed advantage it had over GCC has diminshed greatly it's error reporting/diagnostics is really 'best of class' amongst the compilers I've used. The speed of the generated code lags behind gcc however, and it also lacks advanced optimizations such as pgo (profile guided optimization).

I look at it as a great alternative, but GCC remains my main compiler toolchain, partly because of the licence which ensures that all the enhancements done to it will be available to me as an end user but also because of the strong developer support it has from companies like Red Hat, IBM, Google, etc employing full-time developers working solely on GCC.

stephth• 14 years ago

I believe a huge amount of programmers want to provide open source code to open source code projects, not for proprietary projects.

Why not? Worst case scenario, some people use their software without giving anything back. Best case scenario, improvements find their way back into their code. But none of this can happen if the license is prohibitive.

nikcub3• 14 years ago

> Which is why GPL is such a popular licence.

this may have been true with desktop software but it is a lot less true with web software - where MIT and BSD style licenses are much more prevalent.

I think modern authors are more interested in others using their software unencumbered than they are concerned about some ideological battle or keeping software 'open'.

paulhauggis6• 14 years ago

"I believe a huge amount of programmers want to provide open source code to open source code projects, not for proprietary projects. Which is why GPL is such a popular licence."

I really wish developers would stop calling the GNU "free". If you are restricting the end user (IE: you can't use this in proprietary projects), it's not freedom.

The BSD license is true freedom.

griotspeak• 14 years ago

Consider also the possibility that Apple sponsored Clang/LLVM because was written in a way that made it nearly impossible to analyze code exactly as the compiler would. The separation of LLVM and Clang means that Static analyzer in clang is doing the same thing as when you compile.

dlitz• 14 years ago

> On paper the GPLv3 is awesome, but it adds some major restrictions that make it unappealing to corporations.

Oh, stop with the FUD. The only people GPLv3 is a problem for is proprietary software companies, and people who think they're in that business. Of course, on HN that's probably a lot of people's employers (mine, too), but let's not pretend that this extends to "corporations" generally.

bryanlarsen2• 14 years ago

Agreed. It's probably a slightly lower number now, but a few years ago 80% of all software written was custom in-house software where the choice of license is fairly moot since the GPL restrictions don't apply if you don't distribute your software.

bouncing3• 14 years ago

I could see how the inclusion of BTFS in FreeBSD might promote free software, and its inclusion would not be prohibited by any version of the GPL.

But how does the use of GPL code in a proprietary project, as would be the case in your consulting example, benefit free software? The whole point of the GPL, any version, is to make sure that derivative work is itself free software. It's not that GPL "sounds good on paper" and in reality, it's totally different.

GPLv3 on paper: You can't use it to make proprietary software. You can't use it to take away users' freedom.

GPLv3 in reality: See above.

X-Istence10• 14 years ago

If BTRFS was included as GPL code in the FreeBSD kernel by default it would taint the entire kernel and it would become a GPL governed piece of work...

There is a reason why ext2 for example isn't enabled by default in FreeBSD and why it is mostly stagnant in the tree. Nobody wants to touch it with a 10 ft pole...

Use of an LGPL library would make my life easier, also in the past when I have done work with LGPL libraries (and BSD/MIT and other licenses as well) I have contributed back bugfixes, or new features that benefit said library. When companies shun the GPL and LGPL the same benefits are not available, there is no choice for the corporation to use it and or give back, it becomes a requirement, even if it means that part of our secret sauce now because not so secret.

Good luck getting that past management.

Forcing someones hand is not a good way to start a mutual beneficial relationship.

robbyt• 14 years ago

Google's Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-r0zoo9...

danielson• 14 years ago

Slightly shorter ...

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-r0zoo9...

vog2• 14 years ago

Unfortunately, the article is no longer available. The page shows "Access Forbidden".

Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-r0zoo9...

chj• 14 years ago

I vote for BSD. If only I can enjoy good food, why should I care about the recipe used? It is the working software that matters, I could not care less for source code.

Open source is important only after the people working on the software decide they will no longer work on it. From that point on, I do hope they open source the whole thing so other people can carry on. However if we impose a GPL-like license on the code, it may discourage people from taking the project full time and doing more interesting stuff. Again, what matters most is the survival of the software.

__alexs3• 14 years ago

> It is the working software that matters, I could not care less for source code.

Working software doesn't matter at all. It's your users interests that matter, and GPL compatible licenses are the only ones that guarantee their freedom.

rimantas3• 14 years ago

There are hundreds of millions of users of Apple devices now. Ask them what matters more: working software, or GPL compatible licenses.

Your first sentence is stupid beyond belief.

forgottenpaswrd• 14 years ago

What about Google's great GPL purge? Also called "Android".

Google modified all what was going to interface with the programs, like the libc so they did not have to use GPL.

There is nothing bad on this, people is free to use whatever they want.

As a company, GPL sometimes is too restrictive.

ck2• 14 years ago

cache:

http://google.com/search?strip=1&q=cache:http://meta.ath...

wadesworld• 14 years ago

GPL purge would be a good thing, since GPL has done more to hurt free software than help it.

binarycrusader• 14 years ago

They're smart -- several organisations I know of stopped contributing upstream to projects once they went GPLv3. They're now looking for BSD-licensed alternatives and plan to contribute to them instead.

A few game development projects I follow also switched from LGPL licenses to BSD licenses (and saw contributions go up!). (See SDL, Ogre3D, etc.)

It's actually kind of refreshing to see many people going back to the basics.

idspispopd• 14 years ago

This is a GPLv3 problem, and it's not limited to Apple. v3 is incompatible with many existing business policies.

The trend of dumping GPL will continue in many of the for-profit tech businesses.

ejfinneran• 14 years ago

Everyone is battling over why corporations or Apple specifically doesn't like GPLv3, and noone has mentioned Linus has said he doesn't like GPLv3 either and will stick with v2 for Linux.

Linux is still shipping under GPLv2.

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stabl...

pconf• 14 years ago

OSX has always been based primarily on BSD-licensed open source. Obviously they don't want their deep pockets to attract lawsuits. The lesson here should be obvious, make the GPL too onerous and fewer companies will risk using it. The FSF suing Cisco was an example that Apple took seriously.

Apple’s great GPL purge

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