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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

Heh emacs-22.1.

Wonder where that's used. Scripting in elisp?

It's included so the there's a nice editor in Terminal by default (yes, I'm just kidding, I know vim is there). It's so old because it's the last version of Emacs released under version 2 of the gpl (and Apple hates version 3). It's the same reason the default Bash is so old.

Bash defaults to Emacs keybindings which also work throughout macOS since it began in the NeXT days. It is included because on macOS it is the universal text editor.

I am new to macOS and I was just recently surprised by that - noticed Ctrl+k worked in some un-expected places like a plain text box widget (not in emacs). I thought it was a nice touch.

> Apple hates version 3

Google as well.

As does any corporation with software distribution and a breathing legal team.

If you want your code to be usable by people who don't know what "fsf" stands for, don't use gpl3.

Having had to gather licenses for such legal teams, in corporations that never contributed a single comma change to any of the code they take for free, I bet in around 10 years FOSS advocates will start to miss the GPL.

I think you are absolutely correct.

I originally intended to point out more how people who use and invest in Mac OS X and claim they are for FSF are, in some part, contradicting themselves.

It was the default editor of the Apple (NeXT) Darwin UNIX distribution. Given how much effort they have put in this list in the last 15 years, I guess it just wasn't curated much unless legal said to do so.

emacs is distributed with the OS, so the GPL requires Apple to make the emacs source available. (Even if they haven't changed it.)

Only if you make such a request. Read the GPL.

Publishing the source like this is risk management for a company. By doing this they don't risk having to receive, vet and process 100's of requests for source at a random time - which could use up their legal department's resources at the wrong moment.

Can't the just point to the gnu repo?

No. They're distributing the binaries, so they have to provide the source code to users of the binaries on request. Publishing it like this satisfies that requirement.

I think you're mixing up the two options that GPL provides. My understanding is that you can either limit your distribution of source to the same parties to which you provide binaries (by "accompanying" the binary with the source), or you can require a request, but you must accept such requests from everyone.

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