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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

Apple refuses to update their command line tools because of the license. The bash I have here is more than ten years old. It's only a matter of time before things diverge enough to make porting a major pain.

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I dont understand this, they already share some of the source to several OS components. Do you care to elaborate a bit on this? Is there some GPL clause or something that became too risky for Apple or something? How do BSD projects get by with the newer licenses aside from already being open source it doesnt seem to affect their underlying license...

Allegedly, Apple hates GPLv3.

And it’s worth remembering: Linus Torvalds hates GPLv3 as well.

Meanwhile, updating gnu tools is pretty straightforward with homebrew, so the consequences of this view are minimal—for me, so far.

Linus Torvalds has in multiple talks said that he does not hate gplv3. He thinks limiting DRM (tivo case) in the license is something he do not want for the kernel, and he strongly disliked the method where GPLv2 automatically upgrades to GPLv3 with the "or any newer version", since his view is that GPLv3 and GPLv2 is two very different licenses because of the DRM clause. During the debconf talk, he said that describing gplv3 as being similar to gplv2 was immoral.

Here is a direct quote "I actually think version 3 is a fine license" - Linus Torvalds

FSF view DRM as just being a physical version of a legal restriction, and they often quote laws that makes it illegal to bypass DRM as proof that DRM is also a legal restriction. Thus in GPLv3 they treat them as identical and they don't see it as a change in how the GPL license work. Linus strongly disagree on this.

This is very different from the Apple case and I doubt anyone can find similar quotes from them.

Their lawyers likely strongly advised against bundling GPLv3 software with their OS because there is a non-zero risk that some judge, somewhere, some day, will claim that requires them to release the source of all their software under GPLv3.

I think that, if GPLv3 ever gets sufficiently tested in courts all around the world (which is highly unlikely) that stance could change.

Why would GPLv3 be substantially different risk than GPLv2?

GPLv3 has anti-TiVoization and patent protection built in.

Yes, but that doesn't make it more likely that anyone would have to open source their apps or OS?

No, but those fears weren't rational to begin with.

You would hate it too if you had to open source the entirety of your OS or application because a GPLv3 COPYING file was floating about in there.

When they included Bash and other GNU tools in their OS to draw developers to their platform, while said platform was dying, they didn't hate that...

Not only Apple but almost every enterprise.

More details here:

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

[…]

Anyway, 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?

I'm not an expert, so forgive me if I'm way off base here… but isn't this exactly the need that homebrew fills?

That's similar to saying that Cygwin or MSYS or MinGW or WSL is filling that need on Windows.

The main difference would be in that, since Windows has no native Unix environment, all these tools are added functionality while on the Mac, it overrides built-in functionality and can make things go a bit weird.

Just like it doesn't have a native Win32 environment, rather different personalities built on top of a common layer.

UNIX environment on Windows is just like how IBM and Unisys mainframes deal with it.

Indeed. (Except that "WSL" should be read as "Windows Substitute for Linux.")

I don't remember FreeBSD or illumos calling their syscall compatibility layer for Linux Substitute.

Nor were they called “services for Linux.”

Nor are they called now, rather Subsystem.

I don't care what names marketing departments come up with.

Actually "for Linux" came from the legal department as Linux is a trademark and it's a common practice to indicate relationship with "for X" where X is a trademark (e.g. "Y for Twitter" instead for "Twitter Y" that would suggest close relationship, from the same company).

Thanks for the clarification.

It's more like a "Windows Subsystem for Linux Applications"

The only problem with Cygwin and MSYS and MinGW was that they filled that need poorly.

You could say that WSL is filling that need on Windows now, WSL certainly does remove some of the earlier obstacles/objections why one would want to avoid Windows and use Linux for development.

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