Hacker News Reader

Comment by pstuart | Hacker News Reader

I still don't understand how a gnu binary could taint their OS. They can provide the source on opensource.apple.com. Case closed.

View on HN

The problem is that GPL3 has more restrictions than just "publish the code". That's why projects such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc. also won't include GPL3 code, as including GPL3 code would restrict what you can and can't do with the entire system.

I assume that Apple's reasoning is similar.

Can you name them? It's not exactly snark. My experience is that almost everyone with strong GPLv3 opinions turns out not to actually object to the terms themselves when discussed in isolation.

To head off: it's not the patent grant. Apache 2 has a very similar patent grant and everyone is fine with it.

Apple doesn’t support it because GPLv3 requires that you are actually able to run the modified source code (not just see, change and distribute). While they probably could do that on macOS, macos and iOS share the same kernel and many common source trees. So by providing macOS software with GPLv3 code, some of that code could potentially be shipped with iOS which would land them in hot water because you are not able to just execute code on iOS. Even with a developer license, you couldn’t just recompile the kernel (or even Library) and replace it with the default one.

Edit:

Here is more information about that:

> Protecting Your Right to Tinker

> Tivoization is a dangerous attempt to curtail users' freedom: the right to modify your software will become meaningless if none of your computers let you do it. GPLv3 stops tivoization by requiring the distributor to provide you with whatever information or data is necessary to install modified software on the device. This may be as simple as a set of instructions, or it may include special data such as cryptographic keys or information about how to bypass an integrity check in the hardware. It will depend on how the hardware was designed—but no matter what information you need, you must be able to get it.

Source: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.en.html

That means if there was GPLv3 code in iOS, Apple would have to send you their private keys to sign any source code so you can run it on iOS.

The product in question is bash, though, which doesn't ship on iOS at all and which obviously could be (and should be) modifiable on OS X.

Sure. But iOS doesn't have Bash (I don't think, even if it does: Then just ship GPLv2 Bash on iOS, and modern Bash on macOS where users might actually care). The GPLv3 of Bash doesn't infect the shared kernel or libraries between iOS and macOS, it's just the `/bin/sh` program. It's easy enough to check if it's being included in iOS.

"The reason we can't ship modern Bash on macOS is that we're concerned we might accidentally include Bash on iOS."?

(and /bin/sh on macOS is already sufficiently user-modifiable to satisfy GPLv3)

Apple is pretty firm on no GPLv3 because accidentally shipping it on iOS can be pretty dangerous for them. Whether you agree with the decision to just not ship GPLv3 software (I don’t), I can understand apples concerns regarding GPLv3.

Furthermore, it wouldn’t surprise me if iOS had bash support even for just debug builds and Apple either had to worry about testing, building and maintaining two version of bash and still risk getting them mixed up and accidentally shipping some parts of the bash source code. This much easier to just never use GPLV3

> accidentally shipping it on iOS can be pretty dangerous

I read the same argument about GPLv2 in like 1994. To date, there remains no case law I'm aware of where a copyright holder "lost" anything by "accidentally" shipping GPL software. How many decades does it take for us to put this myth to rest?

A lot, because it's hard to derive meaningful conclusions from something that's used so relatively little precisely because of licensing concerns.

Anyway, with v2, the concerns were more vague - you'd have to accidentally link something GPLv2. With v3, even just shipping the binary signed with a private key on a platform that requires said key to load it, is enough to potentially force disclosure of that key (and that is by design of GPLv3 - it wants to kill the TiVo model).

Right, so the risk can't be quantified and the whole thing is just isomorphic "because I don't like it". Which was as true then as it is now. It's not about license terms, it's about what amounts to politics.

Experimenting is not the only way to quantify risk. You can also e.g. have several highly paid lawyers look over the text of the license, and see what each of them had to say.

The big players in the industry did just that, and there appears to be a remarkable consensus on it.

The remarkable consensus behind IBM's purchase of Red Hat, you mean? Seems like their highly paid lawyers were down with it.

Again, it's just stunning the extent to which this FUD hasn't changed at all over a quarter century.

The corporate risk profile of Apple vs IBM is so drastically different that it's not even a serious comparison.

The GPLv3 was intentionally designed to create the risk that Apple and others are trying to avoid. IBM doesn't have that risk because they don't sell hardware or software packages, they sell expensive service contracts.

Red Hat, a division of IBM, literally does almost $3B of revenue selling a Linux distribution that includes almost the entirety of the GNU corpus, all GPLv3. IBM bought them because they already resell packages and contracts based on the same stuff and wanted the vertical integration. So yeah, you buy an expensive service contract from IBM and it comes with (gasp) a giant license for GPLv3 stuff in RHEL.

That point is silly. If what you say were true, then the purchase would have been poison. It's not true. It's FUD. And it's hilariously the same FUD that people were flinging around in years before most of the existing FUD-flingers were even born.

> It's not about license terms, it's about what amounts to politics.

Which is exactly what the GPL is! Especially v3.

The outcome of violating the GPL is license termination: you cannot distribute it any more. I don't think there has ever been a case of enforced further distribution or disclosure.

Termination means recall / reimage all device on store shelf and maybe compensation for those distrubited without license.

My main point was that to my knowledge there has never been a case of forced further distribution.

About termination, what you mention is kind of stopping further violation of the terms and maybe compensation for the past violations. What I wanted to mention (but wasn't at all clear about) is that after termination, you cannot even distribute if you intend to abide by the terms unless you are forgiven by the copyright holder. (In the case of the GPL version 3 there is some grace period during which for the first violation, if you abide within that period, you are explicitly permitted to resume distribution under the license terms.)

Accidental shipping of IP which a company do not own is a constant risk. Companies sometimes accidental ship proprietary software, copyrighted images, copyrighted text, patented techniques, trademarked names, trademarked images, and more.

A Swedish copyright lobby organization committed copyright infringement on their own website. Bethesda game company had a trademark dispute with the developers of Minecraft. Apple and Samsung are constantly in patent war with each other. There is an almost unlimited number of cases where one company sue an other for contract and license disputes.

Shipping software is pretty dangerous, and there is no data to show that shipping GPLv3 licensed software is more likely to cause accidental infringement of someones IP than other licensed software.

Eh, is it 2007 again? Hasn't this been discussed to death already? I have little interest to repeat it again; this discussion has been on-going for ten years already (longer if we count GPL vs. BSD discussions, which are roughly similar). Everyone should be familiar with the arguments by now; I trust you're already familiar with mine.

I understand that you're well-intentioned, but I find the suggestion that I'm somehow not informed to be rather patronizing to be honest.

So... you don't really know what restrictions you're talking about, right? I mean, you brought up the subject:

"There are restrictions!" "What restrictions?" "Everyone knows. It's patronizing to ask me. I won't say."

The whole tivo-isation thing has been discussed extensively, as well as the problems with trying to prevent it with the license.

I didn't include an entire summary of it, as it can be easily looked up on e.g. Wikipedia, as well as many other places.

> Apache 2 has a very similar patent grant and everyone is fine with it.

OpenBSD apparently isn't fine with it, fwiw.

> The original Apache license was similar to the Berkeley license, but source code published under version 2 of the Apache license is subject to additional restrictions and cannot be included into OpenBSD.

> -- ref: https://www.openbsd.org/policy.html

On FreeBSD, as I recall, they don't want any GPL'd code in the base system, simply because the ideological goal is to have everything under BSDL. It's not that it affects other bits of the system though.

Yeh, GPL2 is also considered less than ideal, and replacing GPl2 code has been a low-key long-term goal. GPL2 is still considered acceptable though, whereas GPL3 is outright barred.

Is there any GPL code remaining in the base at this point? I thought it was all gone once they replaced gcc with Clang.

I think gcc is still in base, right? They just added clang and set that as the default, AFAIK. I haven't kept up with FreeBSD much in the last few years, so not sure what the plans are to remove gcc.

Also, a quick look at the source tree shows there are still some other parts as well. GNU binutils, GNU diff, dialog is GPL, etc. See: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/tree/master/contrib

In the kernel, I think there are some drivers that are based on the Linux GPL code, for example: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/blob/1d6e4247415d264485ee... (just first hit from GitHub search for "gpl")

So yeah, looks like there's still plenty of GPL code in FreeBSD that's not trivially replaceable. The same applies to OpenBSD, although in general the OpenBSD people tend to be a bit more proactive in replacing GPL code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com