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Comment by November-Echo | Hacker News Reader

About the bash thing: Apple isn’t allowed to ship a newer version due to licensing problems. That’s also the reason why they switched to zsh [1].

[1]: https://thenextweb.com/dd/2019/06/04/why-does-macos-catalina...

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Yeah, I know. It's not just bash, it's a lot of their other userland tools too. It was sort of funny at first, and you can update them with homebrew and usually not break things, but at the end of the day... this is Apple's licensing problem, and yet I have to deal with it. That's stupid! I have scripts that run perfectly on my servers... why should I have to be a contortionist to test them locally?

They are allowed, it is just like everyone else on comercial world, they rather not deal with copyleft software licenses.

Which is a quite different issue.

AFAIK GPLv3 means (among other things) that if a company is slapped with an injunction due to a patent suit, you can't just license the patent for yourself - a patent license has to cover all GPLv3 usage.

They are allowed, but some of the legal consequences to the new terms in GPLv3 are worth stalling updates, choosing alternative system components and even rewriting components to avoid.

Apple is perfectly allowed to ship a newer version, they'd just have to share some of their special sauce. Not entirely unreasonable in my opinion.

Apple doesn't want to ship a new version because they don't want people to see how they've modified bash. I don't know what patents or top secret features they've added to make their version of bash incompatible with GPL, as they're allowed to ship GPL code in a closed source product just fine as long as they ship it as a separate binary, but it's more important than their users' convenience apparently.

Also note that Microsoft ships entire Linux distros without having a problem with GPL licensing.

> Apple doesn't want to ship a new version because they don't want people to see how they've modified bash.

This is just false, the old bash is GPL2 and Apple publishes the source for their bash on their open source compliance page. The reason they don't upgrade is the GPL3 patent grant clause, they ship the last GPL2 release for all GNU utils. The linux kernel is GPL2, so Microsoft doesn't have this problem.

Microsoft ships the entire Ubuntu, which does contain GPL3 code. Maybe they get away with it because it's not so integrated with the rest of Windows.

In WSL1 Microsoft only ships an implementation of the Linux syscall interface, the actual userland comes in the form of a tarball inside an appx package from Canonical, through the MS Store.

I don't exactly know how WSL2 works, but the main difference is that they now use an actual Linux kernel inside a lightweight VM, and that kernel's source is on GitHub. Userland still comes from appx-wrapped tarballs from Canonical.

It's not a GPL problem. It's a GPLv3 problem. Most likely the anti-tivoization clause. Linux, like the old version of Bash that Apple is shipping, is licensed under GPL v2.

I suspect Microsoft is also very careful to make sure they don't ship any GPL v3 components with Windows itself, even when they're available via separate download, because they want to be able to ship locked down devices.

That still doesn’t answer how MS is able to ship an entire Linux OS which obviously contains the newest versions of bash and many other binaries without apparently having licensing issues that Apple does.

They don't ship it though. The Linux subsystem for Windows is a different component. It's an image you download and run (might be community maintained too; not sure).

Locked down devices don't get to use WSL in the first place.

And I don't see what the problem is. Okay, so they'd have to let you replace the bash binary. That doesn't give you any abilities you don't already have.

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