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Comment by Mutjake | Hacker News Reader

If it was licensed under GPL, my bet is that Apple would not have adopted it at all.

That's entirely possible, but does it hurt their bottom line? They switched from GCC, because LLVM was available (to grow and eventually use).

Their aversion to the GPL seems mostly cultural, which is interesting given that we skewer microsoft for their sins along those lines 20 years ago now.

Apple has an aversion to GPL 3 and not to GPL 2.x because of what 3 forces people to do. It's the same with FreeBSD: once libgcc_s went to 3 they could no longer use it.

It's the same reason why bash and rsync have not been upgraded on macOS to newer versions: they also started using GPL3.

Honestly curious what's the thing that "[GPLv]3 forces people to do" in context of those cases? IANAL but interested in perspective of choosing license for some of my current and future works

Not lock down people's devices basically. [L]GPLv3 requires that people are able to replace the [L]GPLv3'd binaries in their own devices if they want to (so they actually take advantage of the code being FLOSS instead of some nice theoretical novelty - ie. it is nice that my router uses Linux and find it amusing that it comes with the GPLv2 printed out, but what is the point if i can't open it up and fix/change some things that annoy me?). Apple wants to keep the devices they sell you under tight control, so [L]GPLv3 rubs them wrong.

And so they avoid it.

It might also be about patents since IIRC [L]GPLv3 requires that if you use a [L]GPLv3'd program and that program infringes some of your patents then you are not allowed to sue others over their use of your patents in the same program.

See also "Why is FreeBSD deprecating GCC in favor of Clang/LLVM?":

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/49906/why-is-freebs...

GPL3 is more restrictive than GPL2, which in turn is more restrictive than BSD/MIT, in the name of allowing other freedoms for end-users.

Thanks, this link seems quite comprehensive and the answer author tries to write in a neutral voice - appreciated!

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