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I'd also put more of the blame on GNU than Apple. Apple probably would have continued to ship bash if it hadn't switched to the GPL3 license.

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The only reason Bash exists at all is because of the very same reason Bash switched to GPLv3. There could be no theoretical world where Bash exists but stays with GPLv2.

There is NO reason BASH "needed" to go GPLv3.

It wouldn't be a good look for a very popular GNU package to not adopt the hot new license they'd been working on for years.

I guess Linux isn't technically a GNU package, but it's GPLv2.

I’m sure GNU would love Linux. I’m also sure Linux would be GPLv3 if it was a GNU package for the last 20 or so years. But now people who wrote Linux are dead and they can’t relicense easily.

That's a cryptic response. Can you elaborate?

It's not right either. Bash was made-to-order by the FSF to get a shell free of the old BSD etc code.

But there's nothing extremely important about it being GPL3 and not GPL2 (except that it should follow the FSF dictums to the maximum).

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