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Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

> Honestly, it sounds like they're deeply scared of long-standing FSF-backed software having to compete (or even be replaced) with alternatives that just happen not to be GPL

They are, for good reason. Big companies hate open source, despite their claims to the contrary. Look at Apple's proprietary forks of all the BSD stuff, and handset manufacturers' proprietary forks of Android. The FSF should absolutely be doing everything in their power to minimize how often this happens.

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That's an argument you can certainly make. Unfortunately for them, as it turns out, deciding licenses for other projects is not in their power, and trolling other projects' issue trackers is counter-productive to the goal of convincing them change their license.

> Look at Apple's proprietary forks of all the BSD stuff

What forks of what stuff?

OS X, Darwin off the top of my head

https://opensource.apple.com/release/macos-115.html

Here's the kernel, including all the BSD stuff:

https://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-7195.141.2/

You can compile it yourself and run macOS with your own kernel build. Here's a blog by Apple's head of XNU development explaining how that works:

https://kernelshaman.blogspot.com/2021/02/building-xnu-for-m...

Yeah and the open source people gave up, it’s like giving you a free recipe for a beef Wellington in a world they control of food. Nothing uses Darwin besides Apple

And? The source is there. There is no requirement to do extra work to make it useful for anyone but yourself. They did not even need to release the source, but they did.

You made a claim about "proprietary forks of all the BSD stuff". The kernel is open source. The rest of the OS is written from scratch by Apple, and originally by NeXT, and is not a fork of anything.

Are you standing by your original claim?

I never claimed that.

What was this then? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29459806

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