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Comment by Xuzz | Hacker News Reader

Apple has an equivalent page for iOS, but they've done a very good job phasing out anything GPL or LGPL licensed, and are now down to a very small set of tools with any code released: http://opensource.apple.com/

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The very reason why I prefer the GPL/LGPL over the BSD license, no obligation to give back/share with the community.

I don't get it. What purpose do the licenses serve if the software goes unused?

You could basically say the same thing about any proprietary license.

It won't go unused by anyone who needs it and is willing to abide by the provisions of the license, same as any other software license. And there are many millions of people happily using GPL'd software every day.

And the very reason I dont, I have no intention of forcing my views of what should be done with the sc onto people that might benefit from using it.

You mean distribute it, not use it.

It seems that what is left of GPL software there is either things that they've changed beyond recognition since taking on (webkit) or absolutely basic parts like gcc. Bit of a shame the larger pieces, all the way up to Darwin have nearly died.

Not sure what you mean, exactly. GCC went away for 5.x, sure, but that's because they've switched over to clang, which may not be (L)GPL, but is open source, and I haven't heard any stories of secret modifications to it.

Everything else seems to have remained from one iOS release to the next...?

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