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Comment by nirvana | Hacker News Reader

The NeXT Operating system, upon which OS X is based, was created in the 1980s. It's not accurate to say it "wouldn't exist" without Richard Stallman.

I am glad to see that Apple has stopped using GCC and moved to LLVM - a project it helped create. I'm tired of hearing "Free" software advocates use the fact that people use "Free" software as a justification for claiming that these same are hypocrites for selling software (even though they are complying with the terms.)

The thing that keeps GPLed software out of the App Store is the terms of the GPL, not Apple. Yet, Stallman attacks Apple for this...

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NeXTstep may have been started in the 1980s, but it was still built on many open source (generally BSD licensed at that time) components.

Apple hired Chris Lattner, who started LLVM when he was a graduate student at UIUC. It may be funding development now, but it wasn't "Apple's" innovation. Apple's primary reason for funding LLVM development was likely to be able to integrate their proprietary software more closely with the compiler, something that GCC is designed to discourage.

The GPL and the Apple store EULA are incompatible. Considering that the GPL has been around for decades, the incompatibility can be considered intentional.

Don't forget the NeXT's failed attempts to steal GCC.

Steal is inacurrate, however Jobs tried to combine GCC's backend with Next's proprietary ObjC frontend. He wasn't legally able to do so (he tried to sneak past GPL by distributing them as separate packages and claim that the end-user would do the actual linking) and since he really needed the GCC backend this meant that GCC got ObjC support.

How can you "steal" something that is given away for free?

Your accusation contains the truth of the matter. No "Free software" is actually free. The F stands for Fascism. Stallman gets to dictate who uses it and who doesn't without regard to what the GPL actually says.

At least, thats how it operates.

Notice how, Apple using and supporting free software has resulted no end in dishonest accusations from you and others in this thread?

This is why I will have nothing to do with your "movement" and oppose it at every turn.

I don't see how commenting on NeXT's attempts to circumvent the GPL was criticizing Apple at all. NeXT's goal was to wrap GCC with a proprietary wrapper thereby appropriating the FSF's work and denying users the freedom to modify and adapt it for their own purposes.

Copyright laws are reality. Free software is pragmatically protected by copyright. Misappropriation of copyrighted works is considered "theft"/"stealing" by the groups with which Apple chooses to associate and for which Apple forces restrictive DRM on end users.

> Apple hired Chris Lattner, who started LLVM when he was a graduate student at UIUC. It may be funding development now, but it wasn't "Apple's" innovation.

So what if Lattner wasn't working at Apple? Apple's not a person, it's a corporation; LLVM's not a person, it's a library. Apple funding LLVM now means a great deal more than you're giving credit for.

> Apple's primary reason for funding LLVM development was likely to be able to integrate their proprietary software more closely with the compiler, something that GCC is designed to discourage.

And that is a technical failing of GCC, kept in for ideological purposes. Yet somehow LLVM remains open source, Clang remains open source, and the half-proprietary system of XCode has something far greater than GCC will probably ever have.

In the end, Stallman just happens to be one of the guys who contributed to the GNU system. Personally, I'm confident that something similar would have come along with or without him and the GPL (in fact, you mentioned the BSD license that was applied to many components used in NeXT). People implement many parts of these kinds of systems in undergraduate college courses- they're not exactly new discoveries.

this is wrong, please read the below threads about this;

"There is plenty of GPL software available legally on Apple devices, particularly Macs. On iOS devices the conflict is the EULA only. The approval process has nothing to do with it. GNU/Linux distributions have approval processes too. More about how the EULA conflicts with the GPL: http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-...

Right, so because someone adopted a license, the GPL, that forbids distributing the software under the EULA, you guys are going to blame the EULA, rather than the GPL? And then say that it is Apple's fault?

Apple didn't write the GPL.

And at this point, I'm reminded once again, never to debate facts with people advancing an ideology. You can have the last word.

I don't see any real reason, apart from ire for the GPL, for Apple to insist on attaching its EULA to the app (as opposed to the use of the platform, say, which is GPL-compatible), for a free-software app where the author doesn't want to add a EULA, and where the source code is freely available. The purpose of the EULA for proprietary apps is to ban various kinds of reverse-engineering/piracy, which is a pointless thing to ban if the source and app are given away and the app author doesn't care about reverse engineering.

It seems perfectly reasonable to me for a software author to say: I give this app away for free, and you can redistribute it, but you can't attach an EULA to my app if you do. If you, for some reason, are so pigheaded that you insist on adding no-reverse-engineering conditions to my app, which has no actual effect because the damn thing is open-source anyway, I'd blame you for the pointless ideological policy.

As someone who's just had their app approved this very day, Apple don't force their EULA on you.

There's a box where you can paste in your own EULA during the upload process.

Can you just paste the GPL in there? If so, I'm not sure why there'd be an incompatibility. Or is it not incompatible anymore?

As I pointed out, the incompatibility is on the part of the GPL, not Apple. It is Stallman who has decreed that they are incompatible, and then turned around and blamed Apple for the incompatibility.

This makes the FSF advocates position completely asinine. Which is why I have difficulty taking any of them seriously. They don't even respect their own license, so why should I?

(Don't worry, I simply don't use GPL code, and don't release any code under the GPL.)

> Right, so because someone adopted a license, the GPL, that forbids distributing the software under the EULA, you guys are going to blame the EULA, rather than the GPL?

Yes, because it is that EULA that takes away our freedoms, not the GPL.

You can blame the GPL for being uncompromising in this respect, but the GPL came first. They could've made the EULA compatible if that was a priority. Google managed to, after all.

As a user, i want to have the freedom to install whatever i want on my device, gpl, bsd or not. apple creates an eula to stop me from doing anything i want on my own device.

So don't use Apple hardware. Simple.

Not so simple. Let me illustrate in increasing levels of absurdity: if Peach Inc. tried to, say, claim property of any data or content authored, produced or processed with any of their devices, and forbid you from using them in the loo because it damages their image, and claims rights on the organs of your firstborn child when you open some DVD shrink wrap, etc. etc. and I find that aberrant, there is a point at which "so don't use Peach hardware" doesn't settle the issue.

For many people, being forbidden to use a piece of hardware that you legally own in whatever way you want is an unacceptable intrusion on personal freedom.

"For many people, being forbidden to use a piece of hardware that you legally own in whatever way you want is an unacceptable intrusion on personal freedom." So don't buy hardware with those restrictions! For all the acknowledged absurdity of your opening (there are laws that exist to prevent that sort of thing), the fundamental fact of the matter is that as a consumer, you are free to choose not to buy something. If the market doesn't offer what you want you have two options; the obvious one is to do without. The other option is to develop your own.

My point is, why are there laws that exist to prevent the sort of absurd things I propose? That is, why isn't "if you don't like it then don't buy it" sufficient in those cases?

There is a line to be drawn somewhere and different people may reasonably argue for drawing it at different places.

> My point is, why are there laws that exist to prevent the sort of absurd things I propose? That is, why isn't "if you don't like it then don't buy it" sufficient in those cases?

Because goverments like making up new rules and regulations.

As the recent jailbreak exception shows, you are not legally forbidden from doing anything you want with the device you own.

No they don't. Stallman decreed that the GPL was not compatible. Apple never did.

Show me where, in Apple's EULA, it forbids GPLed code.

Last time I checked Apple still shipped OSX with GCC 4.2 as the default compiler. And no, Apple did NOT help create LLVM, it was already 5 years into it's development when Apple came aboard.

As for Apple's EULA and it's GPL conflict, the EULA sets a limit on how many devices you can install the program where GPL explicitly grants you the right to make any number of copies of said program. This makes the Apple's EULA and GPL incompatible.

Wasn't the NeXT OS based off BSD? I believe that is open source.

Open source yes, but not RMS's version. It is debatable whether Stallman was instrumental in creating the free BSD license.

Not at the time, but it is now. It was owned by the Regents of The University of California, and in the intervening decades, it has gone from being a license you had to pay for, or otherwise negotiate, to a generally open source license.

Wikipedia puts the BSD (open source) at 1988 introduction with the GPL being 1989. NeXTSTEP was released September 18, 1989. So, I would say your dates do not mesh and joejohnson's comment is correct.

BSD wasn't completely open source until much later, so I would assume that NeXT purchased a license, just as they did for Display PostScript and other pieces.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi

Who is making these claims of hypocricy?

The complaint I recall was when Apple was violating the KHTML license for a while before releasing their source properly.

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