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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

If I publish a program to run on a Mac, Apple should give me resources for debugging issues?

If Apple includes your program as part of the software it sells along with the Mac, then Apple should be sending you well-tested pull requests for any problems its users find, not just giving you debugging resources.

Or fork the project and fix it themselves. I expect the software included in Windows as default to work correctly. I don't see any reason why that wouldn't apply to all products I buy like that.

If Apple is distributing free and open source software as part of the base operating system, certainly they should be taking on some of the support burden. This would be a different story if Apple wasn't shipping curl directly.

Ah. I accept that argument. I feel that Apple is still acting perfectly legally and perhaps the solution is for developers to be clear about their expectations by way of licensing. But that’s often hard to do once the license ship has sailed and then your program becomes included in something like MacOS.

The gist of what rubs me the wrong way is that Apple is following curl’s license precisely and people are still unhappy.

There's plenty of room for being a dick without breaking a law.

what's legality got to do with decent society?

> The gist of what rubs me the wrong way is that Apple is following curl’s license precisely and people are still unhappy.

I view Apple's behavior the same as I do people who leave their shopping carts loose in the parking lot instead of returning them to the corrals. Sure, they aren't legally required to provide any form of support to curl, but they would anyway if they had any decency.

As a human being, it can be very useful to separate out “moral” behavior from “legal” behavior. Even if Apple or John Smith acts perfectly legally, that doesn’t mean they’re acting in a kind or good or well-intentioned or fair way. The law - no matter how comprehensive - can never legislate kindness. In fact, if you are sophisticated about it, you can be a world-class Greatest Of All Time A—-hole while still technically complying with every law in your jurisdiction.

But isn’t there always a kind of quid pro quo in free software? It’s not as if Apple refuses to participate in the free software ecosystem. Doesn’t Apple also publish some important open source software?

Sure, Apple ships curl, and maybe doesn’t support it (are you sure? Don’t they build and test it from source on their own servers? Isn’t that a form of support?).

But Apple also ships and supports WebKit, which - as the original basis for Chromium - has arguably had a bigger impact on the world than curl has. And I suspect that Apple also contributed to some of the standards that curl relies on. Of course, Apple built WebKit as a fork of KHTML… but if memory serves, they didn’t have to make the fork open source.

I’m not trying to defend Apple in any way, I just think that the conversation can be a bit more sophisticated than just “big company ships free software and gives nothing back”. Apple has shipped some really cool open source software in the past, and I think it’s disingenuous to suggest that they owe something to every package that they ship. That is not really in the spirit of free software.

LLVM is also pretty significant and they’ve supported that heavily.

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