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Comment by gavinhoward | Hacker News Reader

Like the author, I appreciate the Apple OSS Distributions, even though I don't use Mac OSX.

Four or five weeks ago, I was searching GitHub for every instance of my email for legal reasons. I came across it in an Apple OSS Distribution. And that is when I learned that my best project had been silently shipped with Ventura.

I was ecstatic! [1] It's always great to see more people adopt your work.

Don't worry; they followed the license.

[1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2023/02/my-code-conquered-another-os...

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Wow, you authored bc? It’s incredibly useful. I have to admit that since Spotlight now supports quick calculations, it’s my second step. But it used to be my first. Thanks so much for your work.

My '08 MacBook has calculations via Spotlight.

Not to mention the screenshot tool (including Command-Shift-4, Spacebar) that works immediately upon keypress unlike the new Windows built-in screenshotter. Of which it doesn't hide its own UI properly and may leave a small 1-pixel bar at the top of your screenshot! It's insane how poorly crafted Windows is, and yet it flourishes.

Thank you! I don't blame you for using something more handy, by the way.

Any idea why they would ship such an old version?

Nope.

An acquaintance had a theory, though. They presumed that Apple was doing two years of regression testing on Ventura, so maybe they grabbed the latest version at the time, tested stuff for two years and shipped the version they tested.

If so, I don't blame them. Most protects are not run like mine, so they need to test for the lowest common denominator and assume that later versions will have new bugs.

They're vendoring in each of those projects, though; they could just read the commits.

If people could read commits and know what something is going to do, then all code would be bug-free.

I've noticed other projects stopped shipping when GPLv2 became GPLv3

Also, I noticed they've been technically in violation of the GPL for years with bash - they never shipped source for rootless.h/etc

https://opensource.apple.com/source/X11/X11-0.40/xc/programs...

This is really cool. I use 'bc' in a small script that I run almost daily.

Cool! If I may ask, what does the script do?

I like to know how much incremental disk space I'm using so I have a series of scripts that tell me the files which have been deleted/added and outputs to get the sum (yes, I know there are better ways). The impetus for checking disk usage is a tale in IT stupidity which I don't talk about! But now I use the script for other purposes as well such as verifying that my mirror has the same deltas without doing a full compare. I hope I haven't disappointed you with my usage :-)

I really should rewrite this but it was written many years ago and grew into something more than I originally intended. Plus, it works.

> I hope I haven't disappointed you with my usage :-)

Not at all! My software is built to serve. I'm simply delighted that people have use for it.

I know about one user that uses it for their finances. While that's terrifying for me, it should technically be safe, as long as they don't divide.

And really, your use is an awesome use! And it didn't terrify me.

What’s bc? Is it Bit Counter? I just skimmed the website and gh readme looking for a definition of BC, and I’m still unsure. Only clue I found is that it has something to do with calculators….

GNU `bc` is a command-line arbitrary-precision calculator language [1]. It seems the parent comment's author implemented an alternative version that is now shipping in macOS, presumably because Apple doesn't like the GNU licenses.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/bc/manual/html_mono/bc.html

bc is a standard utility on POSIX systems. It's kind of expected that people know about it, like it's expected they know about awk or grep.

bc is a little less known, though.

bc is a staple in my cli work! Thank you for bc!

You're welcome!

I can't resist, because this is the perfect opportunity... RTFM

Hey, thanks for 'bc', I use it all the time!

I use bc all the time :)

Thank you! I'm always delighted to hear that people use it.

bc carries so many of my scripts, I was just using it yesterday! Thank you so much for the work you've done on it.

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