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Comment by fluidcruft | Hacker News Reader

> It's not like Apple were keeping this stuff updated

Well, obviously as the major point of the article is that Apple clearly refuses to ship software covered by GPLv3, so you're getting the rapidly ancient, last GPLv2 versions. It's quite a rare exception for updated GNU software to be available under GPLv2--the FSF basically moved their entire code base from GPLv2+ to GPLv3+ when GPLv3 was released and that has cascading effects since GPLv2 and GPLv3 are incompatible. I was unaware of the sorry state of things on MacOS actually as I don't use Apple products, but it at least enlightened me about all the bash bashing we tend to see on HN.

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Yeah, I recently realized why various bash examples I tried out don't work on OSX. I guess it's an obvious thing to check, but somehow it never occurred to me that OSX's bash would be five years old.

Also worth noting, osx uses bsd versions of various utilities like grep and sed, instead of gnu counterparts

Interesting sidenote: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-Augu...

Some bash examples contains Linuxisms that is not UNIX-03 compliant which OS X is in full, might be that as well.

GPL2 and GPL3 are compatible. You just can't make GPL2 derivatives of GPL3 software.

No, they are not unfortunately. From the FAQ:

"Is GPLv3 compatible with GPLv2? (#v2v3Compatibility)

No. Some of the requirements in GPLv3, such as the requirement to provide Installation Information, do not exist in GPLv2. As a result, the licenses are not compatible: if you tried to combine code released under both these licenses, you would violate section 6 of GPLv2.

However, if code is released under GPL “version 2 or later,” that is compatible with GPLv3 because GPLv3 is one of the options it permits."

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#v2v3Compatibility

to upgrade bash on OS X: brew install bash then follow directions at [1]

[1] http://concisionandconcinnity.blogspot.com/2009/03/upgrade-b...

I use MacPorts and "oh-my-Zsh"... but thinking about it, it should not be all that hard to update all of the outdated GNU stuff in Mac OS... but I don't think the system would actually use the updated stuff, so the security problems probably would still remain.

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