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Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

Why didn't Apple just use mold?

A related question might be why Apple didn't make a business offer to Ueyama-san to improve mold/sold further, e.g. by offering him a position or by buying his company. But my guess is Apple want all the development done in-house.

I think this "Apple's new linker is in the same league as mine. Great job!" response is full of tact and grace, considering Apple just undercut his business.

>A related question might be why Apple didn't make a business offer to Ueyama-san to improve mold/sold further,

I dont think he was willing to sell to Apple for what Apple would consider as reasonable price anyway.

It's AGPL?

...and the macos/iOS-supported version, named 'sold', is commercial and non-AGPL.

see https://github.com/bluewhalesystems/sold

At $8/user/month (while I realize that still likely be pocket change to Apple)... how much is that and what is the risk that the company changes the licensing once you're using it?

Large companies (Apple, Amazon, and the like) would likely buy the company rather than license their product (see Dark Sky (now WeatherKit), Kiva (now Amazon Robotics - https://www.fromscratchradio.org/show/mick-mountz 23:22 )) so that they can't lose control over something that they want when management for one of there tools changes.

And so why use mold (license problems and they wouldn't want to impose the AGPL on all their developers), or be a reseller of sold ($8/month/user - how many developers are in the Apple developer program) - it comes down to "it is better for us to develop our own and release it so that there is certainty about the license for any developers who use it."

There is a total prohibition on AGPL software at most MAANGs.

Apple doesn't even touch the GPL if it can avoid it (thus why its software is mostly based on BSD licensed code).

It would even be further beyond the pale to say "here is a linker for 3rd party developers to use... oh, and its AGPL, sorry 'bout that."

So to the question from the GP:

> Why didn't Apple just use mold?

Because they won't tell 3rd party developers to use AGPl software or require a 3rd party developer to use a different 3rd party developer's licensed software that may change.

If Apple is going to release something, they're going to develop it and release it themselves with as few other encumbrances as possible.

They don’t touch GPLv3 code; they avoid GPLv2 code because it can be relicensed GPLv3. That’s why they are shipping ancient bash and switching to another shell, for instance.

And scaring those corps into buying instead of complying was explicitly the author’s reason[1] for choosing AGPL instead of GPL even though there was no expectation the difference would ever actually matter.

I remember an SFC blog post[2] expressing distaste for such scare-tactics applications of copyleft on the part of MySQL AB in the early 2000s. (As opposed to the initial goal of copyleft, that is using a legal hack to eventually force most software to become free/libre.) This case is maybe less unpleasant, but only marginally so, I think.

[1] https://gist.github.com/lleyton/9c0b75d065f37333ea9851b6cad1..., discussed today at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36225016

[2] https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/jan/06/copyleft-equality...

There's software that could be used if public builds were used, and contributions were made in the open, but lawyers and security guys don't really like the risk that comes from using something you didn't built.

If Apple was releasing software as part of the Xcode package, would AGPL code be acceptable to include in that package as libraries for 3rd party developers to use?

Sorry, I was talking about software used by FAANG employees (sorry Meta, I hate your new name, not sorry really).

Now, thinking about that case, I guess that Apple could make it easy for people to depend on AGPL software that they download on their own, and that Apple only provides some sort of index or crawlers for it. No need for Apple to have AGPL software on their end.

Yeah, and then suffer endless barrage of hate on "how evil mega corporate stole the work of lone developer"

The bigger question would be why not lld, considering Xcode's compiler is clang.

Hostile licensing. mold, like many other ill-informed projects lately, is pseudo-open source aimed at being locked up as a commercial product with a license that is incompatible with free use in the real world.

This is not true, it’s AGPL or pay.

Like I said, hostile licensing.

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