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Were they also open source?

No. The original UNIX utilities were under proprietary licenses for an extremely long time, before eventually they broke free under BSD. The BSD tools are descendants of the originals and are also the versions used by macOS.

BSD wasn’t under an open license when GNU got started, so GNU reimplemented the proprietary UNIX utilities with their own enhancements and their own GPL license.

As such, complaining about the license is rich, considering GNU basically stole it themselves from the first round. And to this day, HN complaining about macOS’s utilities is also rich considering they are actually more standard and authentically UNIX than GNU.

MacOS's utilities are really just FreeBSD's with some patches.

https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/text_cmds https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/system_cmds https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/file_cmds https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/adv_cmds https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/shell_cmds https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/misc_cmds

That is because Apple took entire FreeBSD 'userspace' as part of Mac OS X.

Legally, no, but plenty of people had copies of the source.

Their point was creating the 1st open source version was a good reason not to use the original license I thought.

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