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Comment by Sanddancer | Hacker News Reader

It is the GPL's fault. There was enough change in the social implications of v3 that Apple, and a lot of other stakeholders, don't want to mess with it anymore. The FreeBSD team, for example, has very similar reasons for not including GPL3-infected software, and are actively replacing all GPL software with BSD-licensed software in the base install.

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It is the GPL's fault.

The table shows a lot of outdated non-GPL software, such as vim. Besides that, for many UNIX utilities, they could start cherry-picking from FreeBSD, NetBSD or OpenBSD, and you know, maybe even adding the missing functionality.

I think the actual reason for staleness is that there is not enough motivation for Apple to upgrade UNIX utilities. Many UNIX-savvy users can live with the older versions (in fact, many utilities have less features, because they were the BSD-variants). And if something is really too old, people just install a newer version via Homebrew.

Besides that, Macs are only a small part of their revenue and only a subset of that revenue is provided by developers and people using OS X as a UNIX. Of the developers, probably a sizeable chunk uses OS X just for developing iOS apps.

Personally, I'd like to see them update the user land with utilities from the BSDs and contribute back. But that's probably not gonna happen. The time that Apple was mostly a user-friendly UNIX vendor are over. It's a consumer device company now.

I was only addressing the GPLv3 programs because that was the grandparent was addressing. For Yosemite, lot of the other software, with the notable exception of Vim, seems to be fairly close in version to what the current release is. OpenSSL is an outlier too, but that may very well be a case of the amount of API changes with OpenSSL 1 that didn't provide a clear benefit, but did create new openings for problems.

With Mavericks, the situation is a lot like any other Unix distribution. Unless you have a very good reason for it, you don't want to break working code during a (mostly-)automatic update. For example, RedHat shipped Python 2.6 as the default for many years after Python 2.7 was released -- using 2.7 would have broken user installations.

Personally, I'd like to see Apple volunteer with the efforts the BSDs are making to create good BSD-licensed alternatives to the GPL software that's shipped. However, as you briefly mentioned, a lot of the software has different quirks and design decisions that will cause code to break. BSD grep, for example, mostly Just Works, however, I had to switch back to GPL grep on my FreeBSD box because a few bits and pieces had changed enough to make things a hassle.

Cherry-picking the BSD ones is problematic for backwards compatibility without making significant alterations. Many gnu tools support options that their BSD variants do not and some have slight differences in behavior even when using BSD compatible flags.

They didn't have any problem breaking the compiler toolchain for everyone a couple of times ;).

>GPL3-infected software

I don't think we can have a rational discussion about this.

The GPL is a viral license; it's an intentional choice on their part, and "viral" and "infected" are pretty accurate ways to describe it. Whether you believe that this nature is a good thing for development or a bad thing, disagreeing about the fundamental nature of how the GPL works isn't productive.

The GPL is a viral license; it's an intentional choice on their part, and "viral" and "infected" are pretty accurate ways to describe it.

For libraries. We are talking user land tools here, which are standalone. Providing a new bash version doesn't 'infect' any other software.

I think the extended (or some would say more explicit) patent license in the GPLv3 is what troubles many companies.

But the "viralness" of the GPL applies to modified versions of the covered work, and this is a discussion of the distribution of GPLv3-licensed software in Mac OS X, which is not a modified work. Thus the "viralness" does not apply and throwing out the phrase "GPL3-infected software" adds nothing to the discussion and only stokes flames.

However, there are additional legally questionable terms of distribution which the GPL3 imposes which remain open legal questions. For example, how inclusive is the patent grant? A lot of companies don't want to go anywhere near that minefield, even with using GPL3 software internally, which suggests that it's a much bigger problem than the FSF doesn't want to discuss.

A lot of companies don't want to go anywhere near that minefield, even with using GPL3 software internally, which suggests that it's a much bigger problem than the FSF doesn't want to discuss.

Nonsense. The GPL terms have never applied to internally used software.

Besides, you make it sounds like discouraging companies that live on proprietary software & patents from using GPLv3 licensed code is somehow an unintended and unwanted consequence. The whole point of the GPL is to prevent proprietary software from capitalizing on Free Software. That they won't use it internally either sounds like a feature, not a bug.

When you find a virus that you have to voluntarily get infected by, let me know. Until then, is just biased language.

The language shows a lack of knowledge around what a copyright license is, and how it works.

Copyright prevent every distribution of copies and derivative works. A license is thus a permission, which permits distribution which otherwise is not permitted.

Any license is viral in that you must follow the license in order to distribute the copyrighted work. I can't just take a BSD licensed work, replace it with my own license, and ignore the BSD requirements. The license is my permission to distribute the work and if I ignore it, I am liable under copyright law.

Describing the permission as infective, restrictive, preventive and so on only show how completely fundamentalist the person is. You are given permission to use, copy and modify the program. If you feel infected by that choice, then I call that ungrateful and childish behavior.

I can't take 100,000 lines of my own code, link it against 10 lines of GPLed code, and re-distribute the result under a license of my choice. I have to use a variant of the GPL.

This is the viral aspect that your argument does not address.

I can't take 100,000 lines of my own code, link it against 10 lines of BSDed code, and re-distribute the result without respecting the BSD license.

This is the viral aspect that your argument does not address.

Yes, you can. You can release your code however you want. The BSD license applies to the code provided by the project that chose to license their code under it. You can choose to also license your code as BSD, but you are not required to.

If I ignore or remove the BSD license from the 10 lines, I am removing the permission I had to use them.

Its like if I buy a train ticket. If I throw away the ticket and write my own, I no longer have permission to enter. The permission is in the ticket.

The 10 lines will must always be under the BSD, and every time I distribute I must follow the conditions set down by the license. It infects the distribution of the work, regardless of I license the other 100,000 lines.

I know exactly how a license works. The GPL in its wording frustrates the distribution of free and open software precisely in its requirement that all derivative works by default must also be GPLed. This frustration is amplified when one wants to use a mutually incompatible license, like the CDDL. So yes, a license that makes it hard to cooperate with others is infective and judging by how many companies have avoided the GPLv3, is ineffective as well in encouraging sharing.

Referring to the GPL as viral isn't done because of the rules about redistributing or relicensing the original work. It's called viral because derivative works that I make which use or include the GPL'd code must also be GPL'd. It thus spreads to other projects due to proximity.

That is incorrect. Derivative works must respect every copyright license that is included in it, regardless of type.

A project can have BSD, Apache, MIT and GPL licensed software parts, and the derivative work must respect all the licenses when distributed. You can not "make" them GPL.

Trying to re-license something is like printing your own permission to enter a train. Its not only illogical, its illegal.

I'm not sure what you think we're debating here. I'm not talking about changing the license on the original work. I'm talking about other works which link against or include parts of the original. If you write ReallyCoolTool and license it as GPL, and I write AwesomeGUIApp, which invokes your tool behind the scenes, the GPL requires that I license my code as GPL. By contrast, if you'd used MIT or BSD or similar, I'd be required to comply with the original license when it came to your code, but could license my code as Apache or keep it closed source or do whatever. The viral nature refers to what a project's license does to other code that somebody down the road writes that utilizes the original GPL project.

> the GPL requires that I license my code as GPL.

And that is false. I can use ReallyCoolTool GPL library, and write a AwesomeGUIApp and license my written code as Apache. Nothing prevents me from doing so.

Each license a program use is a set of permissions with conditions in them. You can never choose to ignore a set of conditions, or you loose the permissions. This is why I started this whit "shows a lack of knowledge around what a copyright license is". A copyright license is, and can only be, a set of permissions to use a copyrighted work. Its not changeable, nor can it ever be removed by anyone except the author. The viral nature of copyright enforces this.

It is childish to go around and calling a particular set of permissions as viral. Be grateful for having permission, and stop cry about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_license

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pejorative

why is that statement irrational? GPL3 was intentionally changed to be more viral. I think it's creators have even used the terminology themselves. Calling GPL3 software infected seems like perfectly fair turnabout.

"I don't think we can have a rational discussion about this."

That might be, but it's not because the person you were replying to was wrong.

imo it's a valid observation - a cursory search revealed this really really old and spot-on HN comment[1]

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011426

From that comment:

>The GPL is infectious; any code that uses a GPL library automatically becomes GPL as well.

Wrong. Developers make a conscious decision to use a GPL licensed library. Their code does not "automatically" become GPL against their will. Licenses are not viral. It's a nasty, pejorative term used to attack copyleft.

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