
Apple’s great GPL purge - jamesbritt
http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/
======
i386
Reposted here since it seems the page linked is no longer visible (at least
for me).

\------------

Apple’s great GPL purge

Posted on 5 February 2012 by meta Apple obligingly allows you to browse and
download the open source software they use in OS X. Since they have listings
for each version of OS X, I decided to take a look at how much software they
were using that was only available under the GNU public license. The results
are illuminating:

10.5: 47 GPL-licensed packages. 10.6: 44 GPL-licensed packages. 10.7: 29 GPL-
licensed packages. This clearly supports the idea that Apple is aggressively
trying to remove all GPL-licensed software from OS X. While the removal of
Samba and GCC got some attention, the numbers show that there’s a more general
purging going on.

The 29 remaining GPL-licensed packages aren’t too healthy either. Lion
apparently ships with bash 3.2. That’s from 2006. The current version is
4.2.10. Why no upgrade? Because Apple’s shipping the last version of bash that
was under the GPL version 2.

The message is pretty obvious: Apple won’t ship anything that’s licensed under
GPL v3 on OS X. Now, why is that?

There are two big changes in GPL v3. The first is that it explicitly prohibits
patent lawsuits against people for actually using the GPL-licensed software
you ship. The second is that it carefully prevents TiVoization, locking down
hardware so that people can’t actually run the software they want.

So, which of those things are they planning for OS X, eh?

I’m also intrigued to see how far they are prepared to go with this. They
already annoyed and inconvenienced a lot of people with the Samba and GCC
removal. Having wooed so many developers to the Mac in the last decade, are
they really prepared to throw away all that goodwill by shipping obsolete
tools and making it a pain in the ass to upgrade them?

~~~
knieveltech
Make no mistake, Apple could give a rat's ass about the developer community,
and why should they? We represent a vanishingly small fraction of the total
consumer space and we are orders of magnitude more demanding.

~~~
X-Istence
That isn't necessarily true. Xcode is a very awesome IDE, it has had its
growing pains but with the new clang based backend it can go far and fast. Not
being reliant on older and more stagnant and more tightly coupled GCC to get
there.

It is in Apple's best interest to have a compiler that is also used to do the
checking of code in real time within the IDE be the same. It makes more sense
because otherwise you get differing results in the IDE versus compile time. It
is within Apple's best interest to help developers develop and make it easy to
find issues, clang's output for errors are absolutely fantastic. If you type
something wrong it provides suggestions for what you may have meant (and most
of the time they are accurate).

I think Xcode is one location where Apple is showing that it does care about
developers by building a better product with better integrated tools (git for
example ...). Are there things we miss from the old Xcode, sure, but overall
it is clear that Apple understand they need to provide developers with tools
that help them get their job done.

\---

Clang though is helping the ENTIRE development community. It is an BSD
licensed compiler with some absolutely awesome features.

1\. Their human readable error messages. I've spent a lot less time Googling
random compiler failures or trying to parse GCC's or MSVC's output so that I
can understand it and fix the error (especially in heavily templated C++ code)
just by having the compiler give me human readable errors. This goes a long
way for a developer that misplaced a semicolon or is attempting to use a const
variable into some Boost code that expects a non-const variable thereby
causing thousands of lines of template errors to be thrown. 2\. The LLVM
allows for very interesting "languages" to be easily prototyped and tested,
and JIT compilation and a few other things can be created. 3\. clang can read
incomplete code files and make code completion suggestions. Not just tied to
Xcode, but as a library. clang_complete for Vim is absolutely fantastic and by
far my favourite Vim script.

\---

Why exactly should Apple be required to ship GPL versions of the software when
they could ship BSD licensed utilities without having to worry about being GPL
compliant. Just because a few people prefer the GPL version they can't remove
it from their system? They believe the GPL licensed tools to be inferior (and
with the GPLv3 causes more legal headaches than it is worth) and thus they are
replacing them with a set of tools that fit their requirements. Why does that
mean that they "could give a rat's ass about the developer community"? Why
exactly would they continue to develop clang/llvm as an open source project?

~~~
kamechan
"I think Xcode is one location where Apple is showing that it does care about
developers by building a better product with better integrated tools (git for
example ...)."

I guess this is a matter of opinion. Every time I am _forced_ (read: paid) to
use Xcode for some project, not only do I dislike the fact that I have to dig
out my macbook because Apple's tools don't work on any other platform, but I
find actually using them painful. It's been a few months since I've used it so
maybe times-are-a-changing.

The last time I used Xcode (4.0.1?), it still basically seemed that it was
using the iTunes container. Of course, I have no idea how much actual codebase
Xcode shares with iTunes. Apple is probably just trying to be visually
consistent between their products here. But I've never been a huge fan of
iTunes either. I find the menus and configuration painful.

Though it's apparent that I'm not a huge Apple fan, I'm not trying to troll
anyone here. Reading your statement, I saw your praise for their developer
tools and it really made me think about the fact that, while a lot of Apple's
hardware is competently designed, I'm not really a fan of their software
whatsoever.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single app they've written (besides
mail.app) that I like.

And kudos for them integrating git? Since pretty much every other developer
tool includes support for it, I wouldn't say this is all that exceptional.

~~~
jlarocco
The tools not working on other platforms isn't an Apple only problem, though.
Visual Studio is Windows only, and unless I'm missing something, there are no
good cross platform IDEs for C/C++ development. At least many of the
underlying XCode tools uses are cross-platform (clang, git, ...). It's more
than can be said for any MS dev tool.

~~~
bad_user

         unless I'm missing something, there are no good 
         cross platform IDEs for C/C++
    

For C++ there are no good IDEs period.

Not only are the IDEs buggy, not knowing what to do on even simple cases of
auto-completion, but working on huge code-bases like that of Firefox is
completely unfeasible, unless you deactivate all features that you'd expect
from an IDE, which is why many people working on such huge code bases are
better off with simple text editors, such as Vim and there are Vim/Emacs
enthusiasts even on the Visual Studio team, which says a lot.

Also, when comparing XCode to Visual Studio, well Visual Studio at least runs
on more than 90% of all desktops / laptops out there. And you are allowed to
install Windows in VMWare or other virtualization tools. And so you can do
development in Visual Studio even if you are on OS X or on Linux, granted with
some hoops along the way, but it is doable. AFAIK you are disallowed by the
license of OS X to install it as a virtual machine and even if possible,
companies such as VMWare / Oracle / Microsoft don't even make attempts at
fixing the problems with OS X, as that's not a use-case they can support.

    
    
         At least many of the underlying XCode tools 
         uses are cross-platform (clang, git, ...)
    

Visual Studio has one of the most potent plugins ecosystems out there.

There is Git integration with Visual Studio available:
<http://gitscc.codeplex.com/> ; Also, you can build your Visual Studio
projects with GCC or clang for example. There's even commercial support
available for debugging with GDB: <http://www.wingdb.com/>

~~~
simonw
"AFAIK you are disallowed by the license of OS X to install it as a virtual
machine"

That changed with OS X Lion - you're now allowed to run it in a VM, and the
various VM providers have support pages about it:

[http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?langua...](http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2005334)

<http://kb.parallels.com/112121>

~~~
mcosta
Apple now allows full virtualization of its operating system, provided that it
is installed on Apple hardware which is also running OS X 10.7.

Great!

~~~
berntb
Sigh, Apple makes most of their money on hardware. Deal with it, or not. (My
latest laptop is Linux only.)

------
sc68cal
Apple's failure to update GNU software was actively impacting the security of
OS X. Charlie Miller made mincemeat of OS X because of the sorry state of
security of 3rd party utilities (<http://rixstep.com/1/20080422,00.shtml>).

As Charlie Miller noted in his '07 BH presentation:
([https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-
usa-07/Miller/Pres...](https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-
usa-07/Miller/Presentation/bh-usa-07-miller.pdf))

How to Find a Mac OS X 0-Day:

1) Find some open source package they use that is out of date

2) Read the change log for that software

3) Find a good bug

4) Profit!

"The Samba on Mac OS X (on Monday) had an exploitable remote root
vulnerability in it...it hadn’t been updated since February 2005!"

If anything, Apple removing GPL software creates a better situation, because
fink/macports/homebrew will be available to pick up the slack and provide more
timely updates.

Plus, it seems like FreeBSD is trying to get rid of as much GNU stuff as they
can, so that more of what they release is covered under a BSD license (see BSD
grep, for example). It may be that Apple is just picking up some of these
changes from FreeBSD and doing a little bit of housekeeping on their end.

~~~
fluidcruft
> 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.

~~~
_delirium
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.

~~~
Cieplak
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...](http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-
current/2010-August/019310.html)

------
X-Istence
This comes as no surprise at all. At least to those of us who have been
looking at the various BSD projects, and how businesses are shunning the
GPLv3.

On paper the GPLv3 is awesome, but it adds some major restrictions that make
it unappealing to corporations. I did some contract work for a company whose
lawyers forbid the use of LGPL'ed libraries in their software even-though it
means re-inventing the wheel a couple of times or using inferior libraries.
They were deadly afraid that their code would somehow become infected and that
they would have to open source they wouldn't allow it. Quite a bit of the code
I ended up writing was later released under the BSD license free for use by
the world, and one could replicate their product with their own libraries and
a couple of weekends. (Company not named because 1, my name isn't attached to
it so it won't be easy to find, and 2, I am under NDA still)

Why wouldn't it be in Apple's best interest to use BSD replacements for GPL
licensed software if those are available and are comparable. Apple's
LLVM/clang compiler for example is available under a BSD license and even-
though they hired the project lead the entire project is still open source and
being openly developed. There has in the past (I haven't paid attention
lately) been code sharing between Apple's Darwin Kernel/Userland back to
FreeBSD and vice-versa.

The same movement to remove GPL licensed software is being done in two major
BSD based projects, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Both for very different reasons but
with the same end result. I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing, more
competition is a good thing.

I am still hoping that FreeBSD picks up the CIFS stuff that Sun released with
OpenIndiana because it works much faster/better compared to Samba and I've had
WAY less issues with it.

The GPL isn't so much fostering or creating an atmosphere for open source
development, it creates traps and makes it harder to use the end product.
btrfs will most likely never be available within any OS other than Linux.
Isn't that the opposite of what you'd want as an open source developer, isn't
the idea to spread your code as far and wide as possible, to have people use
it no matter where? ZFS by comparison is available in FreeBSD, it is now
available on Linux and Mac OS X. If I release something as open source I want
people to use it, modify it, play with it and spread it around as far and
wide. Would I like for people to contribute their changes, absolutely, but do
I think that forcing them to do so under a license is the best way to go about
asking for changes? No.

~~~
gillianseed
>'The GPL isn't so much fostering or creating an atmosphere for open source
development, it creates traps and makes it harder to use the end product. '

Of course it is, it actually ENSURES that the source code stays OPEN.
'traps'??

>'Isn't that the opposite of what you'd want as an open source developer,
isn't the idea to spread your code as far and wide as possible, to have people
use it no matter where?'

I believe a huge amount of programmers want to provide open source code to
open source code projects, not for proprietary projects. Which is why GPL is
such a popular licence.

Apple wants to incorporate open source into their proprietary products, that
is why they don't like GPL. Apple sponsoring Clang/LLVM development makes
perfect sense since they are stuck at gcc 4.2.1 due to not accepting GPLv3,
and they will eventually need to update their compiler toolchain (gcc 4.2
branch is old).

Don't take me wrong, I think Clang/LLVM are great projects and although the
compile speed advantage it had over GCC has diminshed greatly it's error
reporting/diagnostics is really 'best of class' amongst the compilers I've
used. The speed of the generated code lags behind gcc however, and it also
lacks advanced optimizations such as pgo (profile guided optimization).

I look at it as a great alternative, but GCC remains my main compiler
toolchain, partly because of the licence which ensures that all the
enhancements done to it will be available to me as an end user but also
because of the strong developer support it has from companies like Red Hat,
IBM, Google, etc employing full-time developers working solely on GCC.

~~~
paulhauggis
"I believe a huge amount of programmers want to provide open source code to
open source code projects, not for proprietary projects. Which is why GPL is
such a popular licence."

I really wish developers would stop calling the GNU "free". If you are
restricting the end user (IE: you can't use this in proprietary projects),
it's not freedom.

The BSD license is true freedom.

~~~
pgeorgi
The BSD license forces me to reiterate that license text (AND copyright
notices)! How dare they?

PD all the way.</sarcasm-attempt>

(By the way: The end user can use GPL code in proprietary projects - once end
users redistribute it, they stop being end users by definition, and only then
the GPL requirements kick in)

~~~
paulhauggis
"The BSD license forces me to reiterate that license text (AND copyright
notices)! How dare they?"

Compared to all of the requirements of the GNU, it's nothing. the GNU is like
finding out you built your house with nuclear material.

"(By the way: The end user can use GPL code in proprietary projects - once end
users redistribute it, they stop being end users by definition, and only then
the GPL requirements kick in)"

If you include GNU software in your proprietary app, the second someone asks
for your source code, you must give it to them. Once a user has the code, they
can compile it and release it for free (The general view of the OSS community
is that software should be free as in beer).

If your application is popular enough, this will happen and you will be forced
to either go out of business, move onto another product, or charge for
support.

It's okay though. It's just pushed app developers like me to only create web
services. The result? the end user pays me a monthly fee and need internet
access to use it. It actually makes it much easier for me to predict my future
earnings.

------
dorianj
>I’m also intrigued to see how far they are prepared to go with this. They
already annoyed and inconvenienced a lot of people with the Samba and GCC
removal. Having wooed so many developers to the Mac in the last decade, are
they really prepared to throw away all that goodwill by shipping obsolete
tools and making it a pain in the ass to upgrade them?

The answer is: all the way. I don't understand any other conclusion you could
draw from this. Other than a few non-essential command line tools (like
emacs), Apple will clean the system of anything they can't control.

A lot of code is shared between OS X and iOS, so the 'tivoisation' clause
means that they can't use GPLv3 on iOS, so best to avoid it on Mac OS X too.

Homebrew will still be around to install all the command-line goodies you
need. No pain in the ass required.

Regardless of Apple's goals in this action, a lot of the OSS world is moving
to permissive licenses, so this isn't a terribly surprising move.

~~~
nirvana
Interestingly, Homebrew is broken right now, at least for me, given that I've
installed Xcode 4.2 and it didn't seem to install GCC (instead installing
LLVM) while homebrew recipes seem to require GCC. (or at least homebrew is
complaining about it.)

~~~
falling
You can get it here <https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer>

~~~
piggity
I believe this installer is missing some headers (included in the OSX GCC)
which will break the install of various Ruby libraries.

If that's what you're into.

------
farmdawgnation
I don't really see any malicious intent here. I've started avoiding the GPLv3
myself just because it makes code that I publish harder for people to take
advantage of. What's the point of me writing some code if it's only going to
sit on Github, as if it were ment for some sort of museum?

Apache and MIT Licenses are generally my goto these days.

------
revertts
This is nothing new. A number of large companies avoid GPLv3 because the
potential of losing IP is too high; it's a difficult license to interpret, and
the legal implications of some of its clauses haven't been fully defined yet
(eg. what all is covered by "convey"?).

So, I wouldn't say that them avoiding it suggests anything sinister like some
of the posters are mentioning... they're probably just playing it safe.

~~~
Jach
You hit the nail on the head with the "convey" question. A fairly large number
of people think there's a good chance that the AGPL is redundant because the
GPLv3 is broad enough in its range of likely court interpretations. I've flip
flopped back and forth on the BSD/GPL side of the fence a number of times,
lately I've started moving back to BSD-land again. (Especially with things
like the "Do what the fuck you want" license, version 3.)

~~~
kevinpet
I don't buy that. I find it hard to believe that a court could find that a
slightly ambiguous clause means something so different from what the people
publishing their code under it understand it to mean. If AGPL didn't exist,
and if everyone using GPL claimed "convey" included a hosted service, then
there'd be a case. But given that AGPL exists, and given that the intent of
most people who use this license is not to prohibit hosted services, that's a
major stretch.

~~~
rsynnott
Interpretation of contracts is not necessarily based on intent, especially if
you're using someone else's contract, and especially if it's not a consumer
contract (where, in many cases, a contract deemed to be deliberately
misleading may not be valid).

------
getsat
Businesses don't like GPLv3 because... it's (arguably) bad for them. BSD
licenced software surges. News at 11.

~~~
moonchrome
>BSD licenced software surges. News at 11.

Actually if you listened to the GPL fanatics that are all over some tech
forums (note: I'm not implying that all people using GPL are fanatics, just
that there is a subset that's fanatical about it, ironically they are usually
technically ignorant) this shouldn't happen - instead everyone should just
"steal" BSD software and not contribute (let alone create) stuff back.

~~~
KaeseEs
This does happen, though. How much of Apple's kernel code has made it back
into other BSD kernels?

~~~
moonchrome
I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm saying there are reasons for
contributing to opensource and opensourcing your projects, other than being
forced by the license. Sometimes it doesn't make sense and in those cases GPL
forces the company to reinvent the wheel which is counter productive. And
there are business models that could rely on GPL to make them viable (offer
custom licensing for a fee for eg.) Point is GPL isn't the ultimate license of
opensource, and BSD is a viable license, which you won't hear from GPL
fanboys.

~~~
diminish
The number of BSD code sucked by proprietary code and never returned; causes a
great number of rewrites; you won't hear much of them; well because of the
closed nature of proprietary forks. That way BSD licenses are unfortunately
not good for the open source ecosystem, but I accept they are good for
proprietary projects or patent-users, commercial users.

~~~
moonchrome
But the point is that the proprietary code will be proprietary code even if
you GPL you just make the company that would use BSD licensed code rewrite it
(or steal it since there's no practical way of enforcing it - and unethical
company gets rewarded). There is no way to force a company to contribute if it
won't/can't. And GPL is all or nothing deal, BSD allows you to upstream
selective patches but keep some parts you can't/won't release.

------
forgottenpaswrd
What about Google's great GPL purge? Also called "Android".

Google modified all what was going to interface with the programs, like the
libc so they did not have to use GPL.

There is nothing bad on this, people is free to use whatever they want.

As a company, GPL sometimes is too restrictive.

------
rsynnott
He missed this one, which may also be problematic:

> You may not convey a covered work if you are a party to an arrangement with
> a third party that is in the business of distributing software, under which
> you make payment to the third party based on the extent of your activity of
> conveying the work, and under which the third party grants, to any of the
> parties who would receive the covered work from you, a discriminatory patent
> license.

This was intended to avoid situations similar to the Microsoft/Novell patent
grant agreement, but could have quite broad scope.

~~~
rhizome
It sounds more like they won't sign any non-exclusive patent agreements, like
an IP monopsony.

~~~
rsynnott
As far as I can see, the main case this covers is, for instance, say Apple
adopts GPLv3 Bash. IBM decided to sue over their patent on causing the letter
'w' to be displayed on a computer screen (or whatever). Currently, Apple can
do three things; fight it, settle, or stop using bash (the last is
impractical, of course). This clause of GPLv3 almost removes the settlement
option; IBM would be highly unlikely to license the patent to, not only Apple,
but anyone redistributing the redistributable source from MacOS.

For a slightly more realistic example (most of the GPL stuff Apple uses,
except for GCC, is not really all that vulnerable to patents), take the bluez
Bluetooth stack, used by Android. There's a very real risk that one of the
many holders of Bluetooth related patents may assert one against Google or
against an OEM over bluez, and in that case, if the patent was valid,
licensing it would be the obvious solution. This would work, because bluez is
GPLv2; it wouldn't necessarily work if it were GPLv3.

I can see what the FSF was going for with this clause, but it does make it
substantially riskier for companies to depend upon GPL(v3) components.

~~~
rhizome
_it does make it substantially riskier for companies to depend upon GPL(v3)
components._

I think we can call GPLv3 a success, then!

------
chj
I vote for BSD. If only I can enjoy good food, why should I care about the
recipe used? It is the working software that matters, I could not care less
for source code.

Open source is important only after the people working on the software decide
they will no longer work on it. From that point on, I do hope they open source
the whole thing so other people can carry on. However if we impose a GPL-like
license on the code, it may discourage people from taking the project full
time and doing more interesting stuff. Again, what matters most is the
survival of the software.

~~~
__alexs
> It is the working software that matters, I could not care less for source
> code.

Working software doesn't matter at all. It's your users interests that matter,
and GPL compatible licenses are the only ones that guarantee their freedom.

~~~
rimantas
There are hundreds of millions of users of Apple devices now. Ask them what
matters more: working software, or GPL compatible licenses.

Your first sentence is stupid beyond belief.

~~~
__alexs
> There are hundreds of millions of users of Apple devices now.

How is this relevant?

> Ask them what matters more: working software, or GPL compatible licenses.

This is a false dichotomy. Try harder.

~~~
stephencanon
Yes, that would be a false dichotomy. However, the post you quote does not set
it up as a dichotomy. My reading of it is that it asks the question "which of
these two things is more important?" I would suggest that it would be better
framed as "is the guarantee of future source access sufficiently important
that it effects their choice of tools?"

GPL advocates tend to believe that access to source is sufficiently important
to effect their choice of tools. You are entitled to that opinion.

There is clearly also a significant body of users don't particularly care
about access to source, and simply want tools that work. You may argue that
this is shortsighted, but they are entitled to that opinion. It is entirely
reasonable to discount future use of your tool of choice vs. current use of
your tool of choice.

There is a group of GPL advocates (not all of them, happily) who advance the
argument that this is because the people who don't care are stupid and/or
ignorant, and that if they only knew what the GPL advocates know, they would
of course have the same preferences as do said GPL advocates. This is an
incredibly egotistical position, without a place in serious discussion -- a
line of reasoning that requires the assumption that a significant population
is entirely irrational or entirely composed of people stupider than the
individual advancing the line of reasoning cannot be taken seriously.

~~~
__alexs
> I would suggest that it would be better framed as "is the guarantee of
> future source access sufficiently important that it effects their choice of
> tools?"

This is also a false dichotomy, although more cunningly hidden. It still
assumes that giving users source access is somehow a hindrance to the creation
of high quality software but Freedom and quality are orthogonal axises.

Removing freedom to see the source might not effect peoples choice it's self I
agree, but really why should it also effect the quality of the software?

The obvious answer is software developed within business models based on
vendor lock-in. However if you ask customers, "is the guarantee of freedom to
change suppliers sufficiently important to your choice of supplier?" You'll
get a very different set of answers.

> ...This is an incredibly egotistical position...

I agree.

GPL is not a license for developers, it's for users. In particular it's about
giving users the choice of who to work with, and making it easy for them to do
so. Whether that means modifying software themselves, directly paying people
to modify software or simply changing some URLs in a config file (e.g.
rsync.net) they have the freedom to choose. A freedom that is enforced
directly in the programs they use, not via convenient business arrangements.

~~~
stephencanon
> Removing freedom to see the source might not effect peoples choice it's self
> I agree, but really why should it also effect the quality of the software?

We are in violent agreement. Freedom to see the source is entirely orthogonal
to quality. However, the space of implementations is not fully populated;
there are domains in which there is only a (good, closed) solution and a
(poor, GPL) solution (this is in no way a criticism of the quality of GPL'd
software in general; there are also domains with only a (good, open) solution,
or where the GPL solution is significantly better than all competitors). It's
not unreasonable for some users to prefer the (good, closed) tool in that
situation.

------
alwillis
BTW, anyone who wants GCC for Mac OS X can easily do so using the OS X GCC
installer: <https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer>

~~~
scott_s
You can also just install XCode, which is free with the OS.

Yes, I know the complaint is that it's "too large" just for gcc and related
toolchain. But that's not true for me. I find it far, far easier to just
download one thing from Apple and install it, then to spend cycles of my own
to figure out how to save myself a little bit of disk space.

~~~
heresy
The new XCode 4.2 and presumably the next versions of it do not ship with a
real GCC, which is one of the things mentioned in the article.

This causes problems for software that doesn't compile right with LLVM yet
(arguably bugs in the software, but tell that to someone who can't use the
LLVM compiled binaries any more).

Eventually, the version of Xcode that includes GCC will be too old to do
anything useful with.

So then you wouldn't be able to "just install XCode", unfortunately.

~~~
X-Istence
They will ship with a different compiler, clang, and then with homebrew you
can compile and install GCC to your hearts content.

For all of my personal projects and projects at work I am using clang because
the errors and warnings it gives me are clearer, pinpoint the problem and it
compiles my codebase almost 30% faster than GCC.

------
redthrowaway
Apple's PC sales are a rapidly diminishing part of their business, and the
share made up by hackers far smaller still. They're perfectly happy to let
those devs for whom up-to-date tools and FOSS are important go elsewhere; look
at any college classroom and you'll see they have way more new customers to
replace them.

This isn't to say they'll actively discourage hackers from using their
products, but if it comes down to a product being hack-friendly or adhering to
Apple's core principles, hack-friendliness doesn't stand a chance.

~~~
YooLi
_"Apple's PC sales are a rapidly diminishing part of their business..."_

Flat out BS. Take a second and look up the numbers.

~~~
nilsbunger
Actually, it is true. In particular, profit-wise the Mac business is tiny,
less than 10% of profits. They could shut down Mac and you would barely notice
in their next earnings statement.

I wish it weren't so, because I love my Mac. But Apple's future is iOS, not
Mac OS. Maybe someday they'll merge and it'll all be one thing?

~~~
lisperforlife
Actually it would hurt their iOS market greatly. iOS devices are worthless
without their third party apps. And these apps can only be produced on a Mac.
In fact, I bought my Mac so that I could build iOS apps. If not for 3rd party
apps, it would simply boil down to the device, the software that Apple ships
with and the browser. Android devices will clearly win hands down in such a
scenario. Initially it would be the case of worse is better but over time it
would overtake iOS devices in terms of features and sales.

~~~
fpgeek
iOS apps can only be produced on a Mac because that's how Apple wants it. In
the unlikely event that Apple did decide to ditch the Mac, they'd port their
iOS developer tools to another platform.

~~~
nilsbunger
I think Apple's Mac roadmap is:

* Mac continues to evolve slowly, not have major innovations. Innovations that do occur will be on things that are aligned with iOS-like devices (like Launchpad, Mac App Store, Macbook Air's).

* Someday they will ditch Mac, when an iOS device can be used to (1) create new iOS apps, and (2) be a productivity machine (e.g. w/ keyboard / etc).

Those of us who like to poke under the hood will have to move back to Linux or
something else.

------
Hemospectrum
I wasn't aware Bash had also moved to GPLv3. Wonder how long till that gets
removed.

~~~
jrockway
Anything whose copyright is owned by the FSF and was GPL2 is now GPL3.

~~~
nilsbunger
Yup. Only option would be to fork from the last GPL2 release and evolve it as
GPL2.

~~~
Hemospectrum
More likely they'll just switch to a new default shell. Perhaps that will be
zsh, or perhaps they'll just go back to tcsh.

Or perhaps Terminal will no longer be installed by default by the time they
complete their purge.

------
vog
Unfortunately, the article is no longer available. The page shows "Access
Forbidden".

Google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-r0zoo9...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-r0zoo92bO8J:meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-
great-gpl-purge/+http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-
purge/&cd=1&hl=de&ct=clnk&client=iceweasel-a)

------
robbyt
Google's Cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-r0zoo9...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-r0zoo92bO8J:meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-
great-gpl-purge/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

~~~
danielson
Slightly shorter ...

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-r0zoo9...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-r0zoo92bO8J:meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-
great-gpl-purge/&strip=1)

------
ejfinneran
Everyone is battling over why corporations or Apple specifically doesn't like
GPLv3, and noone has mentioned Linus has said he doesn't like GPLv3 either and
will stick with v2 for Linux.

Linux is still shipping under GPLv2.

[http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-
stabl...](http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-
stable.git;a=blob;f=COPYING;h=ca442d313d86dc67e0a2e5d584b465bd382cbf5c;hb=dcd6c92267155e70a94b3927bce681ce74b80d1f)

------
binarycrusader
They're smart -- several organisations I know of stopped contributing upstream
to projects once they went GPLv3. They're now looking for BSD-licensed
alternatives and plan to contribute to them instead.

A few game development projects I follow also switched from LGPL licenses to
BSD licenses (and saw contributions go up!). (See SDL, Ogre3D, etc.)

It's actually kind of refreshing to see many people going back to the basics.

------
sudont
This isn't to say that Apple's implementations were that great, though. I know
a few IT techs happy to see something other than the buggy install of Samba
for CIFS.

Personally, Apple's exclusion of the "nounix" option in mount_smbfs was a HUGE
pain in the ass, to the point where I was a click away from submitting it as a
bug. Not that it got better with Lion.

------
pconf
OSX has always been based primarily on BSD-licensed open source. Obviously
they don't want their deep pockets to attract lawsuits. The lesson here should
be obvious, make the GPL too onerous and fewer companies will risk using it.
The FSF suing Cisco was an example that Apple took seriously.

------
idspispopd
This is a GPLv3 problem, and it's not limited to Apple. v3 is incompatible
with many existing business policies.

The trend of dumping GPL will continue in many of the for-profit tech
businesses.

------
wadesworld
GPL purge would be a good thing, since GPL has done more to hurt free software
than help it.

------
ck2
cache:

[http://google.com/search?strip=1&q=cache:http://meta.ath...](http://google.com/search?strip=1&q=cache:http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-
great-gpl-purge/)

------
TheAmazingIdiot
We only have the iPod, iPod touch/iPhone, apple TV, battery covers on newer
Apple laptops, and Apple's hardware for their computers to show where they are
headed. Some may accuse me of a slippery slope argument; I look at it as a
continuation of a linear regression and projection. And where that's going
doesn't look peachy.

It is a rather interesting point they do not have any GPL 3 software
distributed, and for probably for both the reasons stated. However, the way
the whole Mac feel is as it was a curated device (regardless the actual
platform). Both Apple and Microsoft seem to want to converge on a "trusted
platform"; where the trust is against you.

~~~
rsynnott
> Some may accuse me of a slippery slope argument; I look at it as a
> continuation of a linear regression and projection.

So, er, a slope-related argument of some sort, then. It could be friction-y, I
suppose.

~~~
nknight
"Slippery slope" is a specific type of usually-fallacious argument that relies
only on what is possible, not what is likely based on actual evidence and
trends. It's not a generic term for any argument that seeks to prove "X is
heading toward Y".

