
Apple's Great GPL Purge (2014) - indexerror
http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge
======
jordigh
I get the feeling everyone's purging the GPL, and I'm not sure this is a good
long-term goal. I still think we need legal protection against backdoors,
spying, and DRM; and our legislators have only given us copyright law to try
to perform legal judo with. We'll see how things work out, but I'm not
optimistic with the overall GPL purge. I fear that it's taking us to a world
where Black Mirror is a familiar reality instead of a fictional horror.

~~~
grzm
Can you expand on the relationship between the "overall GPL purge" and "a
world where Black Mirror is a familiar reality"?

~~~
jordigh
The GPL is a defense mechanism. OpenWrt is the source code for routers, which
are quite literally the gatekeepers of the internet. It was obtained via GPL
enforcement. It doesn't look like that would have happened without the GPL.

When source code is available, evil actors are just less likely to act evil.
Even if nobody is reading the source code, just the act of publishing it
psychologically nudges people towards acting less sociopathically. When people
feel watched, they are less likely to try to cheat others, delete their
ebooks, spy on them, or experiment on their emotions like Facebook did. This
happens even if nobody is actually watching; just the potential of being
watched is enough.

And people do need a nudge to publish source code. Sure, unimportant bits of
code that you don't really care about, that aren't core to your business, that
you'd rather have someone else maintain for you; that's when you really love
"open source" and you push your changes upstream and you look like a wonderful
community member. It's for the missing important bits, the secret firmware
blobs controlling our phone chips, our BIOS, our cars; even our refrigerators
and our light bulbs; that's when you need GPL enforcement.

I know hackers hate lawyers, but GPL enforcement rarely goes as far as
lawyers. The GPL is a deterrent, a firearm that anyone can use and almost
always remains dormant. People seem to be pushing towards legal disarmament,
MIT license everywhere. I don't think this is enough to deter bad actors.

~~~
grzm
Thanks for taking the time to put in such a lengthy reply. That said, I
respectfully don't see the relationship between the source code license and,
perhaps, what the software is used for, in particular, the social
ramifications of technology that Black Mirror often addresses. The anti-
sociopathic psychological nudge due to publishing source code doesn't seem
very compelling to me. I'm open to being convinced otherwise.

~~~
Ace17
> That said, I respectfully don't see the relationship between the source code
> license and, perhaps, what the software is used for, in particular, the
> social ramifications of technology that Black Mirror often addresses.

Because you might be assuming that the user always controls the software.

However, as long as the source code is kept secret, the
developers/distributors also have some level of control on the users. It
becomes possible (and easy) to insert malware-like stuff in the software (i.e
things unwanted by users, like tracking/spying, license checks, forced
upgrades, feature removal, remote file removal, malware installation, etc),
allowing black-mirroresque situations (software or devices forcing you to
watch advertisements before you can watch what you wanted, complete history of
your browsing).

If the program is licensed under a free software license, it implies that the
source code is public and modifiable. It makes these things are a lot harder
to hide, and a lot harder to keep enabled.

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payne92
I think GPL has served its purpose, leaving a healthy ecosystem of open source
software along with professional acceptance of the model.

Now, paradoxically, GPL is less free than many open source licenses. The GPL
restrictions will limit adoptions, as we're seeing here.

Stated differently, GPL was an important starting "assist" that's now slowing
us down. It's time to turn it off.

~~~
candiodari
GPL is not about maximizing adoption, it's about maximizing freedom of your
work and anything based upon it. It's about not having your work just stolen,
embraced and extended, monopolized, and disappeared.

~~~
greyman
> GPL is not about maximizing adoption, it's about maximizing freedom of your
> work and anything based upon it.

Yes, but you should add that you are talking about the RMS definition of
freedom, not about the word freedom as it is generally understood.

~~~
aikah
GPL ensures GPL softwares remains free of charge for the user. It isn't
concerned with the person that tries to make money with GPL software. it's
free as liberty, not free as "free market", though it gives the user freedom
of choosing free software instead of paid one.

~~~
insulanus
Not quite. The GPL ensures that GPL software remains free to audit and modify
in perpetuity.

It says nothing about the cost of the liscense to the end user of the
software. It's confusing, because you may think "I have the source, I can just
compile it for free". But the reason that you have the source (and the binary,
in some cases), is that most GPL software is also offered free of charge.

As a side note, it's more practical to get usage of a piece of software with
the restrictions of the GPL used, if the software is also available free of
cost.

Damn it, we need a different word.

~~~
marcoperaza
Given that the first purchaser can just turn around and resell or give it away
for free, the fact that you can charge is meaningless and pedantic.

~~~
cyphar
There exist many companies that charge money for free software, please stop
perpetuating this misrepresentation of reality. This business model has
existed since the very beginning of GNU (with RMS himself selling physical
copies of the Emacs source code).

~~~
CodeWriter23
Please stop perpetuating this misrepresentation that you can pay big bucks for
RedHat Enterprise Linux or get the exact same software for free if you're
willing to accept a name change to CentOS.

~~~
cyphar
You're confusing the meaning of the word "free" here. It refers to freedom,
not price. RHEL and SLE both are free software distributions (mostly) and so
you have the legal right (as per their license) to distribute the software.

~~~
marcoperaza
Right, which means that they can't base their business on selling copies of
the software. They make money by selling support and access to supplemental
(proprietary) resources.

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pjmlp
Google is doing the same.

They just gave a death sentence to GCC on the NDK, by declaring it as
deprecated and it will only stay around until clang support catches up with
GCC.

Brillo has even less GPL components than Android and in Fuchsia I imagine not
a single one, given that they are even doing their own micro-kernel.

~~~
cdibona
This isn't the case, we use and release plenty of gplv2/3 code and LK was
permissively licensed before it was adopted by the Fuschia people.

GCC wasn't given a death sentence, we are just moving on to llvm. GCC devs
have been moving to llvm for years and not because of the license. I'm sure
DannyBee will say something about this down thread..

~~~
pjmlp
It might be the case, but it surely looks like something else from the
outside.

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pmb777
Is it really a "purge" if they do it over a decade? Seems like more of an
"obvious preference".

~~~
X86BSD
It takes a long time and lots of work to replace things like the gcc
toolchain, purge pour code of gcc'isms, test, debug, add missing or equivalent
features.

~~~
ksherlock
Xcode 4.0 (2010) was the last version to include gcc; it's been gone since 4.1
(2011)

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0x0
Could it be they avoid GPL3 just because they don't want to release their
Apple Inc code signing keys?

~~~
huxley
Why is Linux still licensed as GPLv2? There can be many valid reasons to not
want to move to GPLv3 beyond hating software freedom.

~~~
rincebrain
Linux is under GPLv2 explicitly, not the "GPLv2 or later" that a number of
projects adopt.

Linux also doesn't require copyright assignment, so there's no one entity that
could change the license - it would be an enormous PITA, and a number of
people would refuse for various reasons (people doing work for companies that
chafe under the TiVo clauses or the patent clauses...)

Plus, Linus himself likely wouldn't relicense his contributions, so that's a
nonstarter. [1]

[1] -
[http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0601.3/0559.html](http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0601.3/0559.html)

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oneplane
It's that that big of a deal actually. You can still disable SIP, you can
still override kernel extension signing (and signing on pretty much anything
else), and you can sill install any GPLv3 software you want. It's just the
default base install that has changed, and everyone knows there is no one-size
fits all. While there are plenty of commercial reasons to not go beyond GPLv3
from the vendor point of view, it doesn't really change anything for "us".
Even if we had a stable bash from 2015, we'd still want the 2016 version and
install it anyway...

~~~
tobltobs
Just out of curiosity (never used a Mac), how to you install all those
versions you need? Via a package manager or from source?

~~~
bearand
There are lots of options, but Homebrew ([http://brew.sh/](http://brew.sh/))
is the most popular package manager for macOS.

------
ksec
Wait a min, as far as I can tell this is a GPL v3 Purge? That is huge
difference.

~~~
rincebrain
I can't be sure without looking up the lists of older software that was
removed, but while almost all of the remaining packages he's listed are now
GPLv3 upstream, I don't think the majority of software decided to do the GPLv3
conversion - Samba, or anything that's actually under the GNU project,
certainly, but I'd be surprised if all the packages (or even 99% of them)
happened to have all relicensed under GPLv3.

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acqq
Were there the changes since 2014? Anybody knows?

~~~
ksherlock
> JavaScriptCore, bash, bc, emacs, efax, gnudiff, gnuserv, gnutar, groff,
> gpatch, keymgr, libstdcxx, man, nano, screen, texinfo, and uucp.

as of 10.12 (opensource.apple.com not yet updated):

gnutar replaced by bsd tar

keymgr gone?

efex gone?

(gnu) make is also included

~~~
saurik
JavaScriptCore seems to have been almost entirely relicensed under APSL; there
are at most just two or three files still under GPL (involving date parsing),
and in many configurations those are no longer compiled.

~~~
bdash
JavaScriptCore code is either LGPL or BSD licensed, depending on whether it
derives from the original KJS source base or is new code written by Apple.
There's no APSL code in JavaScriptCore last I checked.

------
paulddraper
What?!?

Apple is getting rid of Bash? When?

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X86BSD
It's not just Apple. FreeBSD for the last several years has been purging
itself of GPL software as well.

Going so far as to go through the pain of yanking out gcc for the llvm suite
for the OS and ported applications.

~~~
eltoozero
FreeBSD (and the other BSD flavors) are under the _BSD_ license, no?

~~~
Rusky
The software they originated, yes. Software they got from elsewhere (like
GCC), not necessarily.

~~~
X86BSD
Correct. But they used the gcc compiler toolchain, plenty of GPL gnu utilities
and libraries.

All replaced with BSD licensed rewrites now.

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IBM
I really liked this last bit given the reaction to the MBP:

>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?

Seems like developers have been overstating their importance to Apple forever.

~~~
pjmlp
> Seems like developers have been overstating their importance to Apple
> forever.

Apple cares about developers, those that love and enjoy writing applications
for Apple OSes.

The ones that were there in the good and bad days.

Those that jumped into Apple OS just when they coincidently had a UNIX with a
pretty UI because they choose not to get Be instead, not so much.

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yuhong
The fun thing is that Mac OS X don't have the same restrictions as iOS.

~~~
toyg
A default OSX install these days will only allow sandboxed installs from
AppStore, or unsandboxed from developers registered with Apple. The jump from
that to "only Appstore" is not that big and sooner or later will happen, it's
mostly a commercial issue. Some time after that, the various options to change
these policies will go away, and you will be left with something very similar
to iOS in terms of lockdown.

Seriously, mobile dragged us back to the bad old days of the '80s and
basically made sure IBM clones and DOS couldn't exist. We're all screwed.

~~~
pjmlp
I had fun in those days.

The computers were a packaged experience of hardware and software, designed to
work together.

Hence why people have found memories of their 8 or 16 bit systems, while most
might not even remember how their MS-DOS systems looked like or what OEM brand
it was.

~~~
CodeWriter23
I know. And then came the malware.

~~~
pjmlp
Which doesn't have anything to do with PCs, MS-DOS and being open.

