Again, this it's not like it's a tragedy, it's an opposite. Opensource will very much benefit from less freeloader companies like Apple, and less companies of lesser rectitude hanging around OSS projects.
Apples is free to go back 20 years, and copy *BSD userspace instead of GNU, which it used for 15 out of 20 years. They are completely free to chose Microsoft Trident instead kHTML for the browser engine. The are completely free to do the same for hundreds of other GPL libs they used in their commercial products.
They are 100% free to do that... If they can pull it out. The thing is they chose it, because they couldn't make anything else work.
Apples militantly opposes GPL, is a freeloader, was actively working around GPL legal language, and it uses DRM, and they are rumoured to be behind much of anti-GPL publicity campaigns. No, they are not good players at all, and will never be.
> Again, this it's not like it's a tragedy, it's an opposite. Opensource will very much benefit from less freeloader companies like Apple, and less companies of lesser rectitude hanging around OSS projects.
Is that so? Which examples do you have where Apple freeloads some GPL software? As far as I can tell Apple stopped adopting any GPL-3 code and effectively has stopped updating GPL-2 dependencies. They are in the process of completely removing it.
On the other hand Apple still contributes actively to a lot of non GPL licensed Open Source code including LLVM.
Apples is free to go back 20 years, and copy *BSD userspace instead of GNU, which it used for 15 out of 20 years. They are completely free to chose Microsoft Trident instead kHTML for the browser engine. The are completely free to do the same for hundreds of other GPL libs they used in their commercial products.
They are 100% free to do that... If they can pull it out. The thing is they chose it, because they couldn't make anything else work.
Apples militantly opposes GPL, is a freeloader, was actively working around GPL legal language, and it uses DRM, and they are rumoured to be behind much of anti-GPL publicity campaigns. No, they are not good players at all, and will never be.