They accepted the sister LGPLv2 license as the basis of WebKit, and had other tools like Samba integrated. They may have avoided the GPLv2 when easy, but they outright banned GPLv3 (froze bash and gcc on the last version while working to remove them; wrote their own from-scratch CIFS implementation to drop samba).
They accepted those things because they had nothing else. The forked WebKit from KHTML, which was LGPL. It's not like they chose that license. Same with Samba. It was either take those things or invent something new. Especially at that point in Apple's history, they probably didn't have the resources to NIH everything. Today, that would be a different story, I'm sure.
I understand your point about outright banning GPLv3 vs just avoiding GPLv2. But I have to wonder what would have happened in an alternate timeline where KHTML, Samba, and GCC were all GPLv3 at the point in time where this universe's Apple adopted them. Would they have just skipped making their own browser and integrating with SMB?
