> Apple can't use nano because it's licensed as GPLv3
This isn't true. There's nothing in the GPLv3 that says Apple can't ever use it. Apple doesn't want to use GPLv3 programs, because they don't want to stop committing the bad behaviors that it disallows.
> Hmm, I've been curious why Apple switched back to Pico. I'm sorry they seem to have declared war on GPL software, but this seems to be recent revelation. For years OS X distributed nano with seemingly no issues. What changed?
What changed is the GPLv3. Apple was fine to ship software that was under the v2 of the license, but that changed when the v3 was released and most (all?) GNU software jumped to it. (This is all leaving aside why Apple lawyers chose to go this route.)
I thought i read that new macOS version will ship with zsh by default. I have been a happy zsh user for years, but didn’t know why apple would change, as zsh is not as widely known as bash.
But the license might explain this, thanks.
There’s a similar probably-unwarranted-on-paper fear of GPL in other ecosystems but I think GNU/Free Software advocates are often eager to reinforce the fear, presumably for ideological reinforcement. I’ve avoided GPL dependencies in my own projects because of express concerns in the team despite the fact that I don’t need a lawyer to know we’d be in compliance with the licenses.
The thread is interesting for other reasons, mostly OP ignoring obvious solutions offered by respondents and what would look like an implicit demand from Apple if OP didn’t seem so personally interested in the outcome.
It’s also interesting because the responses are surprisingly consistent in minimizing potential conflicting views and generally just encouraging free use and appropriate upstream contribution, a stark contrast to how a lot of FOSS advocates present this divide.
> mostly OP ignoring obvious solutions offered by respondents
Which obvious solutions? The only one I saw getting ignored was the suggestion to use MacPorts. That's great for a machine, but I was under the impression OP wanted nano to come back in a future version of macOS for all machines.
I’ve heard that Apple employees are banned from installing GPLv3 software on their work machines (maybe someone who has worked there can confirm?), so this may be more relevant for Apple employees than actual users of MacOS who can just get nano from a third party package manager.
Not quite true, though while I was there, many fellow employees misunderstood the rules to mean that you couldn't use GPL software on your machine. At least as of a few years ago, the official ruling was that any open-source software _required_ for you to do your job had to be approved by an internal oversight group of sorts, and GPL and AGPL software was right out. You could, however, use any open-source software you wanted (including GPL and AGPL) so long as it was (1) for personal use, (2) not absolutely mandatory for you to do your job (e.g. some niche software or library propping up your employment), and (3) there was some other alternative tool that you could use if necessary.
So, for instance, a GPL-licensed git client like GitUp[1] was fine to use, and didn't require clearance. You could totally also install a newer version of Nano if you wanted, too.
But, the rules _were_ somewhat vague and scary-sounding, so many engineers I worked with took the rules to mean "absolutely no GPL software under any circumstances".
What email is actually talking about is the option to bundle Nano _with the OS_, which Apple can't do with GPLv3 software. That's why for years, for example, macOS has had an absolutely ancient version of bash (before the license was updated to GPLv3), and switched to zsh in newer versions of the OS.
> You could, however, use any open-source software you wanted […] so long as it was (1) for personal use, (2) not absolutely mandatory […]
So, you could use any text editor you feel like, but if the project you are writing required a GPLv3 compiler, that would be a problem? That makes sense.
Slightly confused: I use the nano command on my Macs all the time, without manually installing it. Does that command point to a technically separate implementation ("pico"?), or am I missing something else?
Well. No surprise GPL is dying.... where it was dominant license 20 years ago when I started with Open Source/Free Software.
If you goal to maximize adoption and really your user freedoms it is no good to force them to release changes under the same license as GPL tries to do. And many companies found out maintaning their own fork is costly anyway and so it ofen makes sense to contribute to upstream.
If your goal is to ensure there is no commercial derivatives... with raise of the cloud for many classes of software GPL became useless for protection, this is why we see raise of SSPL etc.
I don't see GPL dying, Linux is GPLv2 and Google uses it everwhere.
When I contribute to OSS (which I don't do frequently enough...) I feel certainly better if it's under GPL than a permissive license. Why should my voluntary work support a business model like Apple's? (Not that I like Google's business model either, but at least they play fair with GPLv2 AFAIK.)
What license gives the end user more freedom to do what they want with the software? That's what the gpl is about, not adoption or "contributing back".
I am not a fan of Stallman/FSF. But to the op I'd like to reply: Use an operating system from a ifferent vendor if you are not happy with the current one. Or buy the apps you want. You can't ask for free (as in beer) under your terms. What would you answer me if I told you we are short of hands in my project, you should accept a couple of implementation issues?
You can literally just install it yourself if you want. Who cares what the OS provides. Unless Apple has a policy prohibiting installing any GPL software.
This. My linux distribution provides nano, but I still install it myself to get the latest version. If someone knows about nano and wants to use it, I don't get why this is a problem.
In fact, similar thing happens with vim. It's not installed by default on my distro of choice (mint). You have to apt install it.
Yeah, "I'm not speaking for the company" won't hold up (as Apple sees it) when the email is written using their systems and sent from their domain. This is equivalent to writing a letter to a newspaper on paper with the company logo on top.
Most companies have an "anti-soapbox" policy as part of their social media and public posting guidelines that specifically disallow expressing opinions (positive, negative, or neutral) using company identifiers without running it by PR and Legal, first.
I wonder how this works with members of the Google Chrome team, for example, discussing roadmap questions on Google Groups.
I enjoyed the post and this is off-topic but when I was younger I was very pro-GPL and I still like copyleft, but to me the logic behind it makes less and less sense as time goes on. RMS compares software to a physical book you can modify, make copies of, and share with your friends, but in my opinion, software is much more like a power drill, a tool you can modify with difficulty and let people borrow. The analogy for software as media is also ironic because the FSF themselves claim that the GPL is not intended for media works and recommend other licenses (like Creative Commons which I support).
I do like the idea that GPL prevents big corps from taking advantage of programmers, but the idea that a GPL program is inherently better than a proprietary program written by an independent developer no longer makes sense to me, though independent proprietary software is often abandoned. But more importantly, it doesn't seem fair when a company makes an AGPL devops tool and then a bigger corp just sells that product as a service. When companies like MongoDB decide to change their licenses so that Amazon doesn't steal all their customers, I don't feel bad about it at all. I have no skin in this game but it blows my mind that there are FSF people who defend massive corporations essentially reselling a smaller company's work solely for the sake of ideological purity. Someone can correct me if I've been misinformed here.
This is not a barrier. Amazon is perfectly able to publish their changes if any. Because the moat is that its hosted inside AWS at a button click. They can also host it for cheaper as they don't have to pay anything to develop the product.
Then why did Mongo relicense? I assumed that AGPL was not enough to maintain their business which is why they are now using a more extreme form of AGPL that is no longer considered Free.
You can fully, legally use AGPL software as Amazon was doing as long as you follow the licensing terms.
Which doesn’t help the FOSS developers extract money out of the cloud users because they can just use the free (for whatever value of ‘free’ Amazon provides) bundled version without any support contacts or whatever.
If your entire business model is based on giving away the software you can see how this might be a problem, no?
Are you disagreeing with me or just giving more detail? Because I think that's what I was saying. My opinion is that this is not fair to a company like MongoDB.
For clarification: MongoDB is still Free as in beer, but not free as in Libre. IOW, Anyone can use MongoDB without paying money, but they cannot offer it to others as-a-service without providing the entire stack of hosting software back to the community. And of course AWS won't do that. So therefore the license is not 'free' to AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.
I think this is a reasonable take. To add a slightly more unreasonable one to it,
I would rather just never read GPL source fullstop. I don't want the copyleft to taint me and inadvertently reproduce copyleft code where I can't, so I will just avoid reading it entirely. I try to avoid using GPL libraries entirely if I can help it since inevitably I may need to circle back and read some of the source.
It's an interesting idea and I cheer those who manage to live in an ideologically pure bubble but I don't think it's fair to say GPL is strictly more free than BSD/MIT.
> Apple has been moving away from the direction of openness and toward absolute software and hardware control for a long long time, presumably proportional to the amount of market share they maintained at the time - i.e. embracing open standards and software as the little guy in the late 90s, stomping them out as much as possible now as a market leader. I sincerely hope this is not a surprise to anyone on this list.
> Apple's Terms of Service impose restrictive limits on use and distribution for any software distributed through the App Store, and the GPL doesn't allow that. This specific case involves other issues, but this is the one that's most unique and deserves explanation.
Apple's desire for complete control over their walled garden is incompatible with the GPL.
Not sure. Probably the anti-tivoization clause is worse from Apple's perspective. Definitely for iPhones. It would mean that the user can update their phone firmware after they have modified a GPLv3-licensed component. Whether they would affect Macs in any way I don't know.
> Is it that if they make changes to the nano source code they would have to disclose them back to us? Too bad if so, that's the entire REASON Free and Open Source Software is so successful
On the contrary, this sense of entitlement of requiring access to source of modified code just because someone used the open source project is what drives people away from GPL.
This isn't true. There's nothing in the GPLv3 that says Apple can't ever use it. Apple doesn't want to use GPLv3 programs, because they don't want to stop committing the bad behaviors that it disallows.