On Oct 25, 2011, at 8:51 PM, Simon Wise wrote:
On 26/10/11 01:29, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
The Apple App Store is incompatible with the GPL and LGPL, from
what I understand. Getting Apple to make their App Store compatible with
the GPL and LGPL is another much better solution since it will work for all GPL
and LGPL software.this is of course the best solution ... but it seems that Apple is
deeply opposed to GPL and all it represents, they have always been
happy to use Open Source code, and contributed some too, but have
stuck to BSD licensed code where-ever they can, and only used GPL
stuff when they had no other choice.They seem to object to the idea that using open source code should
require a reciprocal release of their own improvements and would
rather use the work of others, but keep their own contributions
secret and for their profit only.This is quite a common attitude, and I assume the reason a lot of
companies prefer BSD code. But I believe that the reason Linux is as
strong as it is is exactly because of its license ... any
corporation (or any individual) that wishes to use Linux legally and
distribute their version must do their part and publish their
improvements.
This isn't entirely true with Apple, but it is becoming more and more
true. Apple has done some real contributions to free software, WebKit
is one good example, though they forked off of KHTML in a bit of a
punkish way. Then they merged the BSD parts of Mac OS X with FreeBSD
so its the same code base. They paid Daniel Steffen to port Tcl/Tk to
Cocoa as well. They also contribute to gcc, which is GPL software,
and its their main compiler for both Mac OS X and iOS.
Then came iOS, and they got crazy.
.hc
Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It's a tactic.
It's about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and
expect we're going to win that war. We're not going to win the war on
terrorism. - retired U.S. Army general, William Odom