Apple's Great GPL Purge, 2012
Mathew writes about the declining number GPL packages shipping with OS X:
- 10.5: 47 GPL-licensed packages.
- 10.6: 44 GPL-licensed packages.
- 10.7: 29 GPL-licensed packages.
- 10.8: 22 GPL-licensed packages.
- 10.9: 19 GPL-licensed packages.
- 10.10: 18 GPL-licensed packages.
- 10.11: 16 GPL-licensed packages.
- 10.12: 16 GPL-licensed packages.
As of 10.10 the remaining GPL-only packages seemed to be JavaScriptCore, bash, bc, emacs, efax, gnudiff, gnuserv, gnutar, groff, gpatch, keymgr, libstdcxx, man, nano, screen, texinfo, and uucp. […]
The remaining GPL-licensed packages aren’t too healthy either. Mavericks ships with bash 3.2. That’s from 2006. The current version is 4.2.10. Why no upgrade? Because Apple’s shipping the last version of bash that was under the GPL version 2. […]
There are two big changes in GPL v3. The first is that it explicitly prohibits patent lawsuits against people for actually using the GPL-licensed software you ship. The second is that it carefully prevents TiVoization, locking down hardware so that people can’t actually run the software they want.
So, which of those things are they planning for OS X, eh?
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