Apple Open Sources Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch (Apple Insider) [LWN.net]

Apple Open Sources Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch (Apple Insider)

Posted Sep 12, 2009 23:34 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Apple Open Sources Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch (Apple Insider) by jzbiciak
Parent article: Apple Open Sources Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch (Apple Insider)

It certainly explains why they needed to automate thread pooling, doesn't
it?

But thankfully GCD is a hell of a lot more than just an automatic
thread-pooler, so it might be useful to the rest of us as well (as long as
we're willing to throw portability to the winds, or at least say that you
only get systemwide thread pooling if you compile with *this* compiler and
run *this* daemon).

to post comments

Apple Open Sources Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch (Apple Insider)

Posted Sep 13, 2009 8:07 UTC (Sun) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (4 responses)

Well. "useful to the rest of us" ends up being kind of conditional on the licensing - Apache v2 isn't compatible with GPLv2, so the code (as is) isn't likely to end up in any of the desktop stacks where it could probably be of most use. We'll have to see what happens with the concept.

Apple Open Sources Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch (Apple Insider)

Posted Sep 14, 2009 16:13 UTC (Mon) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (3 responses)

Citation for 'Apacher v2 is not compatible with GPL2?' I thought it was a permissive, essentially BSD-style licence with an additional grant of patent use, so it would be compatible with GPL in the same way the BSD licence is compatible.

Apple Open Sources Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch (Apple Insider)

Posted Sep 14, 2009 23:27 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (2 responses)

http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/ - search for apache license, version 2.0

Apple Open Sources Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch (Apple Insider)

Posted Sep 18, 2009 9:40 UTC (Fri) by trasz (guest, #45786) [Link] (1 responses)

It doesn't matter, because libdispatch accounts as 'system library' - see GPL FAQ for explanation what system libraries are and why GPL applications can link against them, regardless of their license. (For example, GPL-ed applications under Windows can link against Microsoft-provided DLLs.)

Apple Open Sources Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch (Apple Insider)

Posted Sep 18, 2009 13:10 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

The system library exemption only covers the case where you're distributing the code that uses the library separately. Traditional interpretation in the Linux world has been that this prevents you using this for a non-GPL compatible library if other libraries or applications in the standard install make use of it.