Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 18, 2015 7:22 UTC (Sun) by xtifr (guest, #143)
In reply to: Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft by drag
Parent article: Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

It's a very poor example. One project, entirely supported by a company that has a long-running hate on for the GPL in general, and the FSF in particular. A company that was forced to release the source to their Objective-C compiler years ago because they based it on GCC. The only company that has ever been the subject of an actual boycott by the FSF. There's no love lost between these two.

Apple loves permissive licenses, because the code can be incorporated in their proprietary software and third-party proprietary software. They want their customers locked down, tied in, in their little walled garden, with as little freedom as possible. Programmer freedom, they're fine with, as long as the users don't have any!

Even Microsoft and Oracle aren't as anti-user-freedom as Apple. Apple spins themselves as freedom-loving to developers, because they want to use third-party software to lure in more users they can lock down. Copyleft is a total threat to their goals, because it preserves the freedoms for users. So yeah, after their experience with ObjC, and given their hatred of user freedom, it's no surprise that they're willing to invest huge sums to try to knock GCC off its throne.

But it's a completely atypical example, for exactly that reason Suggesting that it shows anything about any general trends is utterly ridiculous.

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 18, 2015 8:53 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

> It's a very poor example. One project, entirely supported by a company that has a long-running hate on for the GPL in general, and the FSF in particular.
...a company that had absolutely no problem with GPLv2 and was contributing to GNU projects up until GCC switched to GPLv3.

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 19, 2015 1:07 UTC (Mon) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link] (1 responses)

A company that specializes in creating what is essentially Tivo-ized hardware, and is thus particularly opposed to the GPLv3. To the point of near-phobia. Ridiculously extreme near-phobia.

And even so, what does their feelings about the GPLv2 have to do with the fact that LLVM is heavily funded by a company that is firmly opposed to what the FSF is doing? Which makes it an extremely atypical example?

I mean geeze, way to completely miss my point!

(And, of course, if you've mainly been working with LLVM, you probably haven't noticed how much gcc development has accelerated recently. So even if it were a good example, it wouldn't be a very good one.)

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 19, 2015 2:54 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> A company that specializes in creating what is essentially Tivo-ized hardware, and is thus particularly opposed to the GPLv3.
You might note, that iPhone was barely out when Apple started switching to LLVM.

> And even so, what does their feelings about the GPLv2 have to do with the fact that LLVM is heavily funded by a company that is firmly opposed to what the FSF is doing?
And what does it have to do with the dynamics of non-copyleft projects? Of course, many contributors to BSD and Apache 2 projects are allergic to GPLv3. That's the whole point!

> Which makes it an extremely atypical example?
I have provided several more examples.

> (And, of course, if you've mainly been working with LLVM, you probably haven't noticed how much gcc development has accelerated recently. So even if it were a good example, it wouldn't be a very good one.)
Wake me up when someone starts to use GCC JIT in anger.