Mono Relicensed MIT

Posted Apr 6, 2016 17:08 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Mono Relicensed MIT by pboddie
Parent article: Mono Relicensed MIT

That was in 95 or so. And they decided to contribute to it. After that Apple contributed quite a lot to GCC, Samba and other projects.

All of this has stopped after GPLv3 switch.

Mono Relicensed MIT

Posted Apr 6, 2016 19:09 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (9 responses)

I think you're getting things backwards. Apple contributed to GCC because there were no other compilers to use at the time and the GPL forced them to release the source if they wanted anyone else to actually use the language. If it weren't GPL, I'm sure Apple would have kept it secret. If something like clang had existed in the 90's, the GCC with the GPL wouldn't have even been on the drawing board. The GPL allowed the community to benefit from Apple's contributions which it otherwise is highly unlikely to have done. I think you keep forgetting that the GPL's main goal is to empower users, not developers.

Mono Relicensed MIT

Posted Apr 6, 2016 20:06 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (8 responses)

> If it weren't GPL, I'm sure Apple would have kept it secret.
Like, you know, clang? That they developed fully from scratch?

> I think you keep forgetting that the GPL's main goal is to empower users, not developers.
By keeping them off iStore. I know.

Mono Relicensed MIT

Posted Apr 6, 2016 20:11 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (7 responses)

They have patches which aren't upstream. Xcode's clang version scheme does not even follow upstream (and is usually based off of some random mid-release cycle revision).

Yeah, it's totally the GPL's fault that the ToS Apple drafted years after the GPL was created is incompatible with the Apple ToS.

Mono Relicensed MIT

Posted Apr 6, 2016 20:32 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (6 responses)

> They have patches which aren't upstream.
They are pretty trivial.

And they open sourced the whole thing, even though they could have kept it closed. Think about it.

Mono Relicensed MIT

Posted Apr 6, 2016 20:43 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (3 responses)

Are they? Do you have a link to them?

And I really don't understand how a handful of applications being FOSS really absolves Apple of all the crap they sling at FOSS everywhere else.

Mono Relicensed MIT

Posted Apr 6, 2016 21:12 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

> Are they? Do you have a link to them?
They usually have some internal changes for iOS builds that take some time to be cleaned up and pushed to the mainline clang which has a very linear development model (they still use SVN).

But hey, that handful of patches totally make all of the contributions to clang and WebKit completely irrelevant.

> And I really don't understand how a handful of applications being FOSS really absolves Apple of all the crap they sling at FOSS everywhere else.
A 'handful'? Really? If you want to do mud-slinging then why not call all FSF products something like "insignificant trinkets" or "obsolete obsessions"?

Mono Relicensed MIT

Posted Apr 10, 2016 7:54 UTC (Sun) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (1 responses)

WebKit is lgpl so they have to make it public - we wouldn't have that entire ecosystem without the license.

They opened CLANG for the same reason MS here opens Mono: to fight competition and strengthen its position and ecosystem. Same reason Google made Android open source. And once the ecosystem has crushed the competition, they close it off and strengthen their control, just like Google is doing with android now. Not impossible with the GPL, for sure, but far easier with a more 'business-friendly' license.

Mono Relicensed MIT

Posted Apr 10, 2016 20:46 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> WebKit is lgpl so they have to make it public - we wouldn't have that entire ecosystem without the license.
And now WebKit is mostly Apache2. The few remaining LGPL pieces are not used by Safari anymore.

Yet it's still alive.

Mono Relicensed MIT

Posted Apr 8, 2016 0:09 UTC (Fri) by lsl (subscriber, #86508) [Link] (1 responses)

>> They have patches which aren't upstream.
> They are pretty trivial.

You mean as trivial as their ARM64 compiler backend that they kept closed and only released when the merging of an other, independently-developed, competing backend into upstream LLVM was imminent?

Mono Relicensed MIT

Posted Apr 8, 2016 1:39 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Yes, like this. They promised to do it once it is production quality and ready for release. And did just that:

> A number of you have asked about the 64-bit CPU in the iPhone 5s, and what that means for LLVM. The iPhone 5s is based on the ARMv8 / Aarch64 instruction set, but the clang compiler in Xcode 5 is based on a custom LLVM Aarch64 backend, not the one currently on llvm.org. Apple is committed to contributing its Aarch64 backend to the community (merging it "the right way" with the existing backend), but it was a significant amount of work, and will take at least several months to work out all the details. I'll keep you posted.