Bison 3.3 released

Posted Jan 28, 2019 8:38 UTC (Mon) by josh (subscriber, #17465)
In reply to: Bison 3.3 released by tshow
Parent article: Bison 3.3 released

As far as I can tell, most FSF command line tools in macos are whatever was more or less stable in 2006

$ curl -s https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bison/bison-2.3.tar.bz2 | tar xjOf - bison-2.3/COPYING | head -n 2
		    GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
		       Version 2, June 1991
$ curl -s https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bison/bison-2.4.tar.bz2 | tar xjOf - bison-2.4/COPYING | head -n 2
                    GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
                       Version 3, 29 June 2007

Apple ships the last version released under GPLv2. Apple seems allergic to GPLv3 for some reason.

Bison 3.3 released

Posted Jan 28, 2019 8:55 UTC (Mon) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link] (1 responses)

I noticed that too (I think it was during that shellshock thing).

I always told people that this must be Steve Jobs's ghost haunting Apple. It still can't get over that GCC/Objective-C thing back then in NeXT times (I worked in a strange shop, where the desktop folks were Apple acolytes and the backend folks Windows worshippers).

Of course this was in jest, but sometimes I think companies do develop traits which are somehow similar to those people develop -- pathologies and all.

I'd say GPL phobia. GPLV2 they've to put up with (but they shell out quite a bit of money to get rid of that too), but GPLV3... nono. That's too much ;-)

Bison 3.3 released

Posted Jan 28, 2019 17:58 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Lots of other companies have similar restrictions. For example, no consumer Amazon device ships with GPLv3.

Bison 3.3 released

Posted Jan 28, 2019 13:44 UTC (Mon) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

If they do not want to upgrade it, at least they could stop shipping it entirely.

Bison 3.3 released

Posted Jan 28, 2019 16:05 UTC (Mon) by zwol (guest, #126152) [Link]

Exactly. As of the original release of GPLv3, Apple's legal department believed that if they shipped any code under that license, they would have to make it possible for end users to install third-party patches to the core of iOS, because of the "anti-tivoization" language. So they didn't, and they still don't.

Source: I used to work for a company that had a contract from Apple to do maintenance on their fork of GCC. Right around the time the FSF started to circulate GPLv3 drafts for comment, Apple canceled our contract and plowed all the money into LLVM instead. This was the unofficial explanation they gave our sales lead.