Xinuos sues IBM
Xinuos sues IBM
Posted Apr 2, 2021 10:04 UTC (Fri) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)In reply to: Xinuos sues IBM by anton
Parent article: Xinuos sues IBM
It's worth noting that at one point, Apple was actively looking at integrating LLVM with GCC under the GPLv2: Chris Lattner even e-mailed about it back in 2005 from his Apple e-mail. That work was rejected, in part for political reasons, and arguably is part of the back story to why Apple dislikes the GPL.
Posted Apr 2, 2021 12:19 UTC (Fri)
by foom (subscriber, #14868)
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It's quite clear from Apple's behavior -- although they've made no public statement -- that they dislike the GPLv3 _specifically_.
They were -- and are -- willing to ship GPLv2 code, but not a single smidgen of GPLv3. The mass relicensing was the immediate turning point at which they ceased updating all GNU software on their systems, and started rewriting or otherwise finding alternatives to everything.
The integration of LLVM and GCC being rejected/ignored is a much too low level technical issue to cause such a major direction change. I suspect that he only way in which these are related is that the integration proposal likely stopped being persued from Apple's side soon after being posted, as they realized the implications of GPLv3 (the first draft of which was released a couple months after this proposal!).
One might wonder what would've happened if they had successfully contributed llvm to FSF/GCC a year earlier, and it, too, had been relicensed to GPLv3...
Xinuos sues IBM