"Thanks to pirates, or rather the fear of them, the Intel edition of Apple's OS X is now a proprietary operating system. Mac developers and power users no longer have the freedom to alter, rebuild, and replace the OS X kernel from source code. Stripped of openness, it no longer possesses the quality that elevated Linux to its status as the second most popular commercial OS."
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-10-02
True freedom? *LOL*
GPL would not have forced Apple to anything at all. They can change their license whenever then want, to the extent they are the copyright holders. If they're not the copyright holders, then of course they don't have that right (according to the GPL), but that's only fair when they are gaining from other peoples free work 
But one can ALWAYS change the license term for the future, for all code where one is the copyright holder.
The BSD does not allow me to change who is the copyright holder. It does however allow for sub-licensing (which the GPL doesn't, I might add).
Mac OS X isn't Unix btw.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2006-01-16
> GPL would not have forced Apple to anything at all
Sure it would have, because Apple was not the copyright holder. This discussion was not about which license _Apple_ chose, but about wether Apple would have chosen another kernel (like Linux) if it wasn't GPL. That was the starting point of the whole discussion as you can read back.
Member since:2006-01-23
Actually... if you GPL a version of your software, for ease of use, lets call this version 1.0. So you have version 1.0 of MegaProggy GPLed, people like it, yada yada yada. Now you develop a new version that you will release as 2.0 of MegaProggy. However, you decide you don't want it to be GPL any more, you want it to be proprietary software (closed source). Well thats too bad. version 1.0 is GPLed and version 2.0 is a derivative work of 1.0 and thus cannot be closed source. However, you could make version 2.0 licensed under a GPL compatible license.
The only way to move GPLed software to closed source is to start over from scratch.
Member since:
2005-07-12
Its because of the fact it was BSD licensed, Apple has the true freedom to decide not to share should they choose not to. With the GPL it would have forced Apple to do something it didnt want to do. But the truth of the fact is that Mac OS X is just another UNIX fork.
" Well that's what can happen when software is BSD (or BSD compatible) licensed. With the GPL this couldn't have happened. Please, let's dont turn this into another flamewar though, i do not mean to too, just stating the facts."