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If the plan of those corporations was: getting the customers into a vendor lock-in... yes, it's bad for those corporations.

If the plan included putting hardware restrictions on software modifications, so that John had to depend on those corporations to modify the device that John bought... yes, it's bad for those money-sucking corporations [see what happened with "tivoization"].


This is not even real, instead of a long explanation, we can see the example of Linux distributions, plenty of GPLv3 software, and companies like Canonical, Novell, Red Hat, Oracle, etc that distribute them. I can tell you that they have lawyers :-)

Edited 2011-03-26 05:52 UTC

True. I also think history has shown us that sometimes companies need to be protected from themselves. The economy as a whole works best when there is more competition. The corporate modus operandi is to grow profits as large as possible, which leads to monopolistic behaviour, which would kill itself in the long run. Its like when an organ of the body becomes cancerous, its cells just want to grow and multiply but end up killing the whole body instead of improving the functioning of the body.

We need controls on corporate greed, for the sake of the good of all the corporations ( as well as the consumers, obviously). GPL V3 is such a control. The increased adoption of it, would be a good thing for many companies, including those that are afraid of it.

Agreed; from what I have heard SMB 1.0 was pretty much a walking disaster area with SAMBA and Microsoft programmers both screaming in horror when having to maintain it given that it was never cleanly documented from day one. SMB2 is a fresh start for all concerned, written from the ground up with all the parts properly documented and I'm sure Apple realised that the vast majority of people are running Windows Vista and 7 in the next couple of years so it would be best to focus on supporting the technology that people are and will be using than trying to maintain a horrible mess that should have been jettisoned years ago.

What I'd love to know is how does this affect their SMB implementation on Airport Extreme and Time Capsule? Will we see a firmware upgrade to SMB2 or will Apple do a silent refresh of their products to bring SMB2 to the said devices?

Hmmm.. so why is IBM, Red Hat, Novell, Intel, AMD, Google etc all contributing code to GPLv3 licenced projects such as GCC?


Please point me to the GPLv3 paragraph (or any other source of information) that says distributors have to indemnify GPLv3 software against patent violations.

What GPLv3 says is that if you contribute your patented code to a GPLv3 licenced project you can't turn around and sue the recipients for patent infingement, instead you grant the recipients the right to modify and redistribute your patented code. Again, show me the licence text pertaining to patent indemnification against patent violations. I sure haven't found any:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0-standalone.html

As for Apple not using GPLV3 (and not GPLv2) it's obviously because they want to incorporate the code into their proprietary products. Just like llvm in XCode, Webkit into Safari etc.

Back in the days of Next, Steve Jobs had his first brush with the GPL when he tried to use GCC as a frontend to a proprietary ObjectC backend, this wouldn't fly and after the threat of going to court Next decided to release ObjectC as GPL since they needed to use the GCC frontend, thus GCC got ObjectC support and everyone was happy, well apart from Steve Jobs/Next.

So it's not hard to see why Jobs went and supported llvm when the opportunity arised, but this ended up being a good thing (imo) since llvm is open source (and hopefully Apple will continue to send or their non-XCode related in-house patches upstream) and it also provides much needed competition to GCC.

So if Apple does indeed make their own Samba replacement open source then that's obviously great. If not then it's not like they were contributing to Samba anyway afaik.

You are cherry picking companies. I could list a thousand companies that don't. I believe that GPL is indeed bad for companies, but that's beside the scope of this issue.



How is GPLv2 different ot GPLv3 in this regard? The exact same restrictions apply. Apple has been able to work with (or around) them either by open sourcing their code (webkit, objc support in gcc) or by not directly linking with GPLed code (eg spawning new processes to use gcc and gdb inside Xcode).



Here we agree. Making a big deal about licenses is for zealots. If Apple makes the new implementation open source it's a win-win-win situation.

Where are you getting this? What anti-GPL FUD outlet did you read to get to such conclusion?