• pelya@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I’m pretty sure Apple and Google already rewritten all important GNU parts into something with Apache or BSD license, to throw everything GPL licensed out of their embedded systems. The biggest and most important part was obviously GCC, replaced by Clang.

    How many GPL-licensed system libraries and tools are in Android right now, except for the kernel? I’m pretty sure the answer is zero.

    • mariusafa@lemmy.sdf.org
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      3 months ago

      Clang and the LLVM with BSD like licences so we can get the 80’s suing experience of UNIX yet again.

      It’s impressive how many people in the FOSS community hate GNU. Even to the point of creating OSes without GNU in it. Working for free for companies just to get their contributions stolen or expunged.

      Apple loves Open Source, they can stole it as they like, like they did with Darwin (a derivation of XNU). Everything is open until we no longer want to, and you don’t have any right to desist such actions. This sounds like a dream for them.

      Google loves Open Source, they can build an spyware, ad vending machine, DRM platform that is hosted in almost any IOT machine. This is Android.

      The community has to realize that if you care about your software you have to ENFORCE the freedom of it.

      The are entire projects just to liberate android from google. That’s is all fault of the open source licence.

      There are quite a lot of projects which exist to liberate software projects that have been taken hostage. This is no sense.

      Most of the IOT devices are presenting paywall features thanks to Android: cars, fridges, TVs, etc. What is next?

      • Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org
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        3 months ago

        XNU is the kernel in Darwin, XNU is an Apple product derived from BSD and Mach. Darwin has a lot of FreeBSD in it.

        Apple shares that code though. It’s on GitHub. There used to be Darwin distributions.

        Your Android example doesn’t make very much sense either. The largest Android issues are typically hardware lockdown. Nothing about the GPL prevents someone building an ad platform that spies on you, it just makes them share the source code for it. Google’s licensing choices means they don’t share the source code for the Google pieces they put on top of AOSP, the entire project means people can build the alternatives though.

        The lawsuits were about AT&Ts proprietary license. BSD and similar licenses are not that.

        • mariusafa@lemmy.sdf.org
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          3 months ago

          BSD licence allowed to work with the AT&T licence which at the end generated all the drama. Unix wars.

          Again BSD is great if you don’t care about what will happen with your code.

          Yeah the Android point doesn’t have any sense, that’s right.

          Apple shares the code of the parts they want. Since it’s not a copyleft licence, then they can still ship you a version of Darwin + privative code as your macOs without sharing the entire code. So you end running kind of Frankenstein program with parts you don’t know what they do.

          AOSP is not a great licence because it allows Google benefit from contributions, but then it has tons of privative software on top. So basically contributing to the AOSP means that you improve the code that later it’s used in combination with privative one.

          My point is that libre source code should enforce that derivations of it stay libre. Otherwise you are working for free for companies that don’t care about the users.

          Hey for companies is a good point. The best system for them is open source. It makes sense for them to use it. And open source is much better than just privative.

          From the point of view of the individual user and developer is not that great. It kind of hooks you in because it has open source parts, but you are probably unaware of all the closed source stuff that runs in combination with it.

          I get the open source point, but I don’t find it fair at the long term for the individual developer and user.

          Over the years I’ve become convinced that the BSD license is great for code you don’t care about. I’ll use it myself. If there’s a library routine that I just want to say ‘hey, this is useful to anybody and I’m not going to maintain this,’ I’ll put it under the BSD license.

          Linus Torvals at LinuxCon 2016

    • sramder@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Yeah, gotta’ love how all the Apple fanboys were like Bash? Meh’ zsh is the superior shell in the span of a day.

      I mean was the GPL viral… yeah probably. But it’s not like the courts came after either of them. Or ever really will in a meaningful way. Although hope springs eternal for non-webkit browsers in the not-EU 😌