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Apple Public Source License Now FSF Approved
BWJones writes "Apple has now made their public source license 2.0 free.
From the release "The Darwin team at Apple is pleased to announce that version 2.0 of the Apple Public Source License has been certified as a 'Free Software License.' APSL 2.0 includes numerous changes and simplifications to make it even easier to use Apple Open Source software as part of your programs. To indicate acceptance of APSL 2.0, you can now use your new or existing "Apple ID", rather than having a separate Darwin account.""
proclus adds "This
is great news for Darwin-based free software projects like
The GNU-Darwin Distribution
and
Fink.
GNU-Darwin has had an
ongoing discussion
about this development, and annouced and end to our
'Free Darwin
Campaign,' so long as Apple avoids DMCA-based legal action."
Yay! now we have another license to rant about and compare with GPL/BSD!! But seriously, why does apple need a new free software license? Aren't the ones being used now sufficient?
Licensees will now have the choice of providing source code to either just the users of the code or (as before) to the general public (Section 2.2(c)).
What does this mean? Could one restrict who is allowed to use the code and thereby restrict who may view the source? In a commercial application this means that one could produce a program and then sell it and only allow purchasers to view the source, correct?
Visualize the world of wine
The Kernel and the utilities can be FSF approved, but until glibc is ported to Darwin (and I suspect it never will) it should still be called Darwin.
So where can I buy an Apple Open Source License, now that it is approved and all?
BFD
GNU thinks its better than the first, they still dont like it (they are quite picky). Read here.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
This is one more feather in our collective cap. This means that in very recent history (less than a year) open source was significantly impacted every major player. Microsoft is keeping a close eye on us and implementing an open source lab. Big business companies like IBM and Oracle have jumped onboard. And now Apple is realizing that its better to go with it than fight it. This is great news. I could have dreamed of this five years ago, but I never would have bet on it.
We are making history and leaving a big footprint. Little people influencing very large companies.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
Does this mean that it's possible(legal) to transplant Darwin's SMP capabilities into OpenBSD's PowerPC port? Firewire support? Cheapass-iBook-winmodem support?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Apple is trying to please both crowds and is doing a pretty good job of it.
They are giving end-users the software and hardware that fits their needs, such as the iMusic software and the introduction of the G5. at the same time, they are not forgetting the *NIX and open source base of their current OS. Actions such as this one and the continued "giving back" of code to OSS projects exemplify this trend.
Apple seems to have its head on straight and although I don't use their products, I support them and their continued sucess. A computer monoculture is a bad thing.
Now, I might actually buy a Mac laptop if they didn't cost so damn much!
MMORPG fan-boy? Prove your worth
Well, I actually I wonder like a previous poster WHY every company needs to have their own license when GPL and BSD (or Apache perhaps) seem to cover the bases and you can always say "modified GPL", i.e. GPL + trademark restriction.
But on the whole this is great to hear, because I consider the FSF stamp of approval to mean "this license has no hidden traps". I.e., no weird venue change clauses, or ejection seats (if you get sued, your license terminates, if you have patents your license terminates, if you "use" the software the wrong way your license terminates) or other stupidity.
Sometimes free software folks think that these little details don't matter, but of course if you ever have to go to court, EVERY detail matters, and you agree to them!
I really don't have time to read all these stupid licenses, but when I see FSF-approved I feel a little more at ease.
Maybe one of these days RMS will learn to appreciate the jumps and hoops companies who sell software for a living go through to do these types of things, instead of just dismissing them with "they're evil, proprietary and you shouldn't use them". Life is so much simpler when you don't have shareholders, boards of directors, lawyers and... well, money.
Yes, it only applies to Darwin and their other open source projects. No, the previous version of the APSL wasn't FSF-approved, it was only OSI approved.
Donate free food here
So no, the FSF does NOT think that Apple is good, but the FSF also has a very one-dimensional method of determining moral quality, don't they?
Probably because PowerPC architecture is vastly superior to x86. In addition to that, Apple has very strict engineering standards. They do things that make a lot of sense. If you've ever actually sat down and tinkered with or owned a Mac, you'd understand.
Even when I was looking at buying my 15" Ti Powerbook, I decided that if I hated MacOS X, I'd just run Linux or FreeBSD on it. I bought it beacuse the hardware is of exceptional quality. Offerings from most vendors in the PC market are mostly crap. There's very little money spent into engineering things well, but a lot of money invested in engineering them cheaply. I'll never lay a dime down on another piece of x86 hardware again--it's just not worth it.
Join Tor today!
I read that. Is it possible for an organization to be more full of itself than the FSF?
A quotation:
"... we must remember that only part of Mac OS X is being released under the APSL. Even though the fatal flaws of the APSL were fixed, and even if the practical problems were addressed, that does no good for the other parts of Mac OS X whose source code is not being released at all. We must not judge all of a company by just part of what they do."
The FSF reminds me more and more of a religion than of a software organization. I can't think of any other organization that, on the one hand, makes a big deal about freedom and liberty, and on the other hand is so moralistic about orthodoxy and monolithic thinking.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Do you honestly think the world revolves around the type of open source license that people use, and that this news merits a place on Apple's home page? Of course Apple won't make a big splash about this -- it's simply isn't relevant to the vast, vast majority of people who go to the Apple web site looking for information about the company and their products. It's interesting only to programming geeks like us, and even then only to a limited subset of Apple interested geeks.
This is an overstatement. There was much innovation in the world before patent was even a concept.
So, preventing people from copying a song is irrational. Encrypting a personal e-mail is not. DRM, as I see, has basically come to mean the "evil" side of encryption.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Licensees will only be required to release source code of Modifications they "Externally Deploy" (new Section 1.4, and Sections 2.1, 2.2). "External Deployment" is defined to cover the external distribution of APSL'ed code or use of APSL'ed code to provide a service (including content delivery) to a third party through electronic communication with that party.
Don't know how I feel about this one...
You can't run an application service provider program without releasing changes to all your clients, and possibly the public if your clients deal with the public?
You can't run a b2b service without releasing all your changes to your distributors that use it and your clients that use it?
This is very different from the "no black box public distribution" that I previously considered the GPL to represent.
If I had a client who sold widgets, and he had to release all his source to clients who connected to his b2b setup, allowing them to leave him and then give all his internal systems to his competitor, even though he never distributed his software, I don't think he'd be wanting to buy anything I built.
Could you insulate against this by putting a "dumb layer" between your apps? You could argue that ANY system that was interacted with by the public, however indirectly, required publication... in most businesses, this would eliminate the "internal deployment" angle almost totally, unless you had a typist carrying out your data-syncronisation work
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Ask this question to all people who has their Macs running Linux/PPC (Gentoo, YDL, Debian, etc - there thousands and thousands of Linux/PPC users), Mac OS 9 (or even 8 - "classic" application still run better in the original OS *AND* there are still tons of such application not ported yet to OSX *AND* there are still millions of users of Mac OS 8/9 around the world who has own reasons of not migrating to OSX), and even BSD (not OSX - original *BSD, although, there are not many Mac/BSD users).
I think that overall there are millions of Mac users who are running something different than OSX. How do you think they have got their Macs? I understand that some of them have bought their old Macs before OSX was stable/available. But I am sure that there are many of them who bough Macs *AFTER* OSX was around. I personally know many such individuals and some companies. And that makes you quoted sentence WRONG. Think about it.
Less is more !
>What about the DRM (even though it's silly) on iTunes?
Is there something instrinsically bad about Apple's FairPlay DRM?
Seriously, is there anything *fundamentally* wrong with it, specifically?
> How about the patents?
This may come as a surprise, but Apple is a "company" in a "neoliberal economy" trying to turn something called a "profit."
I know that *is* shocking, isn't it?
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Personally I find most of Apple stuff a bit pricey but like where they are going. This FSF move is another step in the right direction.
Hopefully some of these players can continue allying themselves to take down the many-headed hydra that is Micro$loth. Novell adopted some Java angles with Netware 5, and recently added Linux services to their support suite. Maybe Apple can be added to the picture to cover desktop OS, server OS, desktop hardware, desktop software, *NIX services, etc.
I know Apple hasn't been a collaboration proponent in the past but the sum of all parts could be a force to be reckoned with.
Darwin is great and all, but many of us already have a kernel to use. Apple may say they embrace open source but when are they going to release code to some of the various software that makes OSX unique? When they decided to use KHTML for Safari, I thought they would at least release the source code for Safari and not just the changes to KHTML.. Its not like Safari is innovative or anything, we already have better open source browsers, but releasing the source code would of been a nice gesture.
That is indeed true, and John Carmack ported X11 to Darwin a while back.
This goes to show that the efforts of RMS have in fact been fruitful. He's constructive criticism has helped Apple to make a better license.
It's called progress. It's still not compatable with the GPL, but it is now Free Software according to the FSD.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
That's why it's called the FREE software foundation and not the Somewhat-Free, Mostly-Free, Free-This-One-Time, Momentarily-Free, or Free-Enough-So-Take-It-Or-Leave-It Foundation.
One interesting thing about the GPL, is that it protects the software itself, not necessarily the authors. The FSF has come up with a unique and powerful mechanism for insuring that code and/or an application will *always* be freely distributable over its entire lifetime.
It's perfectly reasonable for them to stand up for this important principle. Many times RMS and the FSF have pointed out flaws in only slightly more compromising licenses, and many times their warnings have turned out to be farsighted.
We should all be thanking them for selflessly taking on the role of a watchdog. They serve the public good and have an excellent track record. You should really pick up a membership
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
They released their webcore library, man. That's pretty much everything safari is, save for a lot of boring user interface code. Since webcore is just a ObjC wrapper to KHTML, this is no big deal.
However, it's interesting to note that Apple did relase somehthing to the community, and I have yet to see anyone pick up on it. Apple'a "snapback" mode... This is a really useful, I daresay innovative, feature for a web browser. I use it all the time on slashdot. Especially when you have gestural input, either via a keyboard like mine (see my sig) or the cocoa gestures framework, it really makes site naviagation a breeze.
Also, Apple's method of handling bookmarks is significantly different from most. If only they'd incorperate the Omniweb (check for updates) features Safari would be one of the best browsers out there.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
This is hardly a whine, I'm simply stating that Apple uses Open source for PR, and does not have commitment to open source software or ideology. Your post is a typical defensive, brainless mac zealot comeback, packed in the "translator fashion" for easy mod points. Instead of replying to my actual post, you decide to resort to stereotypical assertions and personal attacks.
You just have to keep in mind that the GNU people have their own goals, which you may or may not agree with, and they are looking at these new licenses from the perspective of their own goals.
Your goals are obviously different from their goals. The practical problems they list are problems in achieving their goals. If you had practical problems achieving your own goals, you would be less likely to use their license and software too.
You have to also remember that the GNU people are not just looking at this license from the perspective of people using APSL software. They are looking at the APSL as a competitor to the GPL. If lots of people begin using the APSL to license their software just as lots of people have already licensed their software under the GPL, you are going to have a lot of software in the free software community that isn't compatible with each other. This will end up dividing the free software community and programmers are going to have to worry even more than they do now about from what software they can borrow code from and put into what programs. And Microsoft and other competitors can say publicly to the press about how distributing Linux distributions may be illegal. It would be like throwing a wrench into open source development.
What you have to understand, which the anti-GNU zealots simply can't, is that for open source software to continue and prosper is in GNU's interest. That is their major goal. All three "practical problems" relate directly to this major goal. They have been with us from the beginning and they have been looking out for us. Its because of them that the mucky and uninteresting problems of licensing has been paid attention to so carefully. They have been the ones enforcing open source licenses behind the scenes (most of them never get to court). When an open source developer has legal problems or questions, they can often turn to the GNU people for help or advice.
Are they zealots? Depends on how compatible your goals are with theirs. So, yeah, maybe a little. But don't forget that in the end they are on our side.
Apple doesn't support Mac OS X on older machines like the 8600. There is a patch that enables it to run - I tried it on my 8500 - but 64 MB is not enough memory to run OS X comfortably, so you would have excessive paging.
Also, the cost of switching a task in the "classic" Mac OS is quite expensive, because there are many "low memory globals" that are different for each task but have to be located at specific memory addresses. The solution to this is to copy them all to a temporary buffer before a task is switched out, and to copy them back into place just before the task resumes.
(While classic Mac OS supports virtual memory for the purposes of using a hard disk as a backing store, it does not offer memory protection. All of the processes as well as the system software are in a single contiguous, unprotected memory space.)
All of these problems are the whole reason Apple struggled for over a decade to write a modern operating system to replace the classic Mac OS. They failed with Pink and then Copland, so they bought NeXT, which evolved to form Mac OS X.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
"We are grateful to Richard Stallman for his many helpful comments in this process."
the GNU project and the FSFoundation are organizations which try to disseminate that for some reasons, proprietary (not commercial) software is a social problem, and one that can be viably dealt with, by making free sofware. nothing else.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
The problem with OSSing QuickTime is that you've lost *any* credibility for DRM with the movie studios. Regardless of the actual ability (or inability) of OSS programs to effectively implement DRM, and regardless of the merits of DRM itself, the movie industry, and big-name professional content creators in general, are going to walk away from anything that looks to them as insecure. An open source QuickTime would be seen as insecure.
I think Apple is stuck here. I don't blame them for not releasing QuickTime in OSS (besides the fact that it would remove yet *another* reason to switch to mac, because OSS QuickTime would see a Linux port faster than you can say "Linus Torvalds"), and I don't think that it's going to happen any time soon.
Anyway, there are *tons* of perfectly good OSS media handlers out there, and, if they use standard codecs (as most of them do), its generally not too complex to convert. If streaming is what you are interested, I'd see the other post (about Darwin Streaming) and try to reverse-engineer a client. It shouldn't be too hard for an ambitious programmer, as far as I can see...
Statistically speaking, there's a 99.998% chance that my IQ is higher than yours. Get over it.
When they decided to use KHTML for Safari, I thought they would at least release the source code for Safari and not just the changes to KHTML..
o re /
Would it have killed you to spend 0.12 seconds on google before opening your mouth?
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/webc
That's every part of safari that matters, right there, for your FSF-approved open source development pleasure. No, the shiny front-end isn't included, but that's not going to bother too many coders considering that you can write your own frontend in as little as one line of code, or if you're feeling particularly clever, zero lines of code. (Note: while the examples given are in ProjectBuilder on MacOS X, there's no intrinsic reason why you couldn't do the same trick with GnuSTEP on Linux, and a GTK+ wrapper would only be slightly more work.)
And WebCore isn't the only "unique" OSX software that they've released the source to. Need a streaming media server? A fully functional ZeroConf implementation? A crypto-key management framework? All there for the taking.
No, Apple isn't going to release the source for iPhoto or Final Cut so you can play with them for free. Cry me a freakin' river. Then get a job.
And while I'm here: the casual, contracted form of "would have" is "would've", not "would of". Please spread the word.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
No, they warn about the shortcomings of other licenses that don't ensure the freedoms of free software (in the case of MIT X11 and new BSD license).
Although what they want is beneficial for both the Open Source and Free Software movements, the movement they are more properly associated with is the Free Software movement, which they began over a decade before the Open Source movement started.
This is simply untrue. The FSF has a widely-accepted and very useful license list which includes these licenses and suggested ways of speaking about the licenses to avoid confusion about which license you're referring to:
RMS gives talks where he tells people why he encourages contributions to X licensed under the X11 license (matching the rest of the project) instead of making a GNU GPL fork. See the Q&A section of some of the Free Software speeches--he tells people precisely why there is no GNU GPL fork of X and why such a fork is likely to be a bad idea.
This is hardly the behavior one would expect to see if the FSF did not want to "accept the existence" of these other licenses.
Digital Citizen
Basically, version 1.2 of the license was OSI approved Open Source, while version 2.0 is Stallman approved Free Software.