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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
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.
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.
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 !
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.
That is indeed true, and John Carmack ported X11 to Darwin a while back.
Linux Whiner Translate-O-Matic:
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?
Wow I sure do like all the nifty features of OSX. I don't understand the fact that giving away the very technology that draws in customers, thus commoditizing the product, would be a stupid business move.
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.
Apple should give away any and all software that draws customers to their platform. That way they no longer have to bother with selling hardware of any sort. Since their software should all be open source they can just make money selling advertisements. I'm sure they could make a couple hundred dollars a month at least. That's way more than my mom gives me!
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
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
- Darwin Streaming Server
- OpenPlay
- Rendezvous
- WebCore -- that's safari without the UI (including a Qt adapter library called KWQ)
There's other stuff too, although some of it is Mac OS X specific implementations of various other stuff (GCC, Kerberos, CUPS, etc.). My point is that by looking only at those high-profile projects, you're missing a few other interesting things (particularly, IMHO, the Darwin Streaming Server, a free, open-source streaming server, but then, most desktop users won't need that).I'd suggest taking the time to actually check their projects' page out before jumping to conclusions about what they offer.
Chin up buckeroo. The "open source" ideology is one that is software centric rather than author centric. The GPL compatible licenses the FSF fully approves are designed to provide as much movability for the software without giving the author much in the way of recompense outside of community recognition. Information may want to be free but rent and stockholders want to be paid.
You're whining because you're inately jealous of what Apple's been able to do with Free code they've used in their products or based their products off of. Apple's taken a bunch of technologies and standards that have been floating in Limbo waiting for someone to actually do something useful and made a good product out of it. Now you want them to release all of their implementations so the next version of Linux can offer all of the features without any of the development time or cost. That is plainly stupid.
Take Redevous (zeroconf/service discovery). Apple took a languishing technology and turned it into a huge feature in their OS. They've also released enough documentation and code for Rendevous to make it simplistic for any developer to work their own implementation of it. If Linux developers hopped on the good foot they could have all the Rendevous functionality they wanted and be entirely compatible with all the services Apple's working with.
Not everyone can make money selling advertisements on their website, ergo they need to sell software or even hardware. To do so you need something your competition doesn't. Apple's in a good position because they've made themselves extremely compatible with the competition and provide incentives for using their products. You can use KHTML all you want in Konq or some other browser. In OSX you can use Konq if you want but they're offering Safari. Anybody can use CUPS for printing, Apple stuck Print Center on top of it and is offering that as an incentive to use their products.
Stop your whining about Apple using OS for PR benefits only. They've put some good money into GCC, CUPS, KHTML, and making OSX fully compatible with FreeBSD. Go check your kernel compile and stop whining about Apple's use of software.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
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.
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