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FSF's Opinion of the Apple Public Source License

Stian Engen writes "Bradley Kuhn of the FSF does not recommend the release of new software using the Apple Public Source License (APSL) 2.0 despite its newly accuired Free Software License."

16 of 344 comments (clear)

  1. This is no big deal by AvitarX · · Score: 3, Informative

    They have all sorts of Free Software Liscences they recomend against.

    Even a handful of Copy-lefted ones.

    This is essentially a copy left for everyone escept Apple, who gets BSD like (from the FSF comments, I couldn't find that in the actual liscense though).

    practically every non GPL compatible Copy-Left on their site says "though it is OK to use this software we recomend against using the liscense for new software".

    And all the BSDish ones recomend using the X11 liscense instead. I don't see how this is news one bit.

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  2. Re:Yet another duplicate story by Gherald · · Score: 2, Informative

    Link to the dupe

  3. Wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    From http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html we see that FSF "...recommend[s] it[the LGPL] for special circumstances only." There are quite a few other licenses on that page, the Perl license, the X11 license, etc., which FSF reccomends. More specifically FSF reccomends that you use a license which makes your work "free software" as defined here http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.

  4. Re:And?!? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Hmm, anyone is still free to use whatever license is available, or build your own if you don't like these. It's not like you're forced to use the GPL. The FSF proposes this license, and give arguments about why it's a good license. Nobody here is forcing you to use it, you still have your brain (I hope so) and the right to use it.
    Furthermore, a license doesn't upgrade automatically, as you seem to imply : something released under the GPL 2.0 doesn't move to GPL 3.0 unless the owner decides to do so. Again, the owner chooses. And finally, even if the owner release something under the GPL, he still own it and can release it under different licenses as he see fit.
    I hope this will help you understand the nature of the FSF movement.

  5. This is not true anymore... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative
    Ahem:
    The problems described in this page are still potential issues for other possible licenses, but they do not apply to version 2.0 of the APSL.
  6. Re:And?!? by deltronzero · · Score: 2, Informative

    The GPL and other forms of free software are not socialism. It is programmers deciding to give away their work for free. If it was socialism, it would be the government deciding that said programmers should give their work away for free (or whatever price the government wishes). Please, get a clue.

  7. Remember Ogg Vorbis? by dido · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ahem. The FSF actually recommended that the Ogg Vorbis toolkit remain under a BSD license, rather than insisting that it go GPL. This was all done, apparently, with Richard M. Stallman's blessing! Yes folks, RMS actually encouraged the Xiphophorous people to use the BSD license rather than the GPL! The story here.

    In response to the change of license, Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation says, "I agree. It is wise to make some of the Ogg Vorbis code available for use in proprietary software, so that commercial companies doing proprietary software will use it, and help Vorbis succeed in competition with other formats that would be restricted against our use."

    No, the FSF does not recommend exclusive use of the GPL at all times. They can encourage use of other more permissive free licenses if they believe that it will aid the cause of Free Software.

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  8. Re:You needs a dose of SCO... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Your use of "Freeware" only shows you know fuck all.

    Freeware is not OSS, Freeware is only the binarys are aviable "for free", not the source code is aviable for modification and re-distribution (OSS, which ASPL is).

  9. Vague? by hummassa · · Score: 2, Informative

    Have you ever gone to the GPL FAQ? and found anything you think is vague not clarified there?

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  10. This is interesting... by evilviper · · Score: 3, Informative
    It is not a true copyleft, because it allows linking with other files which may be entirely proprietary.

    As is every other license on the planet... The GPL is pretty much the only exception.

    It is unfair, since it requires you to give Apple rights to your changes

    Fair enough, that's one big red check-mark.

    It is incompatible with the GPL.

    That's being quite hypocritical there. Their policy is that software released under every other license should be able to be GPL'd, but it's fine that, once GPL'd, it can't be used with software under any other license... Really, really one-sided guys.

    Of course, if that was a problem, they could very well change the GPL now couldn't they??? No, they'd rather have the rest of the world change to what they want.
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  11. Re:And?!? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Are you trying to claim that Capitalist systems have never commited an atrocity?

    Not only that, you persist in confusing "Socialism" with "Communism", and in turn you confuse "Communism" with "Stalinism/Totalitarianism" None of which are particularly similiar to one another.

    Capitalist countries and corporations have done a lot of nasty things in their time, just as many Stalinist/Totalitarianist countries have. Bopal is a good start, and I also do not remember Iraq being a "Socialist" country either. Neither are the vast majority of African nations, and I and many others believe that the imprisionment of "Illegal Combatants" in Camp X-Ray is illegal and immoral.

    Left, right, they're all bastards.

  12. Clippy says by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    It seems like you're confusing Socialism and Totalitarianism!

    Yes, I know you're trolling. I just like biting, that's all. First you suggest democratic, socialist countries (e.g. Canada and most of Europe) would act like despotic, anti-democratic rulers in Middle East countries. Yes, Iraq has social schemes, but the main problem was it wasn't exactly democratic! Then you suggest Microsoft isn't anticompetitive.

    Having people thrown in prison for disagreeing with you is totalitarianism. Socialism is when the state funds social projects instead of trusting to altruistic third parties. The USA has many socialist schemes, including social welfare, public libraries, police, courts and (limited) medical care, even though it's significantly less socialist than some other first world countries.

    Microsoft functions well because it makes (and has made) a decent product.

    Sorry buddy, Microsoft uses the dominant market share "decent product" as leverage in anticompetitive behaviour. Other companies have made even better products than Microsoft, but MS uses anticompetitive tactics against them. This is fact. For example, making secret deals with PC vendors to ensure they only ever offer MS operating systems bundled with their computers. Imagine if Coke charged stores extra for their product if they also stocked Pepsi.

    Microsoft has a dominant share of the desktop computer market in OSes and office software. Do they have a dominant share of the server market? No. However, they use deliberate dirty tricks -- regularly changing, undocumented, non-standard file formats and network protocols -- in order to try and gain server market share. "You can't use non-Microsoft servers to service Microsoft desktops". That's anti-competitive.

  13. Same problam as with original BSD license by TrentC · · Score: 3, Informative

    Its a hell of a lot better than the old license. And its not like developers working with Darwin have much of a choice. I mean, who is going to use the APSL on a non Apple derived product?

    Heh. The FSF has this to say about the original BSD license; I suspect you would see the same thing happen with APSL2-licensed stuff...

    There are many variants of simple non-copyleft free software licenses, including the X10 license, the X11/XFree86 license, the FreeBSD license, and the two BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) licenses. Most of them are equivalent except for details of wording, but the license used for BSD until 1999 had a special problem: the ``obnoxious BSD advertising clause''. It said that every advertisement mentioning the software must include a particular sentence:

    3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement:
    This product includes software developed by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors.


    Initially the obnoxious BSD advertising clause was used only in the Berkeley Software Distribution. That did not cause any particular problem, because including one sentence in an ad is not a great practical difficulty.

    If other developers who used BSD-like licenses had copied the BSD advertising clause verbatim--including the sentence that refers to the University of California--then they would not have made the problem any bigger.

    But, as you might expect, other developers did not copy the clause verbatim. They changed it, replacing ``University of California'' with their own institution or their own names. The result is a plethora of licenses, requiring a plethora of different sentences.


    When people put many such programs together in an operating system, the result is a serious problem. Imagine if a software system required 75 different sentences, each one naming a different author or group of authors. To advertise that, you would need a full-page ad.

    This might seem like extrapolation ad absurdum, but it is actual fact. NetBSD comes with a long list of different sentences, required by the various licenses for parts of the system. In a 1997 version of NetBSD, I counted 75 of these sentences. I would not be surprised if the list has grown by now.
    [Remember, this was written in 1998; this has obviously not happened.]

    Jay (=

  14. Re:Circular reasoning by Reverberant · · Score: 2, Informative

    This is why the APSL is an Open Source license instead of a Free Software license.

    Umm, APSL 2.0 is a "free software" license:

    The Apple Public Source License (APSL) version 2.0 qualifies as a free software license.

  15. Re:Let's get down to brass tacks here. by squiggleslash · · Score: 2, Informative
    FWIW, Darwin is a very, very, small part of OS X.

    If you don't believe me, try and find the device drivers for DVD and CD burners in Darwin. Other than generic IDE *access*, they do not exist. The entire DiscRecording framework is a closed part of OS X.

    ...which is a pain, because the entire thing is tied to specific products, so if you want to get a driver for an unsupported but entirely standard and generic CD burner, you end up having to use a hex editor and a lot of patience (seriosuly, check out xlr8yourmac's advice on the subject). And anyone wanting DVD+R support in OS X is going to have to wait for Apple to decide to implement and release it.

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  16. Re:Darwinism vs. Socialism by zerocool^ · · Score: 2, Informative

    Excellent point about loveline and breeding qualifications in the U.S. No one is breeding on darwinian principles anymore, unless it's social darwinism.

    (ok, synthesizing things from geography, british and russian history, economics, and poli-sci... done).

    In china, at lease people are breeding because they want to have a male child. China is the home of the "20 million missing girls", based on the chinese birth rate, historically, of males:females, and the number of males:females that survive to age 1.

    But, here in america, we're breeding based on height, weight, eye color, hair, and dancing ability.

    I don't think that socialism or capitalism has to do with people breeding when they shouldn't. And I don't blame china for their economic policy regarding 1 child per family. From what I learned in human geography, China's population will continue to grow, even at 1 child per family and no children until age 22, until 2016. They will reach very hard economic times based simply on population growth, but if they had done nothing, there would have been widespread famine very quickly. They will hit 1.5 billion people before going down (they're at 1.2 now), and if they go much higher than 1.6, it's expected that many, many of them will die, and at 2.0 billion, it's expected that hundreds of millions will die because of starvation.

    The relationship to communism isn't hard to see here, but it's hardly to blame. When Mao took over, he wanted to create a chinese world power, which he did. He encouraged the Chinese to have multiple childre, not realizing how fast it would backfire.

    Think now, though, growing up with not only no brothers and sisters, but no cousins and uncles.

    Anyway,

    I just wanted to say that my eariler post on socialism wasn't just from crap i'd read online. I'm a history major, about to graduate. I've had over 30 hours of history, plus 6 of geography, 9 of political science, and 6 of economics. I tried to make it as well reasoned and articulate as I could.

    Random thoughts, i'm tired..

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