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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."
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Since when does the FSF recommend other software licenses then the GPL? Even the LGPL isn't recommended.
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?
We can hope that they are cool about being open (I think they have been, for the most part). But who really expects them to be Free?
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
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.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I guess that Michael needs to learn to review previous stories - this story, complete with the details about FSF approving but not recommending it, was covered in an article three days ago.
In any case, I can't really imagine the FSF recommending any license other than their very own GPL, now the darling of IBM and the open source movement in general. Not that it isn't deserving of this adoration, as it may have saved Linux from SCO.
Only gays use Macs.
Indeed, all their users are quite merry.
The unofficial
I don't think this truly matters very much. Three objections to a software licence has to be well below average. I don't see a problem with points one and three. Yes, it may link to proprietary code, and yes, it's not GPL compatible, but those seem to be minor points, if at all. Perhaps the second point, that Apple gives itself right to changes you make in the code, but not vice versa. However, it is Apple Corporation's code. Apple would have a very tough time surviving if it's code or an ISO image was free for download off of a server. Most of its value is in the OS, not the hardware. Although it is nice and shiny, just expensive.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
I'm confused! am I meant to like apple or hate apple today? OSX is good... but the license is bad... but then the license is good... now the license is bad...
:)
I can't help feeling the Apple license over OSX is a bit better than the SCO license over Linux
(yes. it was a joke)
might as well piss off some more people.
:) b)sell to the open source crowd. Face it, how many /. geeks would have bought anything Apple before OS X and Darwin came out? It's cool now though. Admittedly, that's kind of what made me get my iBook...
Disclaimer:I own an iBook.
Yes, Apple's liscense isn't really the most free of them all. This is because Apple's primary motivations in using Open Source solutions are to: a)harness the man power and combined talent of the open source movement to aide their own software, thus making profit from software they would otherwise have to write themselves
So maybe we have a new category: free as in, you're free to help Apple.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
Remind me, since when did companies have a legal or ethical obligation to release the source for any of their work? Apple is certainly a friend of the open source community, since they pay people to write OSS. This "all your code are belong to us" ideological BS isn't going to help anyone.
Note that "does not recommend APSL 2.0 for new software" != "APSL is bad". The FSF is against almost all licenses other than (L)GPL, including (especially?) BSD. What this means is that if you are writing OSS, then the GPL is your best chance to ensure that your work will always be Free. However, this does not mean that if someone distributes software under some other OSS license, then their intent is to screw you over.
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.
Apple's model of mixing open source and proprietary software is an effective idea.
After all, no hacker wants to idle away his time polishing the mundane details of a user interface. I sure as hell don't want to, but I might if someone paid me. Why not let hackers build the fascinating technologies, open source them, and then let companies pay people (and make money) off of polished user interfaces? We hackers will always have our own (unpolished) interfaces, so we aren't tied down. Granted, the user interfaces are going to have all the problems of close source software - bugs that we can't fix, ect - but it seems like a very reasonable compromise.
Anyway think whatever you want, this model is the one that will carry the most real-world punch in the years to come. The 2.0 is just symbolic of Apple's intention to play the game.
Upstairs Dog, Downstairs People.
does anybody else notice that does not recommend APSL 2.0 for new software does not mean APSL is EVIL.
Apple, IBM and a handful of other companies heavily invested in Open Source and gave a lot of their work back to public. Granted, they are out to make money, but they still took a big risk and huge number of users got free (both as in speech and as in beer) stuff without paying them a cent.
I wish FSF would spend more time to promote current leaders of open source and encourage others to follow in their footsteps. But all I see on their page is critisism:
Aside from this, 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.
So basically, they are more interested in "ideological purity" than promoting realistic progress towards their goal. This is fine as a PHD thesis of some MIT student. But it does show that RMS/FSF are worthless as a realistic leader of today's free software movement. The question is, who and which organizations are up to the task?
This is a double post story, but I saw one particularly insightful comment from the last one (that I did not make) which I would like to re-iterate over here.
Thanks to Llywelyn:
My experience from reading GNU's work is that they aren't terribly fond of anything that isn't GNU.
From that webpage:
-------------
The FSF now considers the APSL to be a free software license with three major practical problems, reminiscent of the NPL:
*It is not a true copyleft, because it allows linking with other files which may be entirely proprietary.
*It is unfair, since it requires you to give Apple rights to your changes which Apple will not give you for its code.
*It is incompatible with the GPL.
-------------
Let's go over these point by point.
>*It is not a true copyleft, because it allows linking with
>other files which may be entirely proprietary.
So does BSD. This does not, in my book, qualify as a "major practical problem."
>It is unfair, since it requires you to give Apple rights to
>your changes which Apple will not give you for its code.
Yes, it requires this. I'm not sure why this makes it "unfair" though: this seems like more of a "legal cover our asses" clause on Apple's part so that they can use the changes elsewhere.
>It is incompatible with the GPL.
Would someone look up the definition of "circular reasoning"?
It seems, from everything I've seen come out of GNU, that they fit every definition of "Zealots". They almost seem to be *reaching* for something bad to say about the license simply because a proprietary software company is behind it.
Let's consider everything in context. It's true that the FSF does not completely approve of Apple's 2.0 license. It's true that Apple does not make their entire OS source code available in any form, let alone under GPL.
Still, it is an improvement over the more restrictive license earlier, and much, much better than the days before Jobs' return from NeXT. At that time, none of the source code was available.
Furthermore, I think this is a Good Thing. A commercial vendor releasing the source code to any central part of their operating system was unheard of years ago. Sun and Microsoft have yet to do this; complaints about Apple's specific license are paltry in comparison to the strict use of binaries in place in other operating systems.
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.
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.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Yes, Apple's liscense isn't really the most free of them all. This is because Apple's primary motivations in using Open Source solutions are to: a)harness the man power and combined talent of the open source movement to aide their own software, thus making profit from software they would otherwise have to write themselves :) b)sell to the open source crowd. Face it, how many /. geeks would have bought anything Apple before OS X and Darwin came out? It's cool now though. Admittedly, that's kind of what made me get my iBook...
So maybe we have a new category: free as in, you're free to help Apple.
Funny... I don't see it that way.
The way I see it is this:
Apple wanted to use a mature kernel for their OS. So they used it. As a mark of respect and good faith to the Open Source community whose work they used, they decided to release the changes they made (which they were not obliged to) back to the community. The caveats they added ensure that they can use any derivatives of the work which they did, and that their true intellectual property (the Mac GUI and libraries) which they've spent 20 years developing remains theirs. (Otherwise, if the license was true GPL, they'd have to release all of their other work under the GPL as well).
So their license limits their involvement to the changes to the kernel. They don't want to release their GUI under a 'free'* license? Good for them. They don't have to. They were acting in good faith, and that should be the end of it.
Simon
* I use 'free' in quotes, lowercase, because I highly disagree with the FSF's definition of 'free'. Particularly because the only license which meets that description is not a license at all - it's called Public Domain.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
So, basically, it's incompatible with the GPL because it's incompatible with the GPL. But it gets better:First of all, who said anything about judging a company? The issue here is whether a particular license is useful for the free software community, not whether Apple will go to corporate heaven. You can't say the APSL is flawed because Apple doesn't use the APSL for all its software. Obviously Apple is being strategic about what license it chooses for which products (and Apple stockholders probably prefer it that way). It doesn't mean the free software community can't acknowledge positive developments about Apple licensing, even if it's not ideal for everyone.
I find it incredible that all the posters to the SCO stories say how terrible the land grab is and yet here, the majority of posters are criticical of the FSF for endeavouring to prevent that kind of nonsense from happening again. I don't pay too close attention to people's usernames so there may be a completely different demographic contributing to both stories but I suggest that those posting here get out their history books and start reading. You may then understand why the "idealogy" of the FSF is so important and precious.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
As is every other license on the planet... The GPL is pretty much the only exception.
Fair enough, that's one big red check-mark.
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Hey buddy,
When a congregation collectively works together to feed the poor by cooking and delivering large amounts of free food, is that communism too? The restaurant owner next door might lose some business. How about when the congregation runs a car wash to collect money toward housing renovations for the poor? Is that communism? The car wash owner down the street might think so. Is it communism when individuals donate a few bucks after Sunday service? Isn't that -- by your line of logic -- communism too?
It's not though. Communism is -- by definition -- ideology enforced by governmental institution and bears no relationship to individuals, acting on principals of free association, freedom of speech, and freedom of commerce (in this case the freedom to donate one's time and effort) toward a collective goal. You're simply red baiting free software authors for committing acts of FREEDOM in a free society. It is my right to donate money to church, the ACLU, EFF, or - *gasp* - even the FSF. Just as it's my right to donate code under whatever license I might choose. A very different proposition from the government forcing me to give my code away under communism, or for that matter, a government which prevents me from giving my code away. In both cases, we're talking about government restricting individual freedom and rights to enforce a certain ideology.
Communism my ass.
--Maynard
All of this just goes to show that there are people in the hippie free software movement who will never, ever accept or approve of anything less than total compliance with their GPL license. If a company doesn't use GPL licensing for their software: evil. If they use it for one product and not another: evil. If they use free software licensing for some of their stuff while their competitors use totally proprietary licensing: they're even more evil because they're just trying to appear like they aren't evil. But they are.
I think GNU-Linux and the open source and free software movmement is an incredible thing that should be encouraged and nurtured. I cheer at their successes. I use Linux both at work and at home. Yay for them. For us all. But I think this community can clearly go too far in what it expects/demands of proprietary software development companies who try to adopt open source principles.
Apparently releasing half your software under an open source license isn't any better than releasing none of it. It's all seen as some sort of subterfugue, an attempt to "dupe" the open source community into thinking the company is "cool." You people need to chill the hell out and realize who your friends and allies are.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
that holds so much weight in the software development community, the "recommendation" by Bradley Kuhn was rather terse. Moreover, his argument was not well-supported. His relase read more as if he was simply bashing Apple's license. The first half of Bradley's statement reads as if he is supporting the new version of the AFSL. Statements such as "The APSL 2.0, like the Affero GPL, seeks to defend the freedom...". Two thirds of the way through his statement we are hit with three bullet points stating why the AFSL is "bad". Prefacing these bullet points is an unlinked reference comparing the AFSL to the NPL. After the bullet points Bradley then goes on to state "For this reason, we recommend you do not release new software using this license". Bradley probably knows a great deal more about the AFSL issue, but such a terse and unelaborated statement against adopting it is irresponsible. Especially coming from a representative of the organization that supposedly worked with Apple's lawyers to draft the new version of the License.
Furthermore - a company such as apple is in the business of making money. In many ways operating a software business "is incompatible with the GPL." [kuhn]. It's nice to see - for a change - an organization that is at least making an effort to give back some of their innovations to the development community. The only other method of protecting their IP is through patent law, and we know how GNU feels about that (link on GNU's home page)
Instead of taking such a cynical and negative stance on an effort to change the way the software industry works - why don't we support it?
Sure, Apple are at heart more or less as greedy and controlling as the next company, but consider how much of MS-Windows, OS/400 or Solaris has been distributed on terms anything like as good as these. Then can you tell me that a step forward hasn't been made here?
I believe that FSF are right to point out the remaining deficiencies in the licence, but they really could have put more effort into thanking Apple for coming to the party as much as they have.
Here's a suggestion for the FSF: set up a Corporate Heroes page, and put stuff like OpenVMS, OpenOffice.org and so on which has been GPLed by a corporation up in there in big print with links and logos. Then add a link to an "honourable mentions" page which mentions (in fine print, no logos) efforts like Apple's which are incomplete or grudging, but yet are progress in the right direction. ANy who care will get the hint. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
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 (=
You're right, he helped make computers a household item, and flooded the market with jobs. what a commie bastard.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
You raise a good point. Is there actually much community participation in Darwin development?
I haven't heard of many features or bugs in Darwin being fixed outside of Apple.
So, anyone have any good stories for how the open source parts of Darwin are being used?
My video compression blog
I'm actually happy both with what Apple has done and with FSF's response.
I credit Apple with the work they did with FSF to come up with a license that can be called Free, and consider significant the set of software they have released under the license.
However, I also understand why they haven't release the whole of Mac OS X under the license. While Apple may be mostly a hardware company in terms of revenue, I don't know a lot of Mac users, myself included, who would buy the hardware if it weren't for the software that goes along with it. And who, conversely, would be happy to buy hardware from a different vendor if the software were available for it.
Thus, though reasonably up to date hardware doesn't hurt, it's the software that keeps the hardware selling. Just imagine where Apple would be if they had to compete with Sony or Dell systems running Mac OS X.
So, I'm glad Apple keeps some significant things (like Quartz) close to its vest, even though I would love to run Quartz on Linux instead of X11. This is what keeps Apple alive as a company that can continue to be creative and innovative in both hardware and software.
And, on the other side, I'm glad that FSF is taking the line it is. I think the GPL is a great thing and without it and the contributions RMS and the FSF have brought to both free software and the cause of free software, the software world would be a far more proprietary place today. And I'm grateful that they continue to push this cause, even if in this case this means they would prefer a course of action that I would prefer Apple not to follow.
So, I like the tension. I'm glad the FSF is the FSF and the hard pull they provide to the cause of Free software. And I'm glad Apple takes a more nuanced and evolutionary approach that helps them survive as a company and the Mac as a compelling platform.
They both provide an important service, and I think the state of software today would be much poorer without them both. So, Apple and FSF, keep it up. Please.