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."

Comments

And?!?

[tbien]

Since when does the FSF recommend other software licenses then the GPL? Even the LGPL isn't recommended.

Re:And?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you create a license which is compatible semantically with the GPL, then the FSF will approve it.
Besides, I'm pretty sure that if you find out flaws in the GPL, or devise a new license including ideas that the FSF didn't think of, the FSF will certainly consider these ideas, and eventually include them in the GPL if they are valid.

Re:And?!?

[zerocool^]

Why? Socialism goes against human nature and evolution. It supports the weakest while hurting the strongest, it assumes what everyone wants to work the same by giving them the same rewards?


As a historian, I must point out here that people's idea of socialism (as in my parent post) are often very wrong. We were all brought up to believe (those of us currently older than 12) that Russia is the devil, and that socialism and communism and marxism and stalinism are all equivilant, and all bad.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Merriam-Webster defines socialism as: any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.

Between Winston Churchill and Margret Thatcher (30 years), the UK was essentially a socialist system. The labour party, voted into office at the end of the war (in '45), recognized themselves as socailists, and their immediate goal was to set up a welfare state.

Did socialist Britain involve concentration camps, millions of civillians dead at the hands of their government, and widespread poverty? No. In fact, their goal (guided by the beverage report) was to establish the abolition of want.

The '45 government implemented the nationalization of the Bank of England (like our federal reserve), the Coal industry, the electric and gas industry, and various other industries, including steel and air transport (British Airways). They also passed the Insurance Act which provided unilaterial insurance for unemployment, sickness, and maternity leave, and they also passed the Health Services Act, which guaranteed free health care at the doctor of choice, including dental and eyecare.

Sounds good for me, I'm all about equality. If you can afford better, that's cool, but every one should enjoy a base-line equality that's above any sub-standard conditions.

And they did it without significantly raising the taxes above what people were already paying under Churchill in '44 to suppliment the war effort.

Socialism can go awry, just like capitalism can. The reason socialism sometimes gets a bad rap is because 1.) anti-russian upbringing in the US, 2.) when socialist governments go bad, people get screwed hard, because socialist ideology places *gasp* trust in human nature.

Linux isn't about socialism, it's capitalism in it's finest form.

How so? I don't think that linux is a political entity. However, it's CERTAINLY not capitalist. The very definition of capitalism involves free market enterprise, and giving away your product for free when you've worked long hard hours on it is a very anti-capitalist thing to do. Merriam Webster again: an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market. In a capitalist sense, linux should not exist, because price is indicitive of relative worth. Since linux is worthless (monitarily), it therefore follows that it should be worthless (as a product). If it had worth, as it's competition does, it would also cost a comparable amount to it's competition. In theory, if the product were not worthless (as a product), then people would be willing to pay for it, and therefore someone would sell it. Yet, no one sells linux. People sell proprietary drivers, support, and custom applications, but no one sells a kernel called "Linux".

And yet, despite the competition being, according to capitalist theory, "better" (by virtue of costing more), 63% of websites that netcraft tracks are running Apache.

This'll probably get me modded down to the basement...

I hope so. Not for your pro-microsoft statements (which most intelligent users of slashdot will agree with: in general, office is an excellent business productivit

not so orwellian anymore

[MrFreak]

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?

Re:not so orwellian anymore

[Ben Escoto]

Exactly. Everyone is dumping on the Free Software Foundation for no reason again. The FSF says that the APSL is a free software license (a high form of praise indeed coming from the FSF), but that it is somewhat unfair to users, mainly because it gives Apple rights that other users don't. Thus it recommends that the licensed not be used for new products.

This seems entirely reasonable to me. FSF is telling people not to use the APSL because they will be giving some of their rights to Apple. Duh! No one would do this anyway.

Slashdot: say something obvious and get flamed for it.

Yet another duplicate story

[Calibax]

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.

Re:Apple

[Gherald]

Only gays use Macs.

Indeed, all their users are quite merry.

It's Just an Opinion

[MSTCrow5429]

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.

How am I meant to feel now?

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Re:Let's get down to brass tacks here.

[MalleusEBHC]

But who really expects them to be Free?

RMS and the FSF. Then again, the GNU/Hippy crowd often reminds me of a greedy, petulent child. When MacOS was completely proprietary, Apple was evil for not letting the code roam free in wild fields as it is apparently entitled to. When Apple opened up some code, they were chastisted for not opening it in the manner that the FSF demands... err, politely asks. Now Apple has changed its license to appease the FSF, but the first thing the FSF does is spout off about how the changes aren't good enough, and even if they were Apple would still be condemned for not opening up all of OS X.

Frankly, I think Steve should tell RMS to shove it. Apple has already given back a lot of code (ZeroConf, KHTML updates, etc.), but the FSF is never going to be happy. Apple should just continue to make jobs for lots of developers and make quality products, be they proprietary or open source.

This has probably been said before but . . .

[ReciprocityProject]

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.

Is it just me or ...

[Heartz]

does anybody else notice that does not recommend APSL 2.0 for new software does not mean APSL is EVIL.

FSF doesn't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Remember Ogg Vorbis?

[dido]

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.

Re:Let's get down to brass tacks here.

[Senjaz]

You have a funny idea of what constitutes the "vast majority" of an OS if you reckon that most of Apple's OS is closed.

Most of it is in fact open source, Darwin is a complete OS in it's own right. What Apple have chosen not to release into open source is their window client/server Quartz which is understandable if you ask me and a whole load of Apps that ship with the commercial OS which aren't actually part of the OS iTunes, iMovie, etc. The other notable exception that springs to mind is QuickTime, but that would be pretty useless anyway unless the community licensed the Sorensen and MPEG4 codecs used to play and create it's content.

Now maybe you think that Apple can survive like Redhat, the whole PC market in this case only supports that company of ~600 employees (http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/presskit/ fact_sheet.html). How long do you reckon that business model is going to support a company with ~12,000 employees? (http://news.com.com/2100-1040_3-978535.html, those are 2001 figures - I can't be bothered to look through Apple's SEC filings to find out exactly how many employees they currently have)

Now maybe you're just a troll or maybe you're just an impulse poster. Sometimes I wish people would think a little before they post.

FSF bashing , yet again

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Free Foftware is as communist as church!

[maynard]

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