He's certainly not a hero, but we all need and are entitled to free speech. My attitude toward Raub would be the same as that of Evelyn Beatrice Hall summarizing Voltaire:
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Every TV cop show says that if the suspect makes it onto embassy property they are untouchable! The TV lies... my reality is ruined!
I'm not clear on why the US's position is important at this stage anyway. It seems to me that the only relevant opinions right now are those of the UK and Ecuadorian governments.
They are scum and need to pay for their crimes. They possibly caused immensely more economic damage.
Whether they are personally scum or not, their success is an example of how sick the patent system has become. In general, business that makes huge profits while doing very little of use to anyone else is a symptom of a bigger problem.
This is what you get when you base your life on what you imagine your invisble friend in the sky wants you to do.
No, it's what you get when those in power feel threatened by a group they've traditionally dominated. It's not that different from repression of intellectuals in China, Jews in the USSR or land owners in El Salvador under atheist regimes. Religion is one of many excuses often used for oppression.
While patents and copyrights are usually quite distinct, they overlap significantly in this case. Specifically, design patents are not obviously different from copyrights to non-lawyers.
Not sure why, though. Design patents are not very different from trade dress. Copyright, however, is entirely different.
It seems you've weakened your argument by pointing out yet another type of legal protection distinct from patents, trademarks and copyright that seems to overlap with them significantly. AFAIK, Apple isn't even bringing up trade dress in these lawsuits. I had never heard the term before and I'd guess the vast majority of non-lawyers have not heard it either so it could easily be used as an example of how far legal protection for products has diverged from everyday life and common sense.
If you go back to the mid-1990s, there was their famous "look and feel" lawsuit against Microsoft. Apple's case there was eerily similar to the one they're running today: "we innovated in creating the graphical user interface; Microsoft copied us; if our competitors simply copy us, it's impossible for us to keep innovating." Apple ended up losing the case.
... I've used Apple as the example here because it's illustrative in showing how innovation hasn't been stifled over time even when the patent system hasn't ruled in their favor as a patent owner.
The Apple v. Microsoft case was on copyright, not patents. Specifically, the court ruled that:
Apple cannot get patent-like protection for the idea of a graphical user interface, or the idea of a desktop metaphor [under copyright law]...
and look-and-feel simply isn't covered there.
With that distinction and proper categorization in mind, the article misses a crucial difference between the 1990s and today: Apple made a significant push to protecting its designs with patents. The lack of such protection almost killed Apple in the 1990s, and its with that protection now that Apple is well on its way to being the largest company ever.
While patents and copyrights are usually quite distinct, they overlap significantly in this case. Specifically, design patents are not obviously different from copyrights to non-lawyers. More importantly, the the question TFA asks is whether "copying" is good or bad for the industry in general not whether it's good or bad for Apple. Patent law does not exist for the benefit of Apple or any other company in existence but for the benefit of society in general. If a company can not continue to be profitable under a system designed to promote innovation, it should either learn to innovate better or go out of business.
One should never be able to patent the what (eg. gui appearance/behavior), only the how (eg. specific implementation). Thus, it was right that Apple lost its MS suit, though they were the superior company (at that time).
Apple was a superior company at what exactly? Maybe they made some better software, but they clearly weren't superior at litigation or being profitable. Even if they had advantages in GUI design, their OSes were inferior to Microsofts' for many years. Apple's strategy of trying to stifle Microsoft and then clone makers via legal means demonstrated they were less interested in giving users choice than even Microsoft. Jobs' return and led to a period of real innovation and and users responded positively. Maybe the increasingly stiff competition and second loss of Jobs will push them back to the bad old days of less innovation coupled with more litigation.
The parallels of current Apple to early 90s Apple are numerous.
- They were first widely used in multitouch and gui - Their OS is more user-friendly - Development and modification of their OS is more tightly controlled - Crucially, they don't license their OS - Steve Jobs isn't there to save them with brand-new product lines
So now, they're stuck with a market-leading position that is being slowly eroded by the open ARM + Android platform (Armdroid as the new Wintel?), and are being forced to fight on several fronts at once: hardware design, OS design, and developer loyalty.
The litigation strategy is just one more parallel, and it seems destined to fail.
Those are very interesting parallels. However, it seems this time, Steve Jobs was the originator of the litigation strategy. Was he already losing his edge?
Having other people copy your designs doesn't mean you can't innovate anymore. On the contrary: by innovating you will stay ahead of the pack.
Also, copies always mean the copier is playing catch-up. They always have to wait and see what you've done, before they can try to do the same. By innovating you will keep the advantage, having everybody copy your work just means you have to innovate even harder and faster. That's tough of course, much easier to stop the rest from picking up your innovative ideas.
That's a great antidote to the unhealthy life cycle of many technology companies. They start out with no patents so they have to innovate like crazy to survive in competition with the established companies that already have a lot of patents. The more they amass patents, the less they have to innovate because they can use their patents as either protection from upstarts or offensive weapons against large competitors. It's an arms race no technology company can ignore. Eliminating clearly harmful classes of patents such as on software and visual design and limiting terms of others might return companies to the type of competition you describe.
Obviously the patent squabbles in these cases are ridiculous - the only reason we have functioning high-tech industry in the US is that most companies are not like Apple, and do not use patents offernsively.
It's a good time to review the reasons why, for example, software patents do not work, and can never be made to work:
Software patents clearly do more harm than good. An additional area of bad patent law I learned about as a result of this case are for visual design. I'd like to how any rational person could defend the idea that being able to prevent competitors from making similar-looking things promotes innovation unless they're being paid to do so. Any appropriate protection of design can be accomplished by copyrights and trademarks, though those are often abused as well.
Nuclear is certainly one of the energy sources we need to expand. We shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that one or two sources will solve all our problems.
As a general rule, if someone in the free world just says "Korea," they usually mean South Korea. It's one of those annoying namespace pollution games, like how "China" now always means mainland China, and never Taiwan (although that one's somewhat more understandable, since they have the chunk of territory called China, whereas the Republic of Korea only has half of the Korean peninsula.)
It's a lot more important to specify which Korea than which China, since as you point out, they are approximately the same area and there are only about twice as many South Koreans as North Koreans. You might be forgiven if you say "Korea" to mean "South Korea" in most articles about technology, but in recent years, we've heard a lot more about nuclear technology in North Korea than South.
Linux doesn't exactly have a reputation for working well on brand-new hardware. The new MacBooks only came out a couple months ago, give Linux some time!
Linux runs just fine on many types of brand new machines, especially if they have Intel video. However, Mac hardware has often been more problematic than others..
I think you'll find that actual new *hardware* takes as long for Linux support no matter what it is... unless it's what the people writing the support have upgraded to, in which case it gets support pretty quickly. Outside of Apple, new *systems* often support Linux right out of the box because the hardware inside is already in use in other systems, and so has had time to have the software kinks worked out. Since Apple usually pushes new components in their new systems (especially the case here), it often takes a while for some distributions to incorporate the software updates. However, the linux support is usually there already; it just hasn't been integrated into the distro-of-choice because nobody's had the need to do it -- and won't until some integrater or commercial entity gets some of the Apple hardware and decides to support it.
Without doing an extensive survey, neither of us can make universal statements about all new PCs. However, some PC vendors like System76 and Zareason specialize in GNU/Linux systems. Some major PC vendors like Dell provide some support for Linux and even occasionally sell machines with it installed. Apple provides no support for GNU/Linux. In fact, any OS other than OSX is a second class citizen on Apple hardware and the machine sometimes feels actively hostile other systems. Even Windows, which Apple officially supports, cannot use all the same hardware capabilities that OSX can such as hybrid graphics.
This shouldn't be surprising to anyone familiar with Apple's business model. It is foolish for anyone to buy new Apple hardware primarliy to run anything other than the OS it comes with. The only reason I am running GNU/Linux on an Apple machine is that I had the choice of using a mostly excellent machine for no cost to me vs. paying for something myself. Even then, I seriously considered buying my own.
"I'm sure that not being required to share enhancements was a major motivation for Apple."
Probably not but they might have wanted the option. It's not hard to imagine some case where sharing development code might have given competitors information about upcoming Apple hardware designs, and Apple is as freakishly paranoid about that as the FSF is about people using unfree software.
I'm hardly the only one to notice Apple's preference for permissively licensed software: "GCC currently handles all those phases for compiling code within Xcode, Apple's Mac OS X IDE (Integrated Development Environment). However, there are some drawbacks to using GCC. One is that it is delivered under the GPL, which means Apple can't integrate it directly into Xcode without making its IDE GPL as well. Apple prefers BSD/MIT style open source licensees, where there is no limitation upon extending open projects as part of larger proprietary products."
The legal means that GCC used to prohibit various technical circumventions which the FSF believed would benefit "not-free" software, also prohibited a modular design which Apple wanted to, and then later exploited for significant benefit.
The FSF thought that ideology was more important than technical flexibility and capability. As a result, the experience of developing with gcc is about the same as 1989, whereas XCode can do many more things, because compiling programs to machine code is not the alpha and omega of software development tools.
The FSF has always put software freedom as their top priority. The reason we even know who they are is that they produced useful software based on their principles. GCC is certainly an old project that could benefit from newer approaches. Its limitations have much more to do with it being old than anyone's politics. That's why competition from LLVM is good for all of us, whether we use LLVM or GCC, which is being pushed to advance by LLVM. As interesting as LLVM is, far more platforms and developers still depend on GCC so the FSF's dedication to their principles continues to benefit everyone as well.
Linux doesn't exactly have a reputation for working well on brand-new hardware. The new MacBooks only came out a couple months ago, give Linux some time!
Linux runs just fine on many types of brand new machines, especially if they have Intel video. However, Mac hardware has often been more problematic than others. I am currently using a 2011 MacBookPro (provided by my employer so I didn't have a choice of hardware) and after more than a year, most of the hardware works well. Initially, the Wifi didn't work at all because of typical Broadcom lack of cooperation. It was difficult or impossible to use the optical drive from Linux and Apple's PC BIOS doesn't seem to support booting from USB at all so installing a distribution was a major pain in the butt. Though the machine has both Intel and AMD video, only the AMD chip is usable after booting via PC BIOS so that's a power tax that is always exacted. Though it is possible to boot Linux via EFI and use the more efficient Intel video with great effort, I never got an external monitor to work. All of my experience leads me to expect that these types of difficulties will continue or get worse with newer Apple hardware.
NeXT bought sole rights to Objective-C from Stepstone long before the Apple merger. They also hold all rights to Objective-C and if they wanted to be vindictive they could cancel its inclusion into GCC, but the don't. Instead, they chose to produce a solution for the entire toolchain in LLVM/Clang. LLVM/Clang has come a long way in a very short time span since Apple invested in it giving us all a choice to leave GCC--a very welcome choice.
Neither NeXT, Apple nor anyone else can "cancel" a Free Software release whether they hold the copyrights or not. Copyright holders can stop making new releases, but they can't take away code already released under the GPL. NeXT did release their extensions to GCC under the GPL for many years because they were depending on the large amount of work that others had put into it. They clearly valued GCC enough to relase their code under the GPL even though they would have preferred a different license. Just as NeXT benefited from GCC, others continue to benefit from NeXT's and Apple's contributions to it. This is a clear success for Copyleft because everyone benefited.
Now that Apple and others have put a large amount of work in LLVM-based compilers, they may be able to end their reliance on GCC, but it took many years and man-hours of work. Although there are plenty of good technical reasons for LLVM, I'm sure that not being required to share enhancements was a major motivation for Apple. That's not to say LLVM projects are a waste of time. It certainly is good that they exist and there is now more competition in the Free compiler space. Hopefully, LLVM projects will remain healthy despite their licenses. Governance and other aspects of the community are just as important or more so than license and there certainly are plenty of examples of permissively-licensed projects used and contributed to by many which thrive such as Apache and PostgreSQL.
The Linux Kernel used the C++ compiler for a while. I believe it was during the 0.99.x era. The goal was to improve the code quality by leveraging C++ compiler features like function name mangling while only using C language features. This, however, looks like they want to use a limited set of C++ language features that would be very handy for experienced C programmers.
You might still be able to compile Linux, as well as other C programs, using a C++ compiler since C++ is still mostly a superset of C. You might even get some benefits of stricter checking.
That's all I really care about, to be honest. As long as I can keep coding in C, they can do whatever.
if GCC, being written in C, has been compiling C++ correctly for many years, it seems a much easier task for a GCC written in C++ to correctly compile C. Also, GCC has been and will continue to be used to compile a great deal of C code so any regressions will be noticed very quickly.
While the GPLv3 was the reason Apple suddenly invested in clang (which just happens to ride on llvm), it has little effect on any companies that do what they should do.
The GPL in general was the reason Apple invested in LLVM and Clang. Jobs has been hostile to Copyleft ever since NeXT was not allowed to get away with violating the GPL with their Objective C frontend. I'm still somewhat surprised that Apple continues to release CUPS under the GPL. Of course the difference there is that they hold the copyright so they can make any part of it proprietary any time they want. They have done so for OSX-specific parts.
It sounds like Woz was duped by Daisey just like the rest of us. Apparently, he removed the made up stuff from the show after This American Life discovered it. However, since Daisey doesn't seem to have admitted he lied, it would be good if Woz called him out on that.
Slashdot Mirror
Convert the file to the site supported format and quality level in sandbox.
Tadaaaa,,,
If you'd read TFA, you'd know it covers that and explains why it's insufficient.
The fact that there is no specific meaning attached to Linux 3.0 or 4.0 is exactly what Linus is saying.
All I can think of is Moss Contacst Fire Department.
He's certainly not a hero, but we all need and are entitled to free speech. My attitude toward Raub would be the same as that of Evelyn Beatrice Hall summarizing Voltaire:
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Every TV cop show says that if the suspect makes it onto embassy property they are untouchable! ... my reality is ruined!
The TV lies
I'm not clear on why the US's position is important at this stage anyway. It seems to me that the only relevant opinions right now are those of the UK and Ecuadorian governments.
They are scum and need to pay for their crimes. They possibly caused immensely more economic damage.
Whether they are personally scum or not, their success is an example of how sick the patent system has become. In general, business that makes huge profits while doing very little of use to anyone else is a symptom of a bigger problem.
This is what you get when you base your life on what you imagine your invisble friend in the sky wants you to do.
No, it's what you get when those in power feel threatened by a group they've traditionally dominated. It's not that different from repression of intellectuals in China, Jews in the USSR or land owners in El Salvador under atheist regimes. Religion is one of many excuses often used for oppression.
I'm sure if the world scorns them strongly enough on this they'll come around on human rights issues.
/is sarcasm dead? ok I'll turn out the lights.
I'm much more hopeful that this will help hasten the demise of the current regime because Iranians will get fed up with them more quickly.
While patents and copyrights are usually quite distinct, they overlap significantly in this case. Specifically, design patents are not obviously different from copyrights to non-lawyers.
Not sure why, though. Design patents are not very different from trade dress. Copyright, however, is entirely different.
It seems you've weakened your argument by pointing out yet another type of legal protection distinct from patents, trademarks and copyright that seems to overlap with them significantly. AFAIK, Apple isn't even bringing up trade dress in these lawsuits. I had never heard the term before and I'd guess the vast majority of non-lawyers have not heard it either so it could easily be used as an example of how far legal protection for products has diverged from everyday life and common sense.
How many thousands and thousands fulminated and vituperated in the most horrible manner against Bush?
How many were thrown in jail?
Are you saying the current administration is more competent at enforcing its will?
If you go back to the mid-1990s, there was their famous "look and feel" lawsuit against Microsoft. Apple's case there was eerily similar to the one they're running today: "we innovated in creating the graphical user interface; Microsoft copied us; if our competitors simply copy us, it's impossible for us to keep innovating." Apple ended up losing the case.
The Apple v. Microsoft case was on copyright, not patents. Specifically, the court ruled that:
Apple cannot get patent-like protection for the idea of a graphical user interface, or the idea of a desktop metaphor [under copyright law]...
and look-and-feel simply isn't covered there.
With that distinction and proper categorization in mind, the article misses a crucial difference between the 1990s and today: Apple made a significant push to protecting its designs with patents. The lack of such protection almost killed Apple in the 1990s, and its with that protection now that Apple is well on its way to being the largest company ever.
While patents and copyrights are usually quite distinct, they overlap significantly in this case. Specifically, design patents are not obviously different from copyrights to non-lawyers. More importantly, the the question TFA asks is whether "copying" is good or bad for the industry in general not whether it's good or bad for Apple. Patent law does not exist for the benefit of Apple or any other company in existence but for the benefit of society in general. If a company can not continue to be profitable under a system designed to promote innovation, it should either learn to innovate better or go out of business.
One should never be able to patent the what (eg. gui appearance/behavior), only the how (eg. specific implementation). Thus, it was right that Apple lost its MS suit, though they were the superior company (at that time).
Apple was a superior company at what exactly? Maybe they made some better software, but they clearly weren't superior at litigation or being profitable. Even if they had advantages in GUI design, their OSes were inferior to Microsofts' for many years. Apple's strategy of trying to stifle Microsoft and then clone makers via legal means demonstrated they were less interested in giving users choice than even Microsoft. Jobs' return and led to a period of real innovation and and users responded positively. Maybe the increasingly stiff competition and second loss of Jobs will push them back to the bad old days of less innovation coupled with more litigation.
The parallels of current Apple to early 90s Apple are numerous.
- They were first widely used in multitouch and gui
- Their OS is more user-friendly
- Development and modification of their OS is more tightly controlled
- Crucially, they don't license their OS
- Steve Jobs isn't there to save them with brand-new product lines
So now, they're stuck with a market-leading position that is being slowly eroded by the open ARM + Android platform (Armdroid as the new Wintel?), and are being forced to fight on several fronts at once: hardware design, OS design, and developer loyalty.
The litigation strategy is just one more parallel, and it seems destined to fail.
Those are very interesting parallels. However, it seems this time, Steve Jobs was the originator of the litigation strategy. Was he already losing his edge?
Having other people copy your designs doesn't mean you can't innovate anymore. On the contrary: by innovating you will stay ahead of the pack.
Also, copies always mean the copier is playing catch-up. They always have to wait and see what you've done, before they can try to do the same. By innovating you will keep the advantage, having everybody copy your work just means you have to innovate even harder and faster. That's tough of course, much easier to stop the rest from picking up your innovative ideas.
That's a great antidote to the unhealthy life cycle of many technology companies. They start out with no patents so they have to innovate like crazy to survive in competition with the established companies that already have a lot of patents. The more they amass patents, the less they have to innovate because they can use their patents as either protection from upstarts or offensive weapons against large competitors. It's an arms race no technology company can ignore. Eliminating clearly harmful classes of patents such as on software and visual design and limiting terms of others might return companies to the type of competition you describe.
Obviously the patent squabbles in these cases are ridiculous - the only reason we have functioning high-tech industry in the US is that most companies are not like Apple, and do not use patents offernsively.
It's a good time to review the reasons why, for example, software patents do not work, and can never be made to work:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Why_abolish_software_patents
Software patents clearly do more harm than good. An additional area of bad patent law I learned about as a result of this case are for visual design. I'd like to how any rational person could defend the idea that being able to prevent competitors from making similar-looking things promotes innovation unless they're being paid to do so. Any appropriate protection of design can be accomplished by copyrights and trademarks, though those are often abused as well.
Nuclear is certainly one of the energy sources we need to expand. We shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that one or two sources will solve all our problems.
As a general rule, if someone in the free world just says "Korea," they usually mean South Korea. It's one of those annoying namespace pollution games, like how "China" now always means mainland China, and never Taiwan (although that one's somewhat more understandable, since they have the chunk of territory called China, whereas the Republic of Korea only has half of the Korean peninsula.)
It's a lot more important to specify which Korea than which China, since as you point out, they are approximately the same area and there are only about twice as many South Koreans as North Koreans. You might be forgiven if you say "Korea" to mean "South Korea" in most articles about technology, but in recent years, we've heard a lot more about nuclear technology in North Korea than South.
Linux doesn't exactly have a reputation for working well on brand-new hardware. The new MacBooks only came out a couple months ago, give Linux some time!
Linux runs just fine on many types of brand new machines, especially if they have Intel video. However, Mac hardware has often been more problematic than others..
I think you'll find that actual new *hardware* takes as long for Linux support no matter what it is... unless it's what the people writing the support have upgraded to, in which case it gets support pretty quickly. Outside of Apple, new *systems* often support Linux right out of the box because the hardware inside is already in use in other systems, and so has had time to have the software kinks worked out. Since Apple usually pushes new components in their new systems (especially the case here), it often takes a while for some distributions to incorporate the software updates. However, the linux support is usually there already; it just hasn't been integrated into the distro-of-choice because nobody's had the need to do it -- and won't until some integrater or commercial entity gets some of the Apple hardware and decides to support it.
Without doing an extensive survey, neither of us can make universal statements about all new PCs. However, some PC vendors like System76 and Zareason specialize in GNU/Linux systems. Some major PC vendors like Dell provide some support for Linux and even occasionally sell machines with it installed. Apple provides no support for GNU/Linux. In fact, any OS other than OSX is a second class citizen on Apple hardware and the machine sometimes feels actively hostile other systems. Even Windows, which Apple officially supports, cannot use all the same hardware capabilities that OSX can such as hybrid graphics.
This shouldn't be surprising to anyone familiar with Apple's business model. It is foolish for anyone to buy new Apple hardware primarliy to run anything other than the OS it comes with. The only reason I am running GNU/Linux on an Apple machine is that I had the choice of using a mostly excellent machine for no cost to me vs. paying for something myself. Even then, I seriously considered buying my own.
"I'm sure that not being required to share enhancements was a major motivation for Apple."
Probably not but they might have wanted the option. It's not hard to imagine some case where sharing development code might have given competitors information about upcoming Apple hardware designs, and Apple is as freakishly paranoid about that as the FSF is about people using unfree software.
I'm hardly the only one to notice Apple's preference for permissively licensed software:
"GCC currently handles all those phases for compiling code within Xcode, Apple's Mac OS X IDE (Integrated Development Environment). However, there are some drawbacks to using GCC. One is that it is delivered under the GPL, which means Apple can't integrate it directly into Xcode without making its IDE GPL as well. Apple prefers BSD/MIT style open source licensees, where there is no limitation upon extending open projects as part of larger proprietary products."
The legal means that GCC used to prohibit various technical circumventions which the FSF believed would benefit "not-free" software, also prohibited a modular design which Apple wanted to, and then later exploited for significant benefit.
The FSF thought that ideology was more important than technical flexibility and capability. As a result, the experience of developing with gcc is about the same as 1989, whereas XCode can do many more things, because compiling programs to machine code is not the alpha and omega of software development tools.
The FSF has always put software freedom as their top priority. The reason we even know who they are is that they produced useful software based on their principles. GCC is certainly an old project that could benefit from newer approaches. Its limitations have much more to do with it being old than anyone's politics. That's why competition from LLVM is good for all of us, whether we use LLVM or GCC, which is being pushed to advance by LLVM. As interesting as LLVM is, far more platforms and developers still depend on GCC so the FSF's dedication to their principles continues to benefit everyone as well.
Linux doesn't exactly have a reputation for working well on brand-new hardware. The new MacBooks only came out a couple months ago, give Linux some time!
Linux runs just fine on many types of brand new machines, especially if they have Intel video. However, Mac hardware has often been more problematic than others. I am currently using a 2011 MacBookPro (provided by my employer so I didn't have a choice of hardware) and after more than a year, most of the hardware works well. Initially, the Wifi didn't work at all because of typical Broadcom lack of cooperation. It was difficult or impossible to use the optical drive from Linux and Apple's PC BIOS doesn't seem to support booting from USB at all so installing a distribution was a major pain in the butt. Though the machine has both Intel and AMD video, only the AMD chip is usable after booting via PC BIOS so that's a power tax that is always exacted. Though it is possible to boot Linux via EFI and use the more efficient Intel video with great effort, I never got an external monitor to work. All of my experience leads me to expect that these types of difficulties will continue or get worse with newer Apple hardware.
NeXT bought sole rights to Objective-C from Stepstone long before the Apple merger. They also hold all rights to Objective-C and if they wanted to be vindictive they could cancel its inclusion into GCC, but the don't. Instead, they chose to produce a solution for the entire toolchain in LLVM/Clang. LLVM/Clang has come a long way in a very short time span since Apple invested in it giving us all a choice to leave GCC--a very welcome choice.
Neither NeXT, Apple nor anyone else can "cancel" a Free Software release whether they hold the copyrights or not. Copyright holders can stop making new releases, but they can't take away code already released under the GPL. NeXT did release their extensions to GCC under the GPL for many years because they were depending on the large amount of work that others had put into it. They clearly valued GCC enough to relase their code under the GPL even though they would have preferred a different license. Just as NeXT benefited from GCC, others continue to benefit from NeXT's and Apple's contributions to it. This is a clear success for Copyleft because everyone benefited.
Now that Apple and others have put a large amount of work in LLVM-based compilers, they may be able to end their reliance on GCC, but it took many years and man-hours of work. Although there are plenty of good technical reasons for LLVM, I'm sure that not being required to share enhancements was a major motivation for Apple. That's not to say LLVM projects are a waste of time. It certainly is good that they exist and there is now more competition in the Free compiler space. Hopefully, LLVM projects will remain healthy despite their licenses. Governance and other aspects of the community are just as important or more so than license and there certainly are plenty of examples of permissively-licensed projects used and contributed to by many which thrive such as Apache and PostgreSQL.
The Linux Kernel used the C++ compiler for a while. I believe it was during the 0.99.x era. The goal was to improve the code quality by leveraging C++ compiler features like function name mangling while only using C language features. This, however, looks like they want to use a limited set of C++ language features that would be very handy for experienced C programmers.
You might still be able to compile Linux, as well as other C programs, using a C++ compiler since C++ is still mostly a superset of C. You might even get some benefits of stricter checking.
That's all I really care about, to be honest. As long as I can keep coding in C, they can do whatever.
if GCC, being written in C, has been compiling C++ correctly for many years, it seems a much easier task for a GCC written in C++ to correctly compile C. Also, GCC has been and will continue to be used to compile a great deal of C code so any regressions will be noticed very quickly.
While the GPLv3 was the reason Apple suddenly invested in clang (which just happens to ride on llvm), it has little effect on any companies that do what they should do.
The GPL in general was the reason Apple invested in LLVM and Clang. Jobs has been hostile to Copyleft ever since NeXT was not allowed to get away with violating the GPL with their Objective C frontend. I'm still somewhat surprised that Apple continues to release CUPS under the GPL. Of course the difference there is that they hold the copyright so they can make any part of it proprietary any time they want. They have done so for OSX-specific parts.
Why would Woz legitimize the work of that liar?
It sounds like Woz was duped by Daisey just like the rest of us. Apparently, he removed the made up stuff from the show after This American Life discovered it. However, since Daisey doesn't seem to have admitted he lied, it would be good if Woz called him out on that.