[PD] expr alternative

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Oct 25, 2011, at 8:51 PM, Simon Wise wrote:

> On 26/10/11 01:29, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
>
>> The Apple App Store is incompatible with the GPL and LGPL, from  
>> what I
>> understand. Getting Apple to make their App Store compatible with  
>> the GPL and
>> LGPL is another much better solution since it will work for all GPL  
>> and LGPL
>> software.
>
> this is of course the best solution ... but it seems that Apple is  
> deeply opposed to GPL and all it represents, they have always been  
> happy to use Open Source code, and contributed some too, but have  
> stuck to BSD licensed code where-ever they can, and only used GPL  
> stuff when they had no other choice.
>
> They seem to object to the idea that using open source code should  
> require a reciprocal release of their own improvements and would  
> rather use the work of others, but keep their own contributions  
> secret and for their profit only.
>
> This is quite a common attitude, and I assume the reason a lot of  
> companies prefer BSD code. But I believe that the reason Linux is as  
> strong as it is is exactly because of its license ... any  
> corporation (or any individual) that wishes to use Linux legally and  
> distribute their version must do their part and publish their  
> improvements.


This isn't entirely true with Apple, but it is becoming more and more  
true.  Apple has done some real contributions to free software, WebKit  
is one good example, though they forked off of KHTML in a bit of a  
punkish way.  Then they merged the BSD parts of Mac OS X with FreeBSD  
so its the same code base.  They paid Daniel Steffen to port Tcl/Tk to  
Cocoa as well.  They also contribute to gcc, which is GPL software,  
and its their main compiler for both Mac OS X and iOS.

Then came iOS, and they got crazy.

.hc


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