Here's Stallman's recollection of what happened:

>The issue first arose when NeXT proposed to distribute a modified GCC in two parts and let the user link them. Jobs asked me whether this was lawful. It seemed to me at the time that it was, following reasoning like what you are using; but since the result was very undesirable for free software, I said I would have to ask the lawyer.

>What the lawyer said surprised me; he said that judges would consider such schemes to be "subterfuges" and would be very harsh toward them. He said a judge would ask whether it is "really" one program, rather than how it is labeled.

>So I went back to Jobs and said we believed his plan was not allowed by the GPL.

>The direct result of this is that we now have an Objective C front end. They had wanted to distribute the Objective C parser as a separate proprietary package to link with the GCC back end, but since I didn't agree this was allowed, they made it free.

http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-...

I think this highlights a few important things:

1) there's significant room for interpretation of what a license means

2) what lawyers and courts think words mean can be quite different from what technologists think

Also, a lot of interactions are mediated by chances of a lawsuit. So if you're a party that is generally disliked by the Free Software folks, like Apple, there's significantly more risk, for identical uses, than a company like Google, which is more popular. There's room for interpretation of what actions mean, and if somebody is more likely to think that you're a nefarious actor, there's a high risk.

I don't blame Apple for switching from GPL to licenses that I consider to be more "free" than the "Free" software licenses. When I read the philosophy pages of the FSF, I come away disagreeing vehemently with their arguments, and often simply unable to understand why people find those documents convincing for anything.

> When I read the philosophy pages of the FSF, I come away disagreeing vehemently with their arguments, and often simply unable to understand why people find those documents convincing for anything.

I mean, there's one thing that is obviously appealing (to a developer, benefits to a user are distinct) - "you can't use my code without giving back." Apple probably doesn't care whether or not you give back, but on the other hand a small developer (like me) often does.

From a developer's point of view I think of GPL not in terms of freedom to do whatever you want, but instead of protecting the developer's wishes about what people do with their software (roughly). When I choose to license something with GPL it's not because I want people to take it and do whatever, it's because I only want people to use it if they are going to be a good citizen.

As a developer, I care a lot more about getting improvements back. GPL is massively beneficial from that orientation. That's why some commercial companies prefer GPL, because the developer of code gets stuff back.

As a user, I care a lot less for GPL, because now I have to publish my changes if I choose to distribute binaries. If I'm a user and I have MIT or BSD code, as a user I have a lot more freedom to do what I want with MIT code.

Since the original NeXT Objective-C compiler was written as an extension to GCC, and GCC has always been (at least perceived) as some sort of legal minefield WRT licensing, this doesn't seem so far-fetched.

What surprises me is that it took them so long to try to divorce from GCC.

EDIT: specified I was talking about the compiler used on the NeXT.