Amazon had GPLv3 blacklisted when I worked there. Nothing new by way of legal concerns about GPLv3. No lawyer is going to advise a company to take actions that will likely see the company go to court to explore just how much of a license is legally enforceable, and just what it actually means.

And they also avoided GPLv2. Sure, they had bash, but all of the "coreutils" were the BSD flavors. That an exception was made for one or a couple of things doesn't exactly counter my claim very strongly.

They accepted the sister LGPLv2 license as the basis of WebKit, and had other tools like Samba integrated. They may have avoided the GPLv2 when easy, but they outright banned GPLv3 (froze bash and gcc on the last version while working to remove them; wrote their own from-scratch CIFS implementation to drop samba).

They accepted those things because they had nothing else. The forked WebKit from KHTML, which was LGPL. It's not like they chose that license. Same with Samba. It was either take those things or invent something new. Especially at that point in Apple's history, they probably didn't have the resources to NIH everything. Today, that would be a different story, I'm sure.

I understand your point about outright banning GPLv3 vs just avoiding GPLv2. But I have to wonder what would have happened in an alternate timeline where KHTML, Samba, and GCC were all GPLv3 at the point in time where this universe's Apple adopted them. Would they have just skipped making their own browser and integrating with SMB?

That’s probably more because of MacOS’s FreeBSD heritage. They used BSD tools where they could get them and used gnu where they must.

Sure. That's true. But follow the rabbit hole. Why do they have a BSD heritage? Why doesn't BSD use GNU software? It's anti-copyleft all the way down. Long before GPLv3.

Because BSD is older than GNU, and NeXTSTEP was based on BSD.

Running GNU coreutils with a highly BSD kernel is a recipe for sadness. If you don't believe me, try Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.

Like what? I install the GNU coreutils with macports on my work Mac. It seems fine.

Sorry. I forgot coreutils doesn't mean core utilities, like ifconfig and route and netstat and those things.

Darwin is a BSD so maybe there is another explanation for that.

And as we all know, FreeBSD has enjoyed plenty of Apple contributions upstream.

Without GPL, all commercial UNIXes would be around and Linux would be just another school clone.