Thanks, I was wrong about apples reason not to use the gplv3.
> rake Apple over the coals over
You spend a lot of time negating dmm's comments about Apple, when most of his post was about pools of power controlling or attempting to control a given bit of software. Granted, Apple spends a bit of time doing this very thing quite frequently and most people seem cool with it (because it's so easy!), so I'm curious why you are so set on defending it?
Because misinformation is misinformation, and i'm not a fan of sitting by and letting it drop, whether it's happening to me, my colleagues, or even companies i don't particularly like personally, but happen to know facts about.
Particularly when this is used as the lead-in and part of a strategy of supporting an argument.
In fact, i'll point out that RMS is actually very good about this stuff himself. If his position is based on factually incorrect info, and you correct it, he will often immediately change his position.
First, GPLv3's patent provisions are not particularly strong compared to other open source licenses.
Second, this has nothing to do with anything, and certainly isn't a reason for Apple avoidance of GPLv3.
Apple was almost unilaterally concerned with the installation information requirements in GPLv3 (that would require providing signing keys and allowing modifications/reverse engineering), not the patent provisions. They said so, multiple times in the various working groups/mailing lists/etc for GPLv3. Heck, APSL, The Apple Public Source License, version 2.0, which apple released tons of source under, predates GPLv3 by 4 years (2003 vs 2007), and happily grants patents.
http://www.opensource.apple.com/license/apsl/
Apple, for the record, was willing to give the GCC project all of the code to LLVM under the GPL and non-assert any patents (and to my knowledge, Apple has not filed patents on any part of LLVM that they have contributed to publicly)
Apple has also contributed to tons of Apache licensed code and similar code that requires contributors grant patent licenses.
I work for Google, and have personally seen them contribute code to our projects with patent licenses (though admittedly, not as much as they used to). Additionally, I worked on both LLVM and GCC, and was involved directly in the various plans WRT to LLVM and GCC merging. Same with GPLv3 stuff, etc.
There are plenty of things to rake Apple over the coals over, and plenty of reasons why Apple disliked GPLv3, but what you cite simply isn't one of them.