There are a lot more examples of this.

On the other hand look at how RMS/FSF talks about LLVM and BSD[2], i am a developer there prefers the MIT license for my software, and for me FSF and GPL are a lot more dangerous then apple and there open source license.

[0] http://www.mysql.com/about/legal/licensing/oem/#4 [1] http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/licensing.html [2] https://lwn.net/Articles/582242/

Oracle can't pick up third party patches and incorporate them into their proprietary version (for example: patches from MariaDB). They can only incorporate their own changes, and changes that other sign over.

My goal with open sourcing my software are to make the (software) world just a little better, i do that by writing the best software i can and hope that as many people possible use it, if i write the best ftp library in the world and you need a ftp library for your proprietary program i hope you use mine instead of an inferior implementation.

In my world view i do not loss anything by you making a proprietary forks of my work (i still have my version of my work with my license) but you and your users are getting a better product.

If you think that quality is important, but that as important as that is that users should have control over the software they use, as part of the control they should have over their own lives, then I think a copyleft license is a good tool to help achieve that.

AFAIK, even the FSF requires copyright assignment – Apple likely would too, and this means any 'official' work on Swift will can be released by Apple under any license they wish.

Of course, if you don't agree with that, you are free to license your contributions as GPL and release them to the community without assigning copyright. They just won't be part of the official distribution, and Apple can't build on them. That's the best of both worlds, then.

Assigning copyright to a 501c(3) non-profit is much different than assigning copyright to a for-profit multi-billion dollar corporation.

I've completed the copyright assignment form for some of my contributions to GNU. The FSF's terms are reasonable and the legal text prevents the FSF from being able to make the software non-free in the future. I really dislike copyright assignment in general, but the FSF is in a unique position and I appreciate that they can defend the GPL on my behalf.

I know what they are, and that doesn't change anything. Apple can't force people to sign a Contributor Agreement. Look at, for example, what happened with MariaDB and MySQL. Oracle can't force the MariaDB devs to sign the agreement, nor would Apple be able to in similar situations.