Re:Why Greet Apple's Swift 2.0 With Open Arms?
by tzs on Thursday June 18, 2015 @07:32PM
(#9742218)
That's nonsense. If they don't want to give at all, why did they make clang free? That was entirely an Apple project, and so they could have made it proprietary, yet they made it open.
Or how about Webkit? Yes, they started from KHTML, which was LGPL. They could have easily kept most of their additions in separate parts linked with the LGPL parts, and they could have kept their parts proprietary. Yet they released their parts under a permissive license.
Or how about launchd? That was entirely theirs, and they could have made it proprietary. Yet they released it under an open source license, one that the FSF recognizes as a free software license. Then when Ubunutu was looking for a new startup daemon and considered launchd, but did not like the license, Apple change the license to Apache. That sure doesn't sound like Apple is trying to give anything.
As far as LLVM goes, there is no reason to believe funding it was anything other than an engineering decision. They needed a modular compiler kit so they could use parts of it in things like debuggers and editors and on-the-fly optimization of graphic filters.
LLVM was the only free compiler kit at the time that was production quality and could do these things. GCC could be modified to do these things if you put in a lot of work, but as a matter of policy Stallman would not allow those changes back into the codebase.
So, they had two options: (1) fork GCC and diverge massively from the official version, or (2) use LLVM. Any sane engineer would choose #2.
Or how about Webkit? Yes, they started from KHTML, which was LGPL. They could have easily kept most of their additions in separate parts linked with the LGPL parts, and they could have kept their parts proprietary. Yet they released their parts under a permissive license.
Or how about launchd? That was entirely theirs, and they could have made it proprietary. Yet they released it under an open source license, one that the FSF recognizes as a free software license. Then when Ubunutu was looking for a new startup daemon and considered launchd, but did not like the license, Apple change the license to Apache. That sure doesn't sound like Apple is trying to give anything.
As far as LLVM goes, there is no reason to believe funding it was anything other than an engineering decision. They needed a modular compiler kit so they could use parts of it in things like debuggers and editors and on-the-fly optimization of graphic filters.
LLVM was the only free compiler kit at the time that was production quality and could do these things. GCC could be modified to do these things if you put in a lot of work, but as a matter of policy Stallman would not allow those changes back into the codebase.
So, they had two options: (1) fork GCC and diverge massively from the official version, or (2) use LLVM. Any sane engineer would choose #2.