What's with the move to MIT over AGPL for utilities?
What's with the move to MIT over AGPL for utilities?
I would understand if Canonical want a new cow to milk, but why are developers even agreeing to this? Are they out of their minds?? Do they actually want companies to steal their code? Or is this some reverse-uno move I don't see yet? I cannot fathom any FOSS project not using the AGPL anymore. It's like they're painting their faces with "here, take my stuff and don't contribute anything back, that's totally fine"
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Apple makes the source code to all their core utilities available? Nobody cares but they do.
Why do they?
They are BSD licensed (very similar to MIT). According to the crowd here, Apple would never Open Source their changes. Yet, in the real world, they do.
Every Linux distro uses CUPS for printing. Apple wrote that and gave it away as free software.
How do we explain that?
There are many companies that use BSD as a base. None of them have take the BSD utils “commercial”.
Why not?
Most of the forks have been other BSD distros. Or Chimera Linux.
How about OpenSSH?
It is MiT licensed. Shouldn’t somebody have embraced, extended, and extinguished it by now?
Why haven’t they?
Apple makes the source code to all their core utilities available
Apple makes the source code for many open source things they distribute available, but often only long after they have shipped binaries. And many parts of their OS which they developed in-house which could also be called "core utilities" are not open source at all.
Every Linux distro uses CUPS for printing. Apple wrote that and gave it away as free software.
Apple did not write cups.
It was was created by Michael R. Sweet in 1997, and was GPL-licensed and used on Linux distros before Mac OS X existed. Apple didn't want to be bound by the GPL so they purchased a different license for it in 2002.
Later, in 2007 they bought the source code and hired msweet to continue its development, and at some point the license of the FOSS version was changed to "GNU General Public License ("GPL") and GNU Library General Public License ("LGPL"), Version 2, with an exception for Apple operating systems."
I loved this comment as much as a person is allowed to love it
"Commercial" is not the opposite of free/libre. In fact, GPL licensed software can be "taken commercial" with a guarantee that it will remain libre, whereas BSD-licensed software doesn't have those guarantees.