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On 22 May 2014 10:21, Martin Gautier <martin.gautier@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Aren't Apple's OSs BSD/Linux based?
LOL!
Yes, the darwin OS is BSD-derived, since BSD does not do viral
freedom. But the public darwin project is now (surprise!) dead and
unmaintained, so not really much claim to FLOSS.
Definitely *not* Linux based. Linux uses the GPL, which enforces viral
freedoms ("copyleft"). Apple chose BSD because they could get away
with closing everything that touched it and pay nothing, just as back
in the mid-90's Microsoft took BSD's code for its TCP/IP stack and
paid nothing and open-sourced nothing and gave nothing back, once it
had to admit it had failed either to shut out or to break the
Internet.
The kernel (technically, microkernel) is Mach, developed at CMU, which
is also non-copyleft FLOSS. I believe Apple did make significant
contributions back. They also took over funding and staffing for CUPS,
which I think every GNU/Linux distro also uses, a good long way back,
an exemplary bit of corporate FLOSS work.
All of these are true statements regarding FLOSS components of MacOS
X. I'm not sure to what extent, if at all, they are true of iOS, which
is what we are discussing here, and which it seems to me is all about
the denial of the four freedoms at every possible juncture. iOS
forbids the running of FLOSS interpreters like Java and Python, for
instance.
Don't see how this pure-iOS thread could conceivably ever be called
useful for a LUG.
--
Phil Hudson http://hudson-it.no-ip.biz
@UWascalWabbit PGP/GnuPG ID: 0x887DCA63
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