this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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i haven't gotten much sleep and it's really early so apologies if i misunderstood the question. very broadly, there's two kinds of open source licenses: copyleft and permissive. generally, permissive licenses like MIT allow any usage of the code, including by copyrighting your own contributions or including it in copyrighted works. copyleft licenses require additions to the code to be open sourced too. this was a problem for apple when GNU code updated from GPLv2 to v3, which iirc added the restriction that any package that included licensed programs also had to be copyleft. this was a problem because apple had packaged a lot of GPL programs with macOS, so now they haven't been updated since 2007
I'm having trouble following the consequence cascade you're describing. The GPL license updated which tried to add in some copylefting (i.e. Apple was compelled to open source stuff to keep using it). Therefore, they simply stopped updating them so they wouldn't need the new license.
Is that it?
yeah that's the situation as i understand it. obviously im not a lawyer and whatnot but the way i understand it apple would have been required to open source the entirety of macOS if they had included GPLv3 software. GPLv2 was also considered copyleft (in fact, the FSF, who is responsible for GPL, coined the term), but GPLv3 added more stipulations in response to practices by corporations (most notably TiVO) that were not appreciated by the free software community
More info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization