Comment by dorianj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dorianj | Hacker News Reader

>I’m also intrigued to see how far they are prepared to go with this. They already annoyed and inconvenienced a lot of people with the Samba and GCC removal. Having wooed so many developers to the Mac in the last decade, are they really prepared to throw away all that goodwill by shipping obsolete tools and making it a pain in the ass to upgrade them?

The answer is: all the way. I don't understand any other conclusion you could draw from this. Other than a few non-essential command line tools (like emacs), Apple will clean the system of anything they can't control.

A lot of code is shared between OS X and iOS, so the 'tivoisation' clause means that they can't use GPLv3 on iOS, so best to avoid it on Mac OS X too.

Homebrew will still be around to install all the command-line goodies you need. No pain in the ass required.

Regardless of Apple's goals in this action, a lot of the OSS world is moving to permissive licenses, so this isn't a terribly surprising move.

>Regardless of Apple's goals in this action, a lot of the OSS world is moving to permissive licenses, so this isn't a terribly surprising move.

Guess I hadn't noticed "a lot of the OSS world moving to permissive licenses". The GPL is still the workhorse of many free systems with code coming out all the time. I mean, if you're counting web development code (like the Rails ecosystem), I suppose you could make the argument that the MIT license is surging... but there's a whole world of code beyond generating dynamic HTML that continues to be licensed under the old-guard licenses.

Most major new projects seem to come with non GPL licenses...

I didn't have this impression. Could you give some examples?

https://github.com/popular/watched

almost every one of those projects is BSD/MIT licensed

> Guess I hadn't noticed "a lot of the OSS world moving to permissive licenses". The GPL is still the workhorse of many free systems with code coming out all the time.

I don't have the stats handy right now, but in general the percentage of new projects using permissive licenses has increased sharply, and many non-FSF GPLv2 products have not made the jump to GPLv3.

>are they really prepared to throw away all that goodwill by shipping obsolete tools and making it a pain in the ass to upgrade them?

Why the hell would they care? Apple has been been gradually squeezing the techie more and more for ages.

Interestingly, Homebrew is broken right now, at least for me, given that I've installed Xcode 4.2 and it didn't seem to install GCC (instead installing LLVM) while homebrew recipes seem to require GCC. (or at least homebrew is complaining about it.)

You can get it here https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer

I believe this installer is missing some headers (included in the OSX GCC) which will break the install of various Ruby libraries.

If that's what you're into.

Homebrew is warning about it, but should still attempt to compile. There is also an homebrew recipe for installing GCC v 4.6 so you can always install that...

I solved this problem by uninstalling Xcode 4.2, downloading Xcode 4.1 from Apple's site <https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action>; and then redownloading 4.2 and updating. You'll probably need to register to download, but it's free.

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