Hacker News Reader

Comment by driggs | Hacker News Reader

Because Apple switched the default macOS shell from the GNU-licensed `bash` to the BSD-licensed `zsh`?

Apple switched when bash switched from GPL2 to GPL3 which they didn’t like. The older bash is still available.

According to the interwebs, zsh became default with Catalina in 2019 [1]; ten years after bash 4 was released with gpl v3 or later.

Also, the interwebs suggest Apple used to use tcsh as the default shell[2]; I don't know when they changed that, but it may have been after bash 4 released? (Thanks, 10.3 was in 2003, so several years before the license changed)

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/4/18651872/apple-macos-catal...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18853318

bash became the default shell in 10.3. tcsh was the default before then.

> Apple switched when bash switched from GPL2 to GPL3

Apple just didn’t update. It took them years to finally switch to switch to zsh.

> The older bash is still available.

Aside from it being bash (a great reason not to use it as far as I’m concerned) it’s now a 17 years old version of bash.

> Aside from it being bash (a great reason not to use it as far as I’m concerned) it’s now a 17 years old version of bash.

I thought people liked macOs for its vintage feel? Remember a time when computers could only render a single menu bar in a fixed location, feel the experience of SYN floods, run a version of bash that is old enough to vote in the next presidential election.

Honestly this is such a waste of time every time I have to argue with developers about installing up to date homebrew (or whatever) versions of the coreutils that I wish Apple would simply DELETE all these ancient versions of tools from MacOS. As a bonus, homebrew does not offer --with-default-names any more and some tools (like make) are posted into different paths so you need to add your own symlinks or add multiple paths to your PATH.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com