Hacker News Reader

> Was there a company that got into open-source because it was tired of how the public could just go "mucking" about in their code base without reservation? What does that even mean?

Well, there's Red Hat w/ their Enterprise Linux distributions, and Apple w/ the FreeBSD-derived iOS and OSX. You can't fork and distribute either of those products without incurring the wrath of their respective owners' very diligent lawyers.

View on HN

Really? I have seen plenty of RHEL "forks", CentOS, Scientific Linux to name a few.

Apple's OSX isn't open source in any sense, sure it has components based on liberally licensed open source code, but so does almost every other proprietary software product.

Why can't you distribute them? Apple's Darwin is mostly under the APSL, which you can edit and distribute, just not under a different license. Likewise, RHEL is open--the trademark is not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com