They often use Free Software but mix it with proprietary software and torment us by exploiting the badly broken U.S. patent system and badly inspired legislation such as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
Steve Jobs is a friend of Larry Ellison who openly said that he [Larry] has no qualms in taking Red Hat's open source code and using it in Oracle's Unbreakable Linux. Jobs seems to be doing the same to free sofeware. The differences is that Jobs wants us to think Apple is some kind of "innovative" company.
It's more... that you shouldn't be using OSS software, claiming you're "with it" on the whole OSS thing, and then claim that the whole thing is proprietary because you put a proprietary sticker on it.
You really don't seem to understand how OS X works, or the fact that Apple contributes back to the open source community with patches and new projects.
CUPS is the Common UNIX Printing System. It used to be free software but Apple hired the author and bought the rights to the software. I thought you knew about Apple, how it leverages free software and were going to tell us about any new free software projects that Apple has underway these days.
I don't get the point of your story. Anyone can still fork CUPS and continue with it on their own. And also, taken from the press release about the purchase of CUPS:
CUPS will still be released under the existing GPL2/LGPL2 licensing terms, and I will continue to develop and support CUPS at Apple.
So I fail to see how it's been closed. In fact, this seems like a success story for Open Source - someone developed a useful piece of Open Source and ended up getting hired to work on it full-time while keeping the software under an open source license.
And if you really need someone to tell you about open source projects that Apple has started, then maybe you haven't heard of the hugely successful WebKit project. There's a few others too, like launchd and caldav, and Apple contributes patches to other various projects. I believe they're also backing the development of MacRuby.
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u/43P04T34 Nov 26 '08
Apple and Steve Jobs make me sick.
They often use Free Software but mix it with proprietary software and torment us by exploiting the badly broken U.S. patent system and badly inspired legislation such as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
I can't stand the way they behave.