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Posted Feb 18, 2016 13:36 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: BSD by Cyberax
Parent article: Winning the copyleft fight

> Yes, and it very publicly forced companies like Apple to invest billions in replacing GPL software.

Yes, poor Apple, forced to actually spend money in order to have software it can use on its own terms instead of freeloading on someone else's work.

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Posted Feb 18, 2016 16:41 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

They weren't freeloading, they were contributing as well, including the whole ObjC language, if under a bit if protest. If you are trying to create a worldwide software commons where copyleft is the new default and proprietary is the exception you want to attract the worlds largest software developers and their billions of dollars worth of time, not push them away. We can build a self-sustaining copyleft community without them, but if you want more than basic survival you need to grow the development community.

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Posted Feb 18, 2016 20:28 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> They weren't freeloading, they were contributing as well, including the whole ObjC language, if under a bit if protest.

"A bit under protest" is a bit of an understatement -- NeXT only contributed their Objective-C frontend back to GCC after the lawyers got involved.

In a bit of irony, the fallout from that led to GCC deliberately making it harder to add proprietary extensions, which also made it harder to extend in any way, which led to the creation of LLVM.