I'm genuinely curious which projects you are thinking of when you mention Apple. Shedding GPLv3 and refusing to (for example) update Bash because they do not want to use anything licensed under GPLv3 is pretty.... I dunno, I'm just curious what projects you're thinking of when you say that. The walls of that garden are pretty high.

So getting rid of GPLv3 means they can't be doing anything good in open source? Nevermind CUPS, LLVM, Swift, and WebKit just to name a few?

GPL isn't the only license in town, and clearly there are disadvantages to it.

What "disadvantage" are you referring to? The one that forces companies to give back in the same manner that allows them to use the work of others for free? Yeah, that is so shitty.

The problem is that you need to give back everything, even if the GPL code you are using is a tiny part of your product. That's why I prefer LGPL.

Or Samba. When given the choice to abide by the GPL and open source their Samba changes, or to drop everything; they did the latter and wrote their own SMB implementation. That was three or four OSX releases ago and it's still buggy as hell. The only one who lost here are Apple's paying customers.

Have to agree, had a lot of pain when they first switched, their initial release/update was broken/poor to say the least.. the hangs and performance issues aside even.

Swift comes to mind.

Chill out. Of course they made it to benefit themselves in some way. They are not a charity.

The point is, they released it as open-source, which is what we are talking about in this thread.