I get the feeling everyone's purging the GPL, and I'm not sure this is a good long-term goal. I still think we need legal protection against backdoors, spying, and DRM; and our legislators have only given us copyright law to try to perform legal judo with. We'll see how things work out, but I'm not optimistic with the overall GPL purge. I fear that it's taking us to a world where Black Mirror is a familiar reality instead of a fictional horror.

I think GPL has served its purpose, leaving a healthy ecosystem of open source software along with professional acceptance of the model.

Now, paradoxically, GPL is less free than many open source licenses. The GPL restrictions will limit adoptions, as we're seeing here.

Stated differently, GPL was an important starting "assist" that's now slowing us down. It's time to turn it off.

Google is doing the same.

They just gave a death sentence to GCC on the NDK, by declaring it as deprecated and it will only stay around until clang support catches up with GCC.

Brillo has even less GPL components than Android and in Fuchsia I imagine not a single one, given that they are even doing their own micro-kernel.

Is it really a "purge" if they do it over a decade? Seems like more of an "obvious preference".

Could it be they avoid GPL3 just because they don't want to release their Apple Inc code signing keys?

It's that that big of a deal actually. You can still disable SIP, you can still override kernel extension signing (and signing on pretty much anything else), and you can sill install any GPLv3 software you want. It's just the default base install that has changed, and everyone knows there is no one-size fits all. While there are plenty of commercial reasons to not go beyond GPLv3 from the vendor point of view, it doesn't really change anything for "us". Even if we had a stable bash from 2015, we'd still want the 2016 version and install it anyway...

Wait a min, as far as I can tell this is a GPL v3 Purge? That is huge difference.

Were there the changes since 2014? Anybody knows?

What?!?

Apple is getting rid of Bash? When?

It's not just Apple. FreeBSD for the last several years has been purging itself of GPL software as well.

Going so far as to go through the pain of yanking out gcc for the llvm suite for the OS and ported applications.

I really liked this last bit given the reaction to the MBP:

>I’m also intrigued to see how far they are prepared to go with this. They already annoyed and inconvenienced a lot of people with the Samba and GCC removal. Having wooed so many developers to the Mac in the last decade, are they really prepared to throw away all that goodwill by shipping obsolete tools and making it a pain in the ass to upgrade them?

Seems like developers have been overstating their importance to Apple forever.

The fun thing is that Mac OS X don't have the same restrictions as iOS.