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If you look at the repos in https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions and their commit messages, that is pretty much the definition of the "Throwing it over the wall every so often" approach to open source.

At least the name-brand projects like Webkit and Swift (which have logos and everything) are on a different planet to that.



Yeah, which is a totally valid approach under the GPL, and essentially the closest one to how source distribution would’ve worked at the time the license was written (software disks either come with source code or instructions to acquire it).


I don't think any of the code that Apple ships with macOS is GPL though? That's the reason why they stopped shipping bash, if I'm not wrong?

edit: ah it seems that they support GPLv2 but not GPLv3, that's what happened. And they still ship bash, just the old GPLv2 version.


What’s not valid is failing to produce source that matches the code that you ship.


It's only a totally valid approach if you're hostile to it. It's following the letter of the law but not the spirit of it.


For certain use-cases, this approach is actually _more_ convenient, i.e. supporting old platforms. If I'm trying to build a modern piece of software on Tiger, but it turns out I need to first back-port cctools from Leopard, they've made that task extremely convenient for me.


git checkout tag ## use this next time


It is unlikely that a given open source project would organize their tags along the lines of "Tiger 10.4.11"




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