we have to get over the social issue first.

There is no social issue, there is only a propaganda issue. People have been told over and over that nuclear is the ultimate evil thing. They just need some counterbalancing facts about how it can be safe and that in fact it's safer than coal... then start by replacing coal plants with small really well contained nuclear plants, and expand from there.

Oh, wait, humans can actually see by starlight alone.

Not if you have headlights on, are you supposed to turn them off when you hit this stretch of road? And park for about fifteen minutes to dark adapt?

and if they kept working on GCC instead and integrated it in their IDE they'd need to open-source Xcode.

GCC was integrated into XCode for years. The reason they didn't need to open-source XCode is that they used it only as a standalone executable. They use Clang the same way, they just base things on intermediate output from the compiler (as they did with GCC).

They also had GDB debugging integrated in XCode, as they do with LLDB - again no issue because they just use the standalone intermediate executable.

If you read about how GCC is built, it sucks technically to integrate into an IDE. Clang was built to do a much better job of that, and it has... again, nothing to do with license.

Apple software makes heavy use of Objective-C, but the Objective-C front-end in GCC is a low priority for the current GCC developers.

Which is irrelevant to Apple as they supply the manpower for ObjC development with whatever compiler they are using. They just shifted all those people over to work on Clang, but if Clang did not exist they would be the ones working on the ObjC font end.

Finally, GCC is GPL version 3 licensed, which requires developers who distribute extensions for (or modified versions of) GCC to make their source code available

Which Apple always did before GPLV3. That part doesn't matter to Apple because they don't ship GCC on devices, just to developers and it's a standalone binary.

With a slide-out keyboard like the Sidekick had you can have a screen-sized keyboard

Even on those the numbers sucked. You cannot fundamentally change the fact converting the whole screen to a number pad dynamically is vastly superior to tiny little number keys, especially as the bulk of the population ages.

And it added a lot of bulk to the phone.

If you want the same effect now just carry a compact portable bluetooth keyboard. The fact that pretty much no-one does is a testament to most people hating tiny keyboards.

They just converted KHTML to Webkit and never looked back.

And no project in the history of open source has ever been forked because someone wanting to do a lot of work did not want to deal with the maintainers...

Is it open source or not? If you don't support the right to fork totally and let the previous guys worry about carrying back changes, you don't support open source.

Webkit probably remains OSS only because the KHTML foundation requires it.

That is bullshit and you know it. Apple keeps lots of other projects open they do not have to. And they benefit from other people's work on Webkit so it's no mystery why they would keep that open, you don't have to believe there's an altruistic motive at work.

Apple understands what few other companies seem to, that if an open source project is strongly backed you'll find other work and ideas from outside the company help improve it beyond what you as a single company could ever hope to do. That is why they make such extensive use of open source work, and why they open source most Apple-originated projects.

It's also why Apple can spend so little on R&D and yet stay ahed of most other companies technologically.

Why would I contribute to open source, when Apple - and Google - use it to build walled gardens and make millions - billions - of dollars I'll never see a penny of?

The difference between nothing and 100k a year is pretty negligible overall when you are talking billions.

Yet lots of people work, even though the things they work on make the companies they work for billions...

Perhaps you are in software for the wrong reason if you worry about who is making money. The reason you contribute to open source is to make life better for everyone, and also to give you freedom to keep using tools and software you like as you move between companies.

Clang wouldn't exist if it wasn't for GCC's license.

Apple contributed heavily to GCC for a while. The license was obviously fine.

But Apple felt GCC architecturally just wasn't able to do what they wanted, so they decided that a long-term solution was that old technical fallback, the re-write. So they promoted and gradually switched over to Clang/LLVM.

The license had nothing to do with anything.

Perhaps they wanted to clear the decks of all the people selling Explorer invites on eBay (or trying to).

Apple caters to the stylish, the people that matter, people who won't care about the presence/absence of a physical keyboard since they have never owned a smartphone before.

I don't know about the stylish, since that never applied to me. But it did cater to people who mattered - real people.

For you see, for real people the small physical keyboards SUCKED. They had very tiny hit areas, were sometimes hard to press. They took up a lot of space which meant tiny screens, and if you started typing anything not a-z you were totally screwed buy whatever whacky shifting mechanism that keyboard designed had chased to introduce.

I had use blackberries and a variety of Palm/Windows phone devices before I got the first iPhone, and I was REJOICING that at last a mobile keyboard had reasonably sized keys, and I could type really fast - and also type pure numbers the way God intended, with a giant keypad.

Just because you and a few of your kind didn't like virtual keyboards, does not mean the rest of the world agreed with you - including many very technically astute people.

As they say:

If you find such things unpleasant, then I suggest you develop a taste for forced labor because by the year twenty-twenty all that sneer is going to get you is a slot in the underclass boiling corpses.

How many of these land on ebay?

Anyone planning to sell them on eBay would presumably check the ebay prices first to see how much they can make.

As far as I can tell, Glass is not selling period. I offered a guy $20 to buy one but they didn't bite, so I guess people are not super desperate to discard them yet - but I don't think many in the open period will be buying to resell, there's just no market.

it has either been because they were forced to by the license, or because it was for software that primarily runs on OS X.

What nonsense is this? Pretty much all open source software Apple uses is under BSD style licenses, they don't have to give back anything.

And yet they have for EVERYTHING they use. There is no "force of license". They do this because it is STUPID not to. It costs WAY more money to re-merge your internal mustache-twirling changes to a library with every new release, than it does simply to contribute back and be able to upgrade with everyone else.

As for the OSX thing, just what are you referring to? Just about all of the open source software Apple makes use of (like BSD) is also in IOS,

But still, somehow, you know

We know because people researched the hell out of Jobs, for both good and bad reasons. There are very few things someone as heavily analyzed as Jobs can hide.

I don't care about Jobs personally, but he seems to have drawn the utter fascination of many - ironically including yourself, or you would not bring him up. How does it feel to have someone you hate controlling your head from beyond the grave anyway? Just curious.

Isn't the "example" the fact that there is even one open source consortium outside Apache...

So, NCSA mean anything to you?

It was my understanding that when they depreciated OpenSSL they just asked software vendors and users to bundle/get the latest version themselves.

No, developers use the Apple provided cryptography libraries where most people would import openSSL.

Which means that a lot of OSX servers _are_ vulnerable while Apple can claim OSX is not./em?

Now that may be so, if you're running an OSX server you probably have a number of open source programs running that were brought over by MacPorts or the like, and they would probably include a more recent verso of SSL.

Also, I don't know if Apache that ships with OSX uses the Apple crypto library or not... that could be an issue.

But honestly how many public facing OSX servers are there likely to be? And most home users do not run Apache. Most of the software consumers will be running on OSX is safe.