Unfortunately, the reason why Apple ships with the very old and very
limited versions of the various command line tools is mostly a legal
one. In particular, a lot of effort has been expended on *not* shipping
any GPL'd tools in the base system because of the extreme limitations of
the GPL itself.
The problem is that the GPL fairly strictly prohibits one from
shipping a proprietary system that uses GPL'd software as a foundation.
At least, that is one possible interpretation and the one that the Apple
legal team chose to take. Obviously, there are other companies that have
chosen a different interpretation-- TiVo, for example-- but the bottom
line is that the whole issue is rather fuzzy, hasn't been challenged in
court, and could cost Apple *millions* if it were challenged, regardless
of whether they won or lost.
The theory is that it is OK to ship dev tools that are largely GPL
based because the system itself is not built upon those tools.
Or something like that.
What it gets down to is that we now have two meanings to the concept
of 'open license'. BSD follows one, GPL the other.
Under the BSD license, you are free to pretty much do anything you
want with the code in a for profit context with only minor caveats on
usage and credit. That is, you can build a closed system on top of the
open foundation of the BSD assets.
The GPL is open in a context that expressly forbids one from building
closed/proprietary systems with it.
Personal Opinion: I think the GPL is having exactly the opposite affect
that was intended. It is stifling innovation. Specific example: Apple
was going to use the debian package manager as the basis for installation
in Darwin and, eventually, OS X-- this was years ago in the very early
days of the Darwin project-- and had to basically abandon that effort
entirely *because of the GPL*. So, instead of Apple spending tens of
thousands of $$$ expanding on and improving dpkg-- all effort that would
have been open source-- they had to reinvent the wheel (or, actually,
completely abandon making a wheel at all). I have seen this happen time
and time again. It is frustrating. It sucks. It is counter productive.
It benefits *no one*.
In any case, don't blame Apple entirely for shipping outdated or
underfeatured versions of the various BSD tools. At least, don't blame
engineering...
b.bum
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