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Apple Makes Free/Open Source Software Look Bad, Illegal

Summary: Apple's mistreatment of software is it exploiting continues to increase resentment against the company

Apple's apathy towards Open Source software is not total apathy when Apple can exploit it and turn it into proprietary software. Apple wishes not to be obliged to share its changes to software it got for free and even when third-party developers are involved, Apple wishes to restrict their own freedom and their own choice. We saw that in the VLC saga [1, 2, 3] and we may be seeing it again based on this short new report which says Apple violates WebKit's Open Source licence. So much for taking KHTML forward, eh? To quote:



Apple has a process in place to do exactly this, which is appreciable. However, this negligence from Apple can cause immense agitation in the Open Source community. If Apple gets away with doing this (which they will not), it will send out a dangerous signal resulting in massive theft, violation and misuse of Open Source codes and principles.


In other news about Apple, it has managed to turn BSD into something vulnerable and there are those who exploit it:

The open source Metasploit vulnerability testing framework got a major overhaul this week with the release of Metasploit 3.7.

The Metasploit 3.7 release provides an enhanced session tracking backend that is intended to improve performance. Metasploit 3.7 also provides over 35 new exploit modules for security researchers to test, including new ones designed to test Apple's iOS mobile operating system security.

The Apple iOS Backup File Extraction module however is not an attack vector for directly exploiting iOS. Rather it is what is known as a post-exploitation module.


As usual, Apple gives a bad name to Open Source and also turns it into proprietary, only to put users at risk in the process. Since Apple is part of the same cartel which harms Open Source (e.g. with patent lawsuits), those who care about Open Source oughtn't care for Apple. Apple only cares about Apple. ⬆

Apple headquarters

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