They might be bumping into old versions of utilities up to just before GPLv3.
From GPLv3 onwards, Apple has had to leave installation of newer versions of tools to users, legally, our publish their own proprietary IP, Stallman’s objective some would say.
That’s simply FUD. Apple seemed to be able to use GPLv2 without any consequences, and GPLv3 has all the same properties in that regard. The real reason is likely this:
Anyway, the message is pretty obvious: Apple won’t ship anything that’s licensed under GPL v3 on OS X. Now, why is that?
There are two big changes in GPL v3. The first is that it explicitly prohibits patent lawsuits against people for actually using the GPL-licensed software you ship. The second is that it carefully prevents TiVoization, locking down hardware so that people can’t actually run the software they want.
So, which of those things are they planning for OS X, eh?
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?
From what I hear, Clang development has slowed to a crawl and GCC leads in new standards compliance and features, since major past Clang supporters have stopped contributing to concentrate on their own languages.
But I see that user ‘pjmlp’, who probably has a much more informed opinion than mine, is posting in this thread.
Then your were lied to (or legal was incompetent). GPL has no way to force anyone to publish internal proprietary source code. Any copyright infringer always has the option to stop distributing. If they want to keep distributing something, they have the option to re-implement the missing functionality themselves.
Well I was there for years, and it seems Apple legal should know more about this as a concern than most, and they clearly didn't lie to us about it being a concern for _them_. (Still consistent with your point: it could be their own fear/uncertainty/doubt.)
Perhaps legal decided the fiasco wasn't worth a protracted court battle, and PR digressions, and foisted the option of re-implementing missing modernized functionality on homebrew/macports, on purpose?
Well, I would tend to trust the FSF’s legal opinions about the GPL over that of Apple’s lawyers. Addidionally, Apple didn’t seem to have a problem with GPLv2, and GPLv3 is no more copyleft than v2 was. Finally, the “might be forced to release proprietary code” story is, while FUD, extremely well-known FUD, repeated for decades industry-wide by GPL naysayers, and would be an appropriate choice for a believable story to tell the programmer employees.
If Apple merely wanted to save on work and dump it all on third-party ports, why not remove packages outright or, for a period of time, make them available as official add-ons? Why, in that case, keep ancient versions as part of the OS? Why remove something as widely used as Samba, which as I recall garnered some criticism at the time? It seems likely to me that Apple has some other reason than that to remove all GPL-licensed packages.
From GPLv3 onwards, Apple has had to leave installation of newer versions of tools to users, legally, our publish their own proprietary IP, Stallman’s objective some would say.