Re: Please release nano under less restrictive license so we can use it

[Chris Allegretta]

On 2023-04-25 10:50, Gur Telem wrote:
> Hi there,
> I'm not speaking for the company, just myself and a few other angry
> users on the internet.
> Apple can't use nano because it's licensed as GPLv3 we are stuck in
> the stone age using Pico.
>
> If possible to make nano with less restrictive license like MIT or
> even Apache it would go a long way to help us integrate nano into the
> system and allow users to get the proper experience with a good and
> friendly editor (that doesn't attract a bunch of memes of people not
> being able to exit it).

[Benno is the maintainer now but I'm still going to butt in]

Hmm, I've been curious why Apple switched back to Pico. I'm sorry they 
seem to have declared war on GPL software, but this seems to be recent 
revelation. For years OS X distributed nano with seemingly no issues. 
What changed?

I'm genuinely interested in what Apple things they are on the hook for. 
Is it that if they make changes to the nano source code they would have 
to disclose them back to us? Too bad if so, that's the entire REASON 
Free and Open Source Software is so successful.

AFAIK nothing has changed whatsoever regarding the responsibilities on 
Apple for distributing nano as a binary. What's likely to have changed 
is whatever guidance their lawyers are providing.

Has Apple tried submitting patches to the project such that nano builds 
without any required patching on their OS? The burden of distributing a 
GPL binary is VERY low as far as I'm aware. It seems to be the Tech 
companies now (not just Apple) make all decisions based on the advice of 
lawyers, and not actual developers.

Sorry that this is probably not what you want to hear, but I don't 
foresee the situation getting better any time soon.