| Do you have any source for that? I found a post[0] on Slashdot from March 2000 that Apple "plans to assign the copyright for its changes to gcc to the [FSF]." Neither the post nor the comments I skimmed seem to make reference to a victorious GPL lawsuit. (Unfortunately the original mailing list post is lost.) The earliest snapshot[1] of opensource.apple.com on the Internet Archive suggests that the compiler sources were available (under "cc") as of October 12, 2000. Although that snapshot suggests the first release was version cc-792, I can't find older than cc-798 on the site today. But the NOTES file[2] is interesting, detailing NeXT's/Apple's earlier changes including release codenames. (3/19/97: "This is the first fully functional compiler for the PowerPC.") I would guess that the earliest Apple shipped gcc was with ProjectBuilder in the Mac OS X Developer Preview which was in 1999. Maybe things start to get blurry with NeXT, WebObjects, etc. but it doesn't _seem_ like Apple was shirking it's responsibilities under the GPL. 0: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/00/03/17/1656240/apple-plan... 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20001012121451/http://www.openso... 2: https://opensource.apple.com/source/cc/cc-798/NOTES.auto.htm... |
Its was NextStep. They tried for a long time to ship a proprietary GCC, then a proprietary frontend with the rest of gcc, then finally backed down and released the frontend. This was all in the early nineties.