I don't really think you can say that. It's not because they did something particularly positive, but more because they did something negative that had positive side effects. A positive externality maybe?
Apple wants the "freedom" to take free software and use it for their own purposes without having to pass the freedom onto their users. It's unfortunate that people see this "banishing" and think its a good thing when it's really a bad thing.
Liberal licenses like BSD are enormously free for everybody involved. The people putting work into software using the open-source code can contribute if they want, which encourages more businesses (who would otherwise be working with proprietary alternatives) to work with the software in the first place.
The increased amount of participation probably far outweighs whatever benefit is involved from the "freedom" in forcing others to publish their changes, which actually just discourages participation from the industry and only marginally improves the ecosystem in the process.
The FSF freedom is not about giving freedom to developers, BSD-style licenses give more freedom to developers. The FSF wants to give freedom to the users, not the developers, and believes that code which is not open and free is a threat to the personal freedom of the users and has every chance of being malicious.
That doesn't make sense to me. How much freedom does a non-programming user gain by having the source code? Such users can hire others to work with the source code for them.
And interestingly enough, non-programming users have this same freedom whether it's BSD code or GPL code. Even more, these same non-programming users have greater freedom with BSD code, because it's more permissive.
I think what you're arguing, obliquely, is that users benefit because there's more source code around when there's GPL than when there's BSD. This is still the core debate between GPL and BSD; does being permissive and trusting people result in less or more source code?
For me, personally, I always contribute back to BSD projects, and avoid GPL projects where there are alternative. I want the freedom BSD gives me, even if I don't exercise it, and even if I never plan to exercise it. But it's why defining GPL as "free" software comes across as double-speak to me.
I think that many people share my goal of having more source code out there, with the freedom to modify it for one's own purposes, but it's definitely not universally agreed that GPL is the best way to achieve this.
However, the downside is that if there's not enough developers to make the software on GPL terms, the users don't have freedom to use the software because there's no software worth using. Of course, it's not true for many GPLed projects, but may be true for some.
As for being malicious, I don't see how GPL adds anything to any other open source license.
That's the party line that the FSF has been spouting for decades now and I don't know why anybody keeps on repeating it. I think the people that give a wink and a nod to that FSF talking points don't even really buy it.
First of all, "users" (as in non-developers) don't care about the code..never have, never will. Secondly, the code never goes away. It's not like someone can physically snatch up some BSD code and lock it away for no one else to use.
But what I find most disturbing about this line of reasoning is that it doesn't take into account the developers decision on how she or he wants to license his or her code. If you want to GPL it, fine, if you want to give it a liberal license fine too.
I think liberal licenses or weak copyleft are appropriate license for certain software, usually libraries. What we see today is that us developers have great freedom in what free libraries we can use to build our applications from. However, that freedom ends with us. It never reaches the users. We use liberally licensed libraries to build proprietary end-user applications. The GPL aims to ensure that freedom reaches the users. People say that the GPL is less free than liberal licenses because it "forces" developers to give source code to users, but the freedom to restrict others is certainly not freedom.
I suppose, but why? Reading the sibling comments, I don't get the GPL vs BSD thing here. I understand the differences between the two (GPL has more requirements on how the source must be treated, etc. See the other comments), but what I don't get is _why does this matter?_ The resulting binaries are still yours, and yours alone (no?) — what material difference does it make that the toolchain is GPL or not?
Have they replaced bash with a good BSD licensed shell, or are they still rolling with an ancient version of bash? Hard to see that as a "positive" if they are...
Oh, I know FreeBSD defaults to tcsh. My concern is that OSX has chosen to ship ancient GPLv2 software instead of modern BSD software. I can't consider this a good thing for anyone but ideologs.
Banishing? GPLv3 was never in MacOS (and Apple's first use of LLVM, though not their creation of Clang, predates the first draft of the GPLv3 by a year or so).
As a user of OS X, I'm highly in favour of this move. I profer the greater openness that BSD licenced alternatives give, and as a BSD fan the benefits to the BSD community have been fantastic. Please don't state opinion as fact.