The Apple Public Source License is the open source and free software license under which Apple's Darwin operating system was released. A free software and open source license was voluntarily adopted to further involve the community from which much of Darwin originated.

The first version of the Apple Public Source License was approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Version 2.0, released July 29 2003 conforms to the Free Software Foundation guidelines, and is also approved by the OSI. The Free Software Foundation approved the Apple Public Source License 2.0 as a free software license, and while they say it is acceptable for developers to work on projects that are already covered by this license, they recommend that developers do not release new projects under this license, because it is not compatible with the GNU General Public License, and is not a copyleft license, because it allows linking with files released entirely as proprietary software.^[1]

Many software releases from Apple have now been relicensed under the more liberal and less controversial Apache License, such as the Bonjour Zeroconf stack.

References

1. ↑ FSF website

External links

• Text of the Apple Public Source License
• Free Software Foundation's opinion on the license

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