And guess what application developers install immediately after getting their MacBooks?
The GPL licensed git.
If I'm forced to use MacOS, I'm fine installing git, GNU make or whatever I want for myself. But I don't see any downsides in Apple being unable to distribute those applications together with their OS.
> And guess what application developers install immediately after getting their MacBooks? The GPL licensed git.
Why would they do that? I didn't, because macOS ships with version 2.39.5 as /usr/bin/git. You're free to upgrade to a newer version, of course, but the included one is recent enough for most uses.
Does macOS include git? Oh. My bad. I concluded from the previous comment that Apple doesn't ship bash because it's GPL and hence doesn't ship anything GPL.
And my point was: this is fine. Even if it was true.
But as this is not the case, I see even fewer arguments against GPL licenses.
Apple shies away from GPLv3 code. They ship a ton of GPLv2 code, though. And as you mentioned, even if they didn't, it just takes a moment to install Homebrew and get whatever else you want. Apple doesn't stop me from installing a new Emacs.
Sure, Apple won't stop you. But the defaults matter. If you're writing a shell script and you want it to run on MacOS, you need to target the ancient version it's actually shipping, or you have to tell your whole team to install a later version. If your servers are running Linux then you'll be dealing with platform inconsistencies all day long. Ask me how I know.
The GPL licensed git.
If I'm forced to use MacOS, I'm fine installing git, GNU make or whatever I want for myself. But I don't see any downsides in Apple being unable to distribute those applications together with their OS.