Of course Apple does not perceive the GPL as in their commercial best interest. Back when NeXT was writing what would eventually become Apple&#x27;s toolchain, Steve Jobs tried to convince Stallman that he could come up with a plugin architecture and keep the Objective-C bit private. Stallman went to his lawyer and came back and said, no, you can&#x27;t do that.<p>Steve Jobs&#x27; perception, and NeXT&#x2F;Apple&#x27;s perception, never changed. What changed is that in the NeXT days, GCC was so much better that Apple said, we&#x27;ll make the tradeoff of using GCC even though we don&#x27;t want the GPL. A few years ago Apple said, we&#x27;ll make the tradeoff of avoiding the GPL even though we want GCC. And they went and invested significant resources into LLVM.<p>The GPL was meant to be a tool to get people who did not perceive free software as in their best interest to contribute to free software anyway. It might not have changed whether they were &quot;haters&quot; as a matter of opinion, but it was definitely intended to change their concrete actions. And it did -- for a very long time.