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Apple open sources multicore code helper

Posted by Scott_Ruecker on · 2 comments
The Register; By Rik Myslewski 		Mail this story
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In a surprise move, Apple has open-sourced its Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) technology under the Apache 2.0 public license. Baked into the recently released Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard, GCD eases the programming challenges that developers face when coding for multicore processors. You can download a PDF of Apple's half-marketing, half-technical description of it here.

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Comments (2)

gus3 ·
The code for the Grand Central Dispatch library is released under the Apache 2.0 license. AFAICT, that means it can't be linked to GPLv2 code. From http://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html

Quoting:The Free Software Foundation considers the Apache License, Version 2.0 to be a free software license, compatible with version 3 of the GPL. The Software Freedom Law Center provides practical advice for developers about including permissively licensed source.

Apache 2 software can therefore be included in GPLv3 projects, because the GPLv3 license accepts our software into GPLv3 works. However, GPLv3 software cannot be included in Apache projects. The licenses are incompatible in one direction only, and it is a result of ASF's licensing philosophy and the GPLv3 authors' interpretation of copyright law....

Despite our best efforts, the FSF has never considered the Apache License to be compatible with GPL version 2, citing the patent termination and indemnification provisions as restrictions not present in the older GPL license. The Apache Software Foundation believes that you should always try to obey the constraints expressed by the copyright holder when redistributing their work.
Disclaimer: IANAL, naturally.
Sander_Marechal ·
As far as I understand CGD that doesn't matter (much). It doesn't need to go into the kernel but is a stand-alone library that can be used by other applications.

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