Apple obligingly allows you to
browse and download the open source software they use in OS X. Since they have listings for each version of OS X, I decided to take a look at how much software they were using that was only available under the GNU public license. The results are illuminating:
- 10.5: 47 GPL-licensed packages.
- 10.6: 44 GPL-licensed packages.
- 10.7: 29 GPL-licensed packages.
- 10.8: 22 GPL-licensed packages.
- 10.9: 19 GPL-licensed packages.
- 10.10: 18 GPL-licensed packages.
- 10.11: 16 GPL-licensed packages.
- 10.12: 16 GPL-licensed packages.
As of 10.10 the remaining GPL-only packages seemed to be JavaScriptCore, bash, bc, emacs, efax, gnudiff, gnuserv, gnutar, groff, gpatch, keymgr, libstdcxx, man, nano, screen, texinfo, and uucp. I include this list as Apple have stopped listing the licenses on their download page, to make it harder to track their progress