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The original was posted on /r/opensource by /u/MonocleRB on 2023-12-18 23:36:37.
So when Microsoft released some DOS source, they did it under the MIT license (“do whatever you want, just credit us”).
When Apple let the Computer History Museum release the source code to Lisa OS 3.1, they wrote an original license that:
· Only lets you use and modify the software for educational purposes.
· Doesn’t let you share it with anyone else, in any way, not even with friends or from teacher to student (although technically you could still distribute patches you make for it).
· Implicitly forbids you from running it on hardware you don’t own.
· Forbids you from publishing benchmarks of it.
· Gives Apple a license to do whatever they feel like with your modifications, even if you keep them to yourself and don’t publish them.
· Lets Apple revoke the license whenever they feel like it.
· Forbids you from exporting it to any nation or person embargoed by the USA (moot, since the license doesn’t let you share the software in any way).
Why Apple feels the need to cripple the use of 40-year-old code is beyond me. Especially when they have released a lot of the code for their current OS and tools under the popular and well-understood Apache License 2.0 or their own APSL 2.0, neither of which impose these arbitrary restrictions.