> Apple's dogged pursuit for non-copyleft replacements for copylefted software is far from new. For example, Apple has worked to create replacements for Samba so they need not ship Samba in OSX.

That is not Apple pursuing non-copyleft software. That is Apple pursuing non-GPLv3 software. If Samba had stayed GPLv2, I doubt Apple would have replaced it.

> But, their anti-copyleft witch hunt goes back much further. It began when Richard Stallman himself famously led the world's first GPL enforcement effort against NeXT, and Objective-C was liberated.

He makes it sound like it was some kind of highly adversarial situation, but here is how Stallman describes it [1]:

The issue first arose when NeXT proposed to distribute
a modified GCC in two parts and let the user link them.
Jobs asked me whether this was lawful. It seemed to me
at the time that it was, following reasoning like what
you are using; but since the result was very undesirable
for free software, I said I would have to ask the lawyer.

What the lawyer said surprised me; he said that judges
would consider such schemes to be "subterfuges" and would
be very harsh toward them. He said a judge would ask whether
it is "really" one program, rather than how it is labeled.

So I went back to Jobs and said we believed his plan was not
allowed by the GPL.

The direct result of this is that we now have an Objective
C front end. They had wanted to distribute the Objective C
parser as a separate proprietary package to link with the
GCC back end, but since I didn't agree this was allowed,
they made it free.

> But, that whole time, Apple was carefully plotting its escape from the copyleft world.

This is just nonsense. If NeXT/Apple had been so determined to get away from copyleft, they would have changed their Objective-C compiler from being part of GCC to being a completely separate program that took in Objective-C and translated it to plain C.

> Fortuitously, Apple eventually discovered a technically brilliant (but sadly non-copylefted) research programming language and compiler system called LLVM. Since then, Apple has sunk millions of dollars into making LLVM better. On the surface, that seems like a win for software freedom, until you look at the bigger picture: their goal is to end copyleft compilers.

Two problems here. First, as mentioned above if Apple was so determined against copyleft compilers, they would have made Objective-C a front end that output C (similar to Stroustrup's cfront for C++).

Second, he is overlooking the fact that GCC was not technically able to meet Apple's needs. For example, Core Image needs an optimizing JIT compiler that can take a chain of image filters and turn it into a single efficient filter for execution on the GPU or CPU (whichever will be faster on the particular system for the particular effects). XCode needs to parse C/C++/Objective-C code in the editor and in the debugger. In short Apple needed a modular compiler system, designed to work as a compiler toolkit from which you can pick and choose the parts needed for a particular application, and designed to be easy to interface with outside tools.

GCC was explicitly designed to not be that, and Stallman would reject changes that would make it easier to use it that way. GCC has opened up a bit to modularization and interfacing with outside tools since then, but that was directly due to competition from LLVM/Clang.

> Their goal is to pick and choose when and how programming language software is liberated.

The author's mistake here is in thinking that Apple has a goal in this area. It is far more likely that whether or not programming language software is liberated is completely orthogonal to anything Apple cares about. They are open sourcing Swift because Chris Lattner wanted to, and their lawyers did not see any problem with that.

[1] http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-...