They're under certain obligations of the Ruby license, no? Wikipedia claims MacRuby is "based on Ruby 1.9." Ruby 1.9 is distributed under GPL and the Ruby License, which states:
2. You may modify your copy of the software in any way, provided that
you do at least ONE of the following:
a) place your modifications in the Public Domain or otherwise
make them Freely Available, such as by posting said
modifications to Usenet or an equivalent medium, or by allowing
the author to include your modifications in the software.
b) use the modified software only within your corporation or
organization.
c) rename any non-standard executables so the names do not conflict
with standard executables, which must also be provided.
d) make other distribution arrangements with the author.
Not sure how this is compatible with "Apple apparently decided to not share MacRuby with other OS X developers" but I do not know much of MacRuby, maybe someone else can weigh in.
This guy isn't complaining about source code or licensing issues.
He's complaining that MacRuby isn't in a shared location, like say libc or some other standard library. He wants to just be able to type 'macruby foo.rb' (or whatever) and have it work an any Apple anywhere, so he doesn't need to distribute his own versions of the library.
Hardly the end of the world. And if apple did include it, then people would just complain that they only had 0.9 instead of 1.1 or whatever.
Anyone who remembers the days of redhat being stuck on a particular python version because all the internal tools used 1.5 might even think it's a good idea to make the system copy private.
If they're using an unmodified copy, then section 3 applies, which means they basically only need to the macruby site somewhere in the docs:
3. You may distribute the software in object code or executable
form, provided that you do at least ONE of the following:
a) distribute the executables and library files of the software,
together with instructions (in the manual page or equivalent)
on where to get the original distribution.
b) accompany the distribution with the machine-readable source of
the software.
c) give non-standard executables non-standard names, with
instructions on where to get the original software distribution.
d) make other distribution arrangements with the author.
The issue is whether MacRuby is part of the public API for OS X. If it were, you could ship a MacRuby app in the Mac App Store without having to include MacRuby itself in your application. But the framework API is currently private, so you can't do that. Of course MacRuby itself is still freely available.
