Comment by shykes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shykes | Hacker News Reader

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I guess they're referring to projects like Darwin (released in 2000) and Webkit (open-sourced in 2005). They also invested heavily in LLVM starting in 2005.

Those are all major strategic investments into open-source, at a time where companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon were not making any comparable investments that I can think of. For example, in 2005 Android was freshly acquired by Google, Chrome was still 3 years away. Go was introduced in 2009.

One exception I can think of is IBM which invested heavily in Linux around the same time Apple was open-sourcing Darwin.

Overall, their claim is arguable but certainly not without merit.

EDIT: remember when IBM covered the streets of San Francisco in Linux graffiti, and were threatened with a huge fine when the paint didn't wash off as planned? http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2001-04-25-ibm-linu...

WebKit was a fork of KDE's KHTML engine, and so had to be open source from the outset. IIRC, in the early days Apple was not on good terms with KHTML upstream and weren't exactly model participants in the open source community.

They basically started the development of WebKit in secret based on KHTML despite having to release the source when they released Safari. The result was two codebases too different to merge, and the improvements couldn't go "back to the community" without discarding many other improvements, not to mention the work needed to integrate it into KDE.

> WebKit was a fork of KDE's KHTML engine, and so had to be open source from the outset.

Parts of it had to be open source. Apple could have made a lot of WebKit closed if they had wanted to since KHTML is LGPL, not GPL, and much of Apple's additions could have been kept as separate modules.

>WebKit was a fork of KDE's KHTML engine, and so had to be open source from the outset.

On the other hand it didn't have to be a fork. They could have gone for the NIH way, and make their own totally controller rendering engine.

Especially given that Apple's WebKit additions totally dwarfed KHTML.

There's also Sun, who open-sourced StarOffice in 2000.

That's where the ambiguity of "major computer company" comes in. Probably the same with IBM. They are probably implying "major personal computer company" but couldn't say "major PC company" because PC = Windows.

Remember the good old days when IBM made PCs? :P

Apple used to call their computers personal computers: https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1979-08/1979_08_BYT...

It's funny how IBM was able to hijack the term.

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