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Comment by frame_perfect | Hacker News Reader

> Apple, the first major computer company to make Open Source development a key part of its software strategy

It's actually pretty factual. They open sourced Darwin/WebKit/LLVM/Clang, and legitimized BSD and Unix as a consumer product via OS X... in 2001/2005/2005. The only "big" company that I can think of that made a move that big was Mozilla, which arguably doesn't even compare to a company as huge as Apple. Plus Mozilla open sourced itself out of pure desparation from pressure via Internet Explorer (which, I might remind you, was one of the worst proprietary pieces of shit to scorch this earth, by none other than Microsoft).

It's only been a recent thing where companies like Google/Microsoft have been embracing open source. Companies like Gitlab/Docker weren't even concievable back then.

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Well, they couldn't not open source WebKit, as at its core lies a fork of LGPL licensed KHTML and KJS (that's why WebCore and JavaScriptCore are LGPL while the rest of WebKit is BSD)

Oh, that's news to me. I guess that makes their claim a bit weaker.

FWIW, LLVM was a thing before Apple got involved (and I remember the project from them, back when it really was a "low-level virtual machine" as its primary purpose). They hired the guy who ran that project and then essentially took over, and have on occasion run "rough shod" over the community: they built their ARM64 backend in secret for the iPhone 5S and essentially forced Google and others to spend a lot of time building out a quality AArch64 toolchain for that same architecture, which everyone else did as part of a public community. When everyone else was pretty much done Apple finally decided they were ready to open source their backend, and used their steering of the project to stall a lot of things while the work was merged. They also had a chilling effect on some developers in the open ecosystem by saying they were going to open source their work: you can find mailing list posts from people saying they didn't want to waste their time as Apple would be providing theirs, which of course they did much much later than they originally scheduled. FWIW, I don't entirely blame Apple here as evil or anything, as I can appreciate "we are the first to care about this chip and we really did all this work ourselves and it would be really demotivating for someone else to just watch us slave away at it and then still be able to come out with a final product only months after us because we gave it away", but they certainly don't deserve the kind of props you bestow upon them by claiming they "open sourced" that project :/.

Oh, whoops! I mistyped. Didn't mean to mention LLVM.

That ARM64 stuff is pretty messed up though.

Does it really matter if they were forced to open source it or not? The point is they poured a ton of money into Webkit and that did a lot of good for the industry as a whole.

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