Edit: I misrecalled that iMessage was announced as something they were opening.
PS: If you're gonna hate on Apple, at least find some valid points about them to hate instead of just spreading bullshit.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/report-after-pat...
As far as Apple not open sourcing anything.
They also published the full git commit history of Swift from the initial commit.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/report-after-pat...
Opening up iMessage or FaceTime would have been more of a statement. Either would allow interoperability on platforms they don't control.
Is there something significant they've open sourced, despite some perceived risk?
Apple gets this bad rap for OSS, because of Google's good PR a few years back on how "Android was open." But it's not like Google has a better track record of supporting OSS when it comes to products that influence their bottom line. Adwords, Google Search, AdSense, Analytics, etc are not open source, and no one ever complains about that.
Edit: Maybe Google is getting more credit because of uptake? Chromium, golang, protobufs, material design, etc. So perhaps not how much was open source, but how much of it ended up in non Google projects?
As far as Golang, I doubt that it has the uptake ofClang (even used by MS), CUPS, or Bonjour.
Yes I realized that CUPS was open source before being acquired by Apple but the copyright was owned by Sweets and they could have closed all future enhancement over the last decade.
It was first released in 2008, only 3 years after WebKit was open sourced, and about the same it was starting to gain traction outside Apple. Most of the browsers which didn't have their own engine back then were actually using Gecko or embedding an IE webview. Google embracing WebKit was a huge factor in pushing it to become the mainstream rendering engine.
https://dot.kde.org/2005/06/07/apple-opens-webkit-cvs-and-bu...
Frankly, I'm not sure Apple ever cared for their thoughts on the matter.
Yes, Apple historically doesn't give a shit about the OSS community unless they can exploit it or it becomes a dangerous nuisance. And this is why it gets a bad rep in OSS circles.
> Steve Jobs in particular is a company
Why do we seem to tie our personal identities to corporate affiliations, to the point of bringing up corporate rivalries out of context and taking sides in them?
I am no fan of Apple myself, but it's worth giving them credit where credit is due, they did everything right when open-sourcing Swift and are very responsive to the community, there's really no downside for anybody here, so why the need to criticise? It only needlessly provides the wrong incentives.
As opposed to whom? Choosing an open source approach is a strategic decision, presumably to the benefit of the chooser.
This was even true of Cygnus, the original Open Source business.
I was asking for examples of something they open sourced that would have exposed something like that, something more risky to the walled garden concept. I perhaps could have worded it better, but HN does seem to react to any questioning of Apple with a defensive posture.
What has any company open sourced that would cause them to loose their competitive advantage?
Certainly, Android is more open than Apple's mobile OS. Google does hold some important bits back. But, still, it is "more risky". Hence the question. I may be missing other areas where Apple was open sourcing things that were more core to them.
Android is "more open" except for the parts that Google cares about - Google Play Services, and all of the other open source components that Google is abandoning.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on...
And there are few if any open source drivers for the cellular chips or graphics chips.
They forked an existing project, only did sourcedumps every few months, often stripped of all comments, refused to work with the original devs that they had forked from (the KDE KHTML engine), etc.
GPLv3 software can't be on Apple products, yet every Chromebook ships with it, because Saint Google.
> GPLv3 software can't be on Apple products
it is not saying:
> App Store
Here is the Tanegashima's post:
> ...GPLv3 software can't be on Apple products...
And here is jwildeboer's reply:
> ... available on Apples App Store. So no, you are mistaken
And my point is:
No he is not mistaken because you are talking about completely different topics.
Clang, WebKit and Swift are "proper" open source projects, done in the open. But there aren't many of those. They have no open source apps, and most frameworks such as Cocoa, AppKit etc. are completely proprietary.
Some of their open source efforts have been half-hearted; Darwin was enthusiastically embraced by the community, then essentially shut down by Apple. The XNU sources are APL, but there's nothing open about its development. I/O Kit is closed, I believe.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Sweet_(programmer)
Wouldn't that apply for most companies? Let's not pretend that Facebook, Microsoft et al do open source as a charity
That's literally what he said.
That, of course, can be a strategy. A company can look cooler and attract talent by developing everything in the open.
Google open sourced Android to get advertising revenue.
IBM supports open source and made money from server sells and still makes money from services.
Apple open sourced WebKit (more than they had to) to gain industry support and later to kill off Flash.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
It doesn't harm Apple's competitiveness. Apple doesn't publish source to the hire level OS X frameworks.
JavascriptCore was also based on BSD code, but was then rewritten by the WebKit team and made GPL.
You're right. WebKit itself is BSD but Webcore and the original original JSCore are LGPL. A really weird combination.
React is one of the leaders in JS dev and several other Facebook projects are quite useful.
Microsoft is the company with the biggest number of open source contributors and several of their projects like TypeScript are extensively used and they are the biggest contributors to LINUX https://octoverse.github.com/
Apple made Swift an open source language that runs only on their proprietary devices and that's it...
I'm not saying that Apple is better, or denying that Facebook does a 'better job', but instead just reinforcing the concept that all these technology companies don't open source out of the goodness of their heart, but instead for the same strategic decisions that Apple does it for.
Incorrect. Besides Linux, like the other poster mentioned, it even runs on Raspberry Pi:
http://dev.iachieved.it/iachievedit/swift-3-0-on-raspberry-p...
https://developer.apple.com/library/content/samplecode/TextE...
They simply lied. They never said "We'll open Facetime, but only if it's implemented as a p2p protocol & client"
Changing one's mind based on changing circumstances isn't lying- it's common sense. The 'thing' that Steve Jobs wanted to publish as an open protocol stopped existing due to a lawsuit, the 'thing' that replaces it shared only its name.
The CEO of a multi-billion dollar company gets on stage during their main annual product conference and says a newly announced product is going to become an open industry standard.
This turns out not to possible in exactly the way the company had planned due to a lawsuit, so the company drops the plan entirely.
That's a lie by definition. You asserted that you'd do something and then you didn't do it. Does breaking a promise imply that there can't be any mitigating circumstances? No, I'm sure there were some reasons for why FaceTime wasn't opened.
People & companies make product buying decisions based on things like these, e.g. some company might have bought a bunch of iPads for video conferencing expecting that in a couple of years they'd be inter-operable with any device they could buy, including non-Apple devices.
This excuse that they couldn't open the p2p thing they initially planned to open is absurd. Apple could absolutely have just opened & standardized what FaceTime ended up being, i.e. an open video chat client/server allowing anyone to run a server. I.e. some sort of IRC or Jabber for video messaging.
Even if they couldn't open or release some specific component due to patent concerns they could still have opened & standardized almost everything else, see e.g. how open source video players ship pluggable codec support without direct support for some proprietary & patented codecs.
Bringing this back to my original comment on APFS, do I think they won't open that? No, they probably will. I just thought I'd point out that Apple has a documented history of abandoning their open source / standardization plans after making some very public announcements about them, so people should be wary of counting their chickens before they're hatched when it comes to Apple.
Telling a lie is to say something you know isn't true. If they honestly intended to open source FaceTime and then changed their mind (for whatever reason) that is not a lie by any definition.
But I agree with you that it casts doubt on their determination to follow through on their open source promises. And that sort of doubt is extremely detrimental to any uptake of open sourced software.
But why? There's literally no point to doing that. The whole point of opening up FaceTime was so people using non-Apple devices could talk to people using Apple devices. After the lawsuit that became no longer possible.