Hacker News Reader

Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

They never promised to open up iMessage. The story behind FaceTime is a little bit more complicated. Steve Jobs said he would open it up without asking the engineers and lawyers who were just as surprised as anyone else about his announcement.

As far as Apple not open sourcing anything.

https://opensource.apple.com

They also published the full git commit history of Swift from the initial commit.

View on HN

Apple's relationship with open source is pretty average. In the end, they use open source strategically. If there's no benefit to open-sourcing something, they won't.

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.

They do have at least one open source application: https://www.cups.org/ it's fully open-source, and wholly owned by Apple, however they bought it, they didn't invent it.

Interesting, I did not know that Apple is the maintainer of CUPS since 2007.

They hired the guy who originally made it, Michael Sweet [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Sweet_(programmer)

They also lead development of LLVM and clang, which is a _huge_ project, and very useful (although sometimes without full realization of that fact) to the Open Source ecosystem.

> In the end, they use open source strategically. If there's no benefit to open-sourcing something, they won't.

Wouldn't that apply for most companies? Let's not pretend that Facebook, Microsoft et al do open source as a charity

>> Apple's relationship with open source is pretty average.

That's literally what he said.

I think you literally mean figuratively.

A lot of companies routinely open-source lots of little things that could easily have stayed internal, but are genuinely useful to everyone else. (Admittedly, I think about 30% of them are Go logging libraries, but the point still stands.) I.e., open source by default as opposed to being the exception.

That, of course, can be a strategy. A company can look cooler and attract talent by developing everything in the open.

It's called "commoditizing your complements"

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/

Webkit was open-source long before anticipating killing Flash. I think, like Darwin, it was originally open-source because it had to be, due to its origin in an existing open-source project that required derivatives also be open-source.

Darwin was originally based on BSD code - there is no requirement to keep BSD code open.

Why does Apple continue to publish Darwin code then? I have always been curious.

Why not?

It doesn't harm Apple's competitiveness. Apple doesn't publish source to the hire level OS X frameworks.

If it makes you feel any better, they redact everything related to ARM (and "good luck" compiling it...).

It does not make me feel any better or worse either way. I am merely curious about Apple's motivations for publishing xnu and other Darwin code.

I think to help third party driver developers?

Most of WebKit today is actually permissive (BSD license), with some that is still LGPL.

Apple didn't own webkit they couldn't keep it closed

The original web rendering engine code was originally licensed under BSD. Apple could have forked it and closed it.

JavascriptCore was also based on BSD code, but was then rewritten by the WebKit team and made GPL.

Fairly sure KHTML was LGPL, Apple could not have closed it even if they wanted to. Same goes for what became JSCore which also remains LGPL.

Pretty sure you are in fact wrong.

Fairly sure KHTML was LGPL, Apple could not have closed it even if they wanted to. Same goes for what became JSCore which also remains LGPL.

You're right. WebKit itself is BSD but Webcore and the original original JSCore are LGPL. A really weird combination.

They don't but they both perform much better than Apple on the subject.

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...

Swift does not run "only on their proprietary devices". It runs on at least Linux as well.

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.

> made Swift an open source language that runs only on their proprietary devices

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...

Perhaps the exception that proves the rule, but TextEdit is open source!

https://developer.apple.com/library/content/samplecode/TextE...

Specifically, there were major lawsuits over patent infringement immediately after Facetime launched.

And those lawsuits forced Apple to re-engineer how Facetime worked, from peer-to-peer direct connections to a more Apple-intermediated model[1]. At that point, creating an open standard is less interesting, since you can only communicate with folks using the same "relay server" network.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/report-after-pat...

Regarding Apple’s Open Source strategy, the WebKit origin story is a major disaster.

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.

Good.

GPLv3 software can't be on Apple products, yet every Chromebook ships with it, because Saint Google.

Signal is GPLv3 and readily available on Apples App Store. So no, you are mistaken.

Read your parent again:

> GPLv3 software can't be on Apple products

it is not saying:

> App Store

Looks like I'm not getting my point across,

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.

It's violating GPLv3.

Since 2010, KDE has been moving away from KHTML to the official WebKit fork.

Open sourcing Swift, though, probably benefits Apple more than it does the community. Sans the Apple UI, it doesn't create some opportunity to lose a sale or have Apple like consumer facing apps show up on some other platform. Apple apps already mostly rely on non-apple backend servers.

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?

WebKit? Darwin? ResearchKit?

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.

Those are good examples. It was an honest question though, not a proclamation that Apple hasn't open sourced anything.

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?

Chromium was a fairly recent fork of WebKit. Webkit was already being adopted by every browser vendor except MS and Mozilla.

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.

You're talking about Blink. Chromium is not a rendering engine, but a full browser. Chrome is just chromium with branded assets and a few proprietary features that link it to Google Services.

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.

They didn't open WebKit. It's a fork of the LGPL'd KHTML code base. Apple is legally obliged to keep it open, so whatever anyone thinks about Apple's open source record using WebKit as an example makes little sense.

Eh, not quite. Apple could satisfy its LGPL obligations by throwing source dumps of WebCore over the wall - without releasing the rest of WebKit, exposing SVN history, or having a public bug tracker. In fact, for the first two years of Safari's life, that's exactly what they did. Then in 2005 they opened it up properly, voluntarily:

https://dot.kde.org/2005/06/07/apple-opens-webkit-cvs-and-bu...

"Voluntarily" after they were rapped over and over by KDE developers and community...

Ah yes, the KDE community, holders of the ear of Steve Jobs.

Frankly, I'm not sure Apple ever cared for their thoughts on the matter.

Of course, they only cared about PR: by pure coincidence, they "voluntarily" changed development model on webkit right after several news outlets had picked up the umpteen blog post by a grumbling KDE developer.

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.

Yes because Apple in general and Steve Jobs in particular is a company that goes out of it way to be accommodating to the masses....

I'm pretty sure you're wrong about this one:

> Steve Jobs in particular is a company

The big one is maps...though that's not so much open source as open data.

The comment you're replying to, and all the parents up to the root, like most comments here made no mention of Google. It was a discussion of Apple on its merits.

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?

Google has nothing to do with this. Apple get their bad rep from their behavior on Darwin, webkit and the GNU bait-and-switch (first adopted with great fanfare, then left to rot and eventually purged mercilessly). The fact that they strenuously refused to let some of their desktop goodness leak back into the OSS world, from the very first day OSX was announced, is also an old pain point.

> Open sourcing Swift, though, probably benefits Apple more than it does the community.

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.

It is not criticism. It's an observation, followed by a question. I'm honestly interested in why Apple has the reputation it does around open source. The replies in the sub thread have been enlightening.

> Open sourcing Swift, though, probably benefits Apple more than it does the community.

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.

The context bubbles up to the post that said "Apple has a history of false promises when it comes to opening and documenting their protocols & data formats". That comment was down voted, but had me curious.

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.

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?

I get the point that you don't like this line of inquiry, but "something more risky" isn't "definitely lose your competitive advantage". And, again, it's a question, not an accusation. I'm curious...trying to understand the Apple reputation in the open source area, how much of it was deserved or not.

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.

I feel like you missed the "Google does hold some important bits back" part that you quoted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com