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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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