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Comment by lobster_johnson | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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

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.

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

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.

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.

Why not?

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

I think to help third party driver developers?

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...

> 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...

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.

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

That's literally what he said.

I think you literally mean figuratively.

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.

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.

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)

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

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

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