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Comment by amrrs | Hacker News Reader

With a blog for Machine Learning where Apple shares some of its practices and now open-sourcing its iOS kernel for the first time, Apple is entering a new era of Post-Jobs where every company has started to believe the only way to attract quality resources is to contribute back to the society - Remember how this community scared FB to rewrite React License. It's a great way forward for FOSS and hopefully one that can set up the right way for Post-Cook Apple.

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>Remember how this community scared FB to rewrite React License

HN helped, but I'd credit WordPress.

I understood "this community" as in "the FOSS community", not "HN community".

I disagree. I think that Apple being as big and as popular as they are will continue to attract top talent for both the salary that they pay and the ability to work on projects that a big company like Apple affords. Open source need not apply here but it is still a good thing.

And what are those projects exactly? They haven't achieved anything technically groundbreaking or even game-impacting for developers for a while now. Swift maybe, but even that...

Come on. They produce multiple entire platforms including hardware (including CPUs and GPUs), OSes (kernel to APIs), apps, a browser, developer tools, services, etc. There are literally thousands of interesting things to work on at Apple.

It was not really my point though. It was originally addressing the fact that to attract top quality engineers with tech, the tech needs to be exciting. And Apple hasn't exactly shined in that regard in the past few years.

Now of course, they're a behemoth company and I'm sure they're tackling complex problems, but they're not rewriting entire operating systems or browsers, they're not strong in the Cloud, they don't have a massive distributed systems offering, they're not creating whole new languages, which I would think is what gets the star engineers going on the middle to long term. The reason for that is that their current pace is more about refining things and not messing with a formula that's been making billions year in and year out for the past, what, 10 years?

You do raise a great point about the hardware part of their business though, I would agree, it is something that sets them apart from companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon or Microsoft and that is a game-defining aspect as far as attracting talent goes, though in a specific niche.

Apple created Swift, a new language that is very good.

Apple is also doing a lot of cool stuff with hardware, AI, and machine learning, including hardware specifically designed for machine-learning products like Face ID.

In terms of distributed systems, the app store and iTunes media services are among the highest-traffic services on the internet.

All of this stuff involves a lot of behind-the-scenes work that is very interesting to engineers.

From the AI perspective the fact that Apple hasn't been publishing has really been a problem for them attracting talent.

This is a mere source code dump that they slapped their Apple Public whatever license on (despite the explicit acknowledgement that vast parts of it are based on other, more freely licensed projects).

If anything it's a net negative.

The APSL is a perfectly fine license -- its terms are generally similar to the GPL, and it has been explicitly approved by both the FSF and OSI as a free software license.

It's a start.

It would be nice to see more of iOS open sourced. Not everything, but enough to run the GUI and maybe Safari.

I think that could be a huge win for Apple. Lower end, open source iOS compatible phone could attack Android offering, particularly at the lower end. They'd gain control over the market (as it would be derived from their source, and compatible with their ecosystem) without having to do much work.

Honestly, if Apple don't do it, someone should come up with an open source iOS compatible offering, which developers could easily re-target their apps to.

VCs reading this, I'm offering 15% for 3MUSD for the above idea. ;)

I think Apple (and everyone else) is doing pretty well with their closed source software.

Apple doesn't need others to make lower and cheaper devices. They're more than capable of doing it themselves, they just don't want to.

No, they don’t want to. But I think it would be advantageous to them to not have Android around.

Potentially they could convert many Android users to open source iOS. It wouldn’t come with the branding, I think it could be to their advantage.

It’s not likely to happen, but I think an open source iOS clone/fork would be nice and could also have potential benefits for Apple.

> No, they don’t want to. But I think it would be advantageous to them to not have Android around.

In 2016 Apple got 104% of the entire mobile industry's profit. Not revenue. Profit [1]

I hardly see how disappearance of Android would bring Apple any more advantages.

This year Samsung looks like they might beat Apple on profits ... due to large sales of components "to a major smartphone customer" [2]

[1] http://fortune.com/2016/11/04/apple-smartphone-profits/ [2] http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/27/technology/samsung-profit-ap...

Thanks, the 104% profit number doesn’t make sense to me and I couldn’t see it explained the the article.

How do you get >100% of the profits available in a given industry?

The rest of the industry operates at a loss.

On average.

> They'd gain control over the market

what you described is a loss of control. business is hard.

Apparently this is such a bad idea, that it's possibly my most downvoted comment ever. :)

I should definitely try and get this funded. :)

I'm still somewhat curious why a iOS compatible open source clone might be a such a bad idea. Even if it was from a different vendor perhaps.

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