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Comment by infinity0 | Hacker News Reader

They contribute to specific open source projects with a long-term view to undercutting other open source projects that are more independent of Apple. That is far from being "nice" or "contributing back".

Have you heard of "dumping"? What Apple does in its FOSS contributions is a similar thing - pour a ton of developer resources into critical FOSS projects so that they eventually control the development process and claim they are "contributing to open source", but in the end everyone that depends on these projects have to follow the direction that they set. LLVM/Clang is perhaps one exception, but even the Apple parts of that project's history have very obvious goals of undermining GCC since they hate the GPL's guts, counterbalanced by the legitimate need for a FOSS competitor to GCC that attracts enough non-Apple influence in the LLVM/Clang project to balance out the Apple influence.

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Apple has no grand plans to dominate open source, that's silly. All of Apple's OSS contributions can be easily understood as solving Apple's needs.

Apple's LLVM involvement is not driven by spite towards the GPL; Apple simply needed a compiler that was compatible with their business model. Likewise they started WebKit so as not to be dependent on MS for a browser, and Swift because they wanted a successor to aging ObjC.

Apple does not have a monopoly in any market.

That's very innocent and naive of you to believe, though of course it's easy to write off any corporate misbehaviour as "solving business needs".

Steve Jobs originally tried to keep the ObjC compiler frontend to GCC proprietary but was forced to open source it due to GPL requirements. Needless to say he hated the GPL ever since that episode and of course jumped on the opportunity to fund a competitor with a non-copyleft license.

Lots of companies hate the GPL. It’s nowhere exclusive to Apple. So what? They don’t have to align with your vision of what open source should be like. What’s wrong with the idea of playing in a different sandbox with a different set of rules if the rules in your current sandbox aren’t ideal? Are you suggesting that we should shame companies who don’t want to deal with GPL-licenses code?

Huh? I totally agree that the app store is a monopoly and leveraging the iOS app store to pressure spotify (a competitor to apple music) is anticompetitive.

But I'm very confused how you're twisting Apple's huge contribution toward LLVM and Webkit over the years into some evil act. Even if all you want is for GCC to be the best compiler it can be, work on LLVM has contributed to that goal by raising the bar. Predictably, GCC has gotten a lot better in the past decade or so. And I'm sure competition from LLVM has helped, just like how browser performance improved remarkably across the board when Chrome first came out. And Android's UI got way better after the iPhone was first released. (It used to be awful). Competition raises all boats; and consumers benefit when that happens.

Who exactly do you imagine is hurt by Apple's open source contributions to LLVM? If clang dethrones gcc it will be because llvm gives developers what we want - a faster compiler, faster executables, better IDE support or something else. My life is made measurably better by these things. Getting all that for free? Hallelujah.

If you don't like the direction Apple (and others) set for an opensource project you care about, you're free to build your own community around a fork. Thats what you would have to do anyway if you want a project to succeed without Apple's support.

What do you want? Great, free software? You've got it. The freedom to change that software however you want? Fork away, brave coder. The ability to sell software based on your changes? Go right ahead.

So where does that anger come from? How is anyone worse off?

> But I'm very confused how you're twisting Apple's huge contribution toward LLVM and Webkit over the years into some evil act.

I'm not twisting anything into an evil act, read my words more closely.

Some of Apple's contributions to open source have been beneficial to the rest of us, because there are competitors to keep them in check in those areas they chose to do open source in.

You should have no doubt that, had those other competitors not existed, Apple's open source contributions would have been used to push a monopolistic advantage over other projects and organisations, and passed it off as "meeting their business needs".

They do not do open source out of any principle of generosity or co-operation with other projects, and much of their ecosystem is legally and technically hostile to supporting FOSS the "proper way". For example it is impossible to properly supply a GPL binary on an iPhone because in general you do not have the ability to install arbitrarily-modified versions of it, a very fundamental principle of the standard definition of Free Open Source Software.

Also I'm not sure why you cite Android vs iPhone since near-everything about an iPhone is proprietary.

What areas are there no competitors, in the space of things they opensource? LLVM has GCC. Webkit has (amongst others) blink. Darwin has Linux. FoundationDB has dozens of great competitors.

And even in the absence of competitors, how is new permissively licensed opensource software a bad thing? How, exactly do you weaponise opensourcing decent software which has no competitors? Can you give some examples?

Every company uses and contributes open source if they believe there is a business case for it. No one is immune from that fact.

I’m sorry but the whole open source claim is weak because the musicians aren’t releasing their product as free to use by anyone. Why would you otherwise need anti piracy measures like Spotify if the music was free to use to begin with?

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