Apple Was Headed for a Slump. Then It Had One of the Biggest Rallies Ever | Hacker News Reader

Apple Was Headed for a Slump. Then It Had One of the Biggest Rallies Ever

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32 pointstempsy55 comments

It appears that few companies have benefited financially as much as Apple Inc from literally decades of outside FOSS development (bsd etc).

Are new Apple software engineers still asked to sign a paper that they will not contribute to FOSS at any time during employment? Are they legally bound from discussing the existence of that agreement?

I don't think you can be legally bound not to discuss the existence of an agreement. Your employment contract can say things like confirming the existence of this agreement can be grounds for dismissal, and that might hold up, but if it said something like you can be sued for confirming the existence of this agreement I think the courts would consider that non-binding.

However as I am not a lawyer, any lawyers here can comment on that?

you can have a nondisclosure agreement about a business relationship. that's pretty common.

nondisclosure is not the same as denying it exists -- you just can't volunteer the topic / information.

Ok normally I'm aware of non-disclosure agreements concerning trade secrets. But I don't think you can have a non-disclosure agreement that says you cannot admit this non-disclosure agreement exists. This would also be generally problematic if you are being asked things that you cannot disclose, then you cannot disclose why you cannot disclose them.

I don’t know about employment contracts, but Google around for info about National Security Letters and gag orders. It’s certainly a thing, at least when the other party is the federal government.

I think, out of a matter of function, you can talk about even NSLs and such with your attorney and company's lawyers. I would imagine key employees would have to know about NSL letters too, otherwise it doesn't really work?

Source? I know plenty of people working at Apple that are the core contributors to FOSS projects.

The only thing I can find is this, from the Apple developer agreement (for using their SDK and publishing on their platform, not working there):

> 3.3.22 If Your Application includes any FOSS, You agree to comply with all applicable FOSS licensing terms. You also agree not to use any FOSS in the development of Your Application in such a way that would cause the non-FOSS portions of the Apple Software to be subject to any FOSS licensing terms or obligations.

That just sounds like a copyleft-avoidance policy, which nearly any tech company is going to (reasonably) have

That’s my point.

Apple is a bad actor in contributing back to free software; however, they do contribute back. Granted, it's by throwing things over the wall in a way that's usually after upstream and it have diverged so much it can no longer be upstreamed, but still under free licenses.

Unless something furthers the development of their ecosystem, eg all the llvm contributions.

You mean like every other for profit company.....

They released launchd under a free license, and it was one of the most interesting developments in the past two decades, despite it not actually contributing to the development of their own ecosystem to free it.

This is old news where the Khtml people were complaining about WebKit.

A situation I remember well (and bitterly)!

One FOSS project I follow, LLVM, has quite a few folks from Apple actively and constructively participating.

I don't see someone affirming that the clause exists but if it did, LLVM would probably be different since it's the backbone of xcode and iOS app development.

It’s a tautology that the biggest tech companies have benefited the most. Microsoft generates more revenue from Linux (via Linux VMs on Azure) than any Linux company ever did.

Tech companies benefiting and quantifying how much they give back to FOSS aside

LLVM, cups, Swift, WebKit of the top of my head. WebKit pretty much laid the foundation to IE’s death, web standards kid of becoming a thing again and innovation to the web (I think at some point MS reformed the IE again)

LLVM is pretty much everywhere

Perhaps you can browse https://developer.apple.com/opensource/

Apple has open source projects it actively maintains, like FoundationDB, so this is just patently untrue.

This is a bit hyperbole. The employee intellectual property agreement is pretty much 'we own everything you do[1]', same as every other company. So you're at the whim of legal and director approval for CLAs. There are numerous teams contributing to OSS projects, a small smattering of which can be found under Apple's own Github: https://github.com/apple

However, folks undergoing software engineer training could be forgiven for this impression, as the training is very OSS hostile. Some of this is understandable, as the two major concerns are corporate engineers plagiarizing OSS, and accidentally giving away patents, both of which are massive liabilities to be avoided.

And yes, the company is very allergic to GPLv3, for a variety of reasons. My recollection is that all the tech companies don't like it or its companion, AGPL. You'll note that many of the GNU tools shipped predate GPLv3.

[1]: Unless you live in California and comply with all the gotchas of that one loophole.

"we own everything you do" -- is not the same as "every other company" .. flatly false

"You are at the whim of legal (dept)" -- true

numerous teams contributing to OSS -- true, like LLVM ; how many software engineers work at Apple?

"training is very OSS hostile" -- true

software patents -- lets talk about that later

plagiarizing OSS -- certainly a serious concern on both sides of this chat

very allergic to GPLv3, .. AGPL -- why is that? surely the rules of GPL, by the third version, are pretty well understood.. Apple Inc benefits quite a bit from say, the Internet ..

Thank you for this reply -- I believe that this factual parent response does address each point, but in a voice that makes it sound like it is all ok and expected. But you see, its not all ok and not all expected.

How much money is enough money, Apple Inc ? What is the world we are creating here?

> "we own everything you do" -- is not the same as "every other company" .. flatly false

This is not a commonly held position, but maybe we can use a third party to mediate the dispute. Joel Spolsky has written on the subject not that long ago[1]:

> So before you hire this developer, you agree, “hey listen, I know that inventing happens all the time, and it’s impossible to prove whether you invented something while you were sitting in the chair I supplied in the cubicle I supplied or not. I don’t just want to buy your 9:00-5:00 inventions. I want them all, and I’m going to pay you a nice salary to get them all,” and she agrees to that, so now you want to sign something that says that all her inventions belong to the company for as long as she is employed by the company.

> This is where we are by default. This is the standard employment contract for developers, inventors, and researchers.

So let's meet in the middle: it is an uphill battle to get an employer to assign IP created 'off the clock' to you. Even when I was working for a public university, for a department dedicated to supporting open source, they had me sign an IP agreement. I don't have the text of the contract to quote you, but as I recall it was the same 24/7/365 overreach.

Amusingly, this leads to a substantial conflict; I hear tales of people circumventing the policy by using a personal email account to land things upstream.

[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-pr...

This is one of several reasons I left Apple and went to GitHub. I wanted to have the ability to work on side projects, but Apple makes that very, very, hard.

GitHub on the other hand is explicit about allowing this in its balanced employee IP agreement, which is pretty nice - https://github.com/github/balanced-employee-ip-agreement

Not sure how that’s possible since Apple is a big contributor to tons of stuff, https://developer.apple.com/opensource/

I think the continued underestimation of Apple since Tim Cook became CEO really just comes down to this: people desperately want a Great Man to worship. Tim Cook isn't revered in that way like Steve Jobs was.

If Apple develops another new product under Tim Cook that generates $500+ billion in profit over time, he might be.

The only interesting product that has been originated under Cook, that isn't a direct derivative of the iPhone (as the watch is), are the AirPods.

Cook is an excellent steward and operator, which is why Jobs de facto installed him as CEO.

What are the chances of another $500b consumer product existing PERIOD. From ANYONE?

The iPhone may have been a once in a century product, even if Steve was still here.

Apple has ONLY made ‘little’ things like the Apple Watch and AirPods. Both are absolutely huge businesses. If people weren’t using the iPhone as a yardstick we wouldn’t stop hearing about how successful Apple is.

But they’re the iPhone company.

You do realize the iPhone was a direct derivative of the Mac, so by your logic even Steve Jobs did nothing that wasn’t derivative?

Are you suggesting Steve Jobs wasn't involved with the development of the Mac?

Some people would say Jeff Raskin and Xerox were where the Mac concept came from.

Which may be as it may be, but has no bearing on my comment or the discussion.

Are you suggesting that Tim Cook was not involved in the development of the Apple Watch or AirPods?

When did I say that?

The point was about the meaningless of calling products ‘derivative’.

The Mac can hardly be called derivative. If you want to go that deep into that kind of logic, you're really reaching to the point that all things are "derivative" of basic physics and no one has ever done anything that's not "derivative".

It's pointless argument.

If you don’t think the Mac is derivative of the Lisa, which is derivative of the Xerox Alto, then I’m quite surprised.

Which was a derivative of ... which was a derivative of ... which was really all derivative of John von Neumann so what's the point of this ridiculous argument.

Steve Jobs was Apple's Bill Gates. Tim Cook is Apple's Steve Ballmer - great businessman, but very little charisma or vision. It's remarkable how reliably these patterns repeat. Sundar Pichai is Google's Steve Ballmer as well.

I think Pichai is Google's Ballmer, but I don't think that applies to Apple at all. The better comparison for Cook is Bob Iger.

I think you're vastly underestimating the business acumen of Ballmer. His personal antics and lack of filter notwithstanding, he (and not Satya) is the only reason why Microsoft is a $1T+ company today: he was the one who started Azure and SaaS/subscriptions at Microsoft.

If only I had listened to everyone and sold my APPL stock when he took over... /s

I wonder if more speculation around the stock is driven by not reporting iDevice sales numbers each quarter.

Speculation aside, Airpods really have taken off, at least as a status symbol. So much so that I know a kid who has airpods but (until he got his dad's old 6s) was without a device he could use them with. He would just flick the case open and closed like a fidget spinner.

Why would unit “sales numbers” matter as far as stock price? They report revenue and overall profit.

The Apple Watch is already a larger revenue generator than the iPod ever was. AirPods are either thought to be larger or soon will be.

A motivation for no longer reporting unit sales was that analysts paid way too much attention to those numbers. I recall several quarters where device sales fell just a little and people would proclaim the soon death of the company[1]. Though unit sales can be inferred from revenue, as the company moves into services it benefits them to group all device sales under one line item because it's a business category that doesn't have the crazy growth it used to.

[1]: (2016) https://www.zdnet.com/article/iphone-apocalypse-end-of-apple...

Its literally all stock buybacks. When the fed says monetary easing they just start to dump money into their own stock

If it was just stock buybacks, the market cap would more or less remain the same due to increased price but less stock outstanding. The market cap has nearly doubled as well since 2019 low.

thats not true. A billion dollar stock purchase can push the market cap of an asset much more than a billion dollars. Even if you retired the shares you bought after.

Is there a study out there which tested if Apple's stock and other S&P500 stocks are pushed ever higher by all this money pouring into unmanaged ETF indexes? E.g. if you buy an S&P500 index-tracking ETF you automatically buy a bunch of Apple shares too. This might mean that the trend of buying ETFs will help Apple stock price staying high.

You can compare the return on Apple stock price vs S&P500 price for the past year:

AAPL: 318.31 / 156.30 - 1 = 103.65%

S&P500: 3295.47 / 2643.87 - 1 = 24.65%

http://archive.md/rnix5

Not just Apple. Microsoft had quite a rally itself over the past decade. So did tesla, netflix, facebook, AMD, Amazon, nvidia, etc. The tech sector did very well during the loose monetary period since the financial crisis.

It's insane looking at Apple and Microsoft. They are valued at about 1.39T and 1.25T respectively. The trillion mark by itself is amazing, but if you just look at the fraction alone, Apple's fraction is nearly 2X Disney and Microsoft's fraction is 2.5X Tesla. And microsoft pays you a dividend every quarter.

Rising tides lift all boats, but some more than others.

> “A lot of the knock on Apple is that they haven’t been very innovative, but they changed the game more than anyone else with things like AirPods and ancillary things,” said Mr. Bryan, whose firm in Arden Hills, Minn., has $2.6 billion under management and owns 41,000 shares of Apple.

So Apple can innovate, but not on anything important. Steve is rolling over.

They did innovate with the butterfly keyboard, LOL!

The iPhone was a once in a lifetime thing. The phone market was already a 1 billion device a year market when the iPhone was introduced. Now it’s 5 billion.

The Apple Watch is much more impressive technically than the iPad. Once you had the iPhone, the iPad was easy. It also was just a big iPhone and didn’t come into its own until 2015.

The Apple Watch is also generating more revenue than the iPod did at its peak.

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