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Comment by fuzzer37 | Hacker News Reader

I think people are missing the point of this post. Yes, it most likely is an employee matching contribution scheme at its source. But this is a literal trillion dollar company giving less than $250 to the operating system that they essentially based their whole software stack on.

Yes, at the end of the day Apple didn't do anything _wrong_ by using their software and making money off of it. It's just a little on the nose to be making a donation that small.

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> It's just a little on the nose to be making a donation that small.

No good deed goes unpunished [0].

The irony is that if Apple hadn't given them a dime, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. Instead, they did them give them (a little bit of) money and are now being criticised for it!

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_good_deed_goes_unpunished

Apple has $ 195.57 billion cash reserves [1], are you seriously trying to say that them giving $250 is a good deed?

It's like driving by a homeless person in a stretch limo and giving them $0.10. It's an insult, not a donation.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/27/apple-q1-cash-hoard-heres-ho...

What? No it’s not. The important party here is the receiver of the money, not the giver. If an insanely rich person and a regular person both give a homeless person $250, in both cases that’s still probably a big deal for the homeless person. Could and should the rich person give more? Maybe, but I don’t think that should be the sole focus.

Would your opinion change in any way if it turned out the homeless person donated their kidney to the rich person a couple of years ago? It seems to me that the broader context matters here as well.

When someone donates a kidney, they lose the kidney. FBSD didn't lose anything when Apple adopted their freely available code.

Eh, still, when someone donates a kidney, someone gets a kidney. You could say FBSD didn't lose anything, but surely Apple did get quite a bit?

Someone who uses your code is a potential contributor, either as a customer, licensee, or collaborator. It's a tragedy of the commons scenario, and one could argue that a different license or terms might've prevented FreeBSD from losing those contributors.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but Apple is a company, not a charity. They shouldn't be held high moral standards. In this kidney-rich person scenario, if the homeless person donated(open source) the kidney without hoping for forced payment in any form, who is it to blame the rich person for not handing out money? They gave only a little sure, but they really really don't have the obligation to donate.

It is morally wrong, but morally wrong stuffs are not the reason to got pitchfork on them.

My view is that if they donate a huge lump sum of money, great! If they don't, fine by me too.

It’s not illegal to for rich kidney recipient to be a douche, but I can still call them out on it.

That’s all this is. No one is threatening legal action against Apple. Some of us are just remarking on how douchey they are in regards to open source. Many of us have done so in the past, and yes this small donation is bringing more attention to that.

I whole-heartedly agree on Apple being the douche here. But discussions should be treaded carefully to a constructive theme instead of another flame war. I still hold my opinion but I did see your point.

Edit: Your edit seems to align to my view. Ignore this comment

> This might be an unpopular opinion, but Apple is a company, not a charity. They shouldn't be held high moral standards

Reminds me of Charlie Stross' talk about predicting the future of sociopathic AI's by comparing them to corporations. I think it's a huge issue in modern society that we have these powerful entities treated on a similar footing to people, but that are expected not to have moral standards.

But the recipient of the $250 is not a homeless person, we're talking about the software foundation Apple staked their entire business on.

Universities receive larger endowments from ordinary college graduates with far less money to give.

It's a better deed than giving $0. But it's a damned if you do, nobody would notice if you didn't kind of situation.

Apple donates $0, we say nothing.

Apple donates $250, out comes the torches and pitchforks.

We only care because money was given. $250 > $0, so on the whole, it is a good deed. In perspective, Apple having hundreds of billions available, does make the donation look like a slap in the face.

People very much complain in years Apple donates 0$.

Good to know! It seems when money is given the crowd is louder, however. But that could just be my perspective.

>Apple donates $0, we say nothing.

I definitely remember this being discussed on HN previously.

IIRC somebody even said that they were donating by hiring people who worked on BSD.

> Apple donates $0, we say nothing.

"We say nothing" does not imply "we are OK with it".

It might just be that people aren't thinking about this issue 24/7.

If a tree falls in the forest...

It's bad in the way that tipping 5 cents is worse than not tipping at all (in countries where tipping is not expected like most of Europe). It's a bit of an insult.

It’s probably an employee match.

My previous employer matched contributions 1:1 and donated $500 to a local charity that provides kids with hot meals, homework help and a friendly environment out of trouble.

My employer at the time made a few billion dollars a year in profit. What would be an appropriate match? 10x my donation? 500x?

Maybe you should be angry at Apple employees for donating to causes that aren’t FreeBSD? Or maybe it would make sense to take it for what it is — an effort to encourage and support employee giving.

The point is it is not a bad deed.

It is not like Apple was making rounds marketing their contribution. Somebody had to spot this to report it.

Rather than criticize take a look at everybody else who did not give anything.

> The irony is that if Apple hadn't given them a dime, we wouldn't even be having this conversation

Apple's relationship with open-source software is a criticism that is brought up often. So, yes, we wouldn't be having this specific conversation had Apple not donated, but we've had, and will continue to have, very similar conversations and criticisms without donations.

https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...

Fair point. Still I wonder how the discussion went at Apple. "Let's be generous. Give 0.00000000001% of our revenues."

FreeBSD uses Apple's open sourced Clang compiler, which is licensed under a BSD style license.

It seems like the Karma is in balance here.

Is BSD generally actually "their software"—i.e., FreeBSD's software? I'd argue not. FreeBSD is merely one flavor of BSD.

Darwin's entire userland was basically a direct rip from FreeBSD, the networking stack as well. Which is fine, that's perfectly acceptable given the license, but it's generally considered good form to actually donate back to the project when you do that, especially when you're worth what Apple is.

All that is to say: claiming Apple just built on "generic BSD" isn't really fair or accurate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_%28operating_system%29

Their userland is still majorly based on OSFMK, not FreeBSD - to the point where exactly that assumption recently bit me when trying to run program written for open source BSDs that assumed certain 1993-vintage userland stuff existed on every BSD-declaring system.

Darwin/XNU/macOS are not FreeBSD based, nor NetBSD based, nor OpenBSD based, even if in places it can take pieces of their code.

> Darwin/XNU/macOS are not FreeBSD based, nor NetBSD based, nor OpenBSD based, even if in places it can take pieces of their code.

Apple disagrees[1]:

> XNU is a hybrid kernel combining the Mach kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University with components from FreeBSD

From Apple's kernel docs[2]:

> Darwin is based on proven technology from many sources. A large portion of this technology is derived from FreeBSD, a version of 4.4BSD that offers advanced networking, performance, security, and compatibility features.

XNU has a "personalities" concept, and the BSD personality is mostly just FreeBSD[2]:

> Above the Mach layer, the BSD layer provides “OS personality” APIs and services. The BSD layer is based on the BSD kernel, primarily FreeBSD.

Even the syscall interface is from FreeBSD. Here's a diagram of macOS architecture[3].

[1] https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu

[2] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_of_Mac_OS_X_archi...

XNU borrows heavily from FreeBSD, in the past and in the present. Apple is very much using software whose copyright belongs to FreeBSD and its contributors specifically, so I think it would be appropriate to say that it is theirs.

Correct on all points.

Maybe I'm a little crazy, and maybe such thinking fully disqualifies me for ever being on a board of directors, or being a CEO: I'd love to see every...say, billion dollar + tech company slice off 0.1% of their profits and just spread that money around to the various free software projects that they depend on.

I thought the (current) macOS userland was from NetBSD, not FreeBSD?

No, NetBSD claim that (https://netbsd.org/gallery/products.html#darwin) but if it was ever true that was a long time ago. Apple synced up with the FreeBSD userland some time toward the end of the first decade of the millennium. They hired FreeBSD’s Jordan K Hubbard (jkh@) as their director of Unix engineering at the time.

They hired a bunch of FreeBSD secs around that time didn’t they?

I had read quite some years ago now that Apple made use of NetBSD as a starting point each time they needed to port to a new architecture (you know how they saying goes), but ultimately it's the FreeBSD userland and XNU kernel that remains... albeit very outdated userland these days - maybe that's why they don't donate much, they only have FreeBSD from >12 years ago. It's always a PITA giving bash scripts to mac users.

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