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I open source everything I legally can.

People pay me for custom advice and integration of otherwise generic publicly available work. That public work also is what gives me the credibility to get gigs I otherwise never could. Others can go make money offering consulting based on my work if they want. I hope they do! There is no shortage of companies in need of consultants to unblock them in niche areas.

It is kind of the "paid support" model, and it works well for a lot of open source projects whose creators actively market themselves as the defacto subject matter experts offering support.

Likewise when I have worked for big companies and am having trouble or need a feature from an open source project I use my elective budget to pay project authors to implement what I need. Bailed me out many times in ways I would have never seen from a big tech firm like Apple.

Let's be honest though. The people that love the Apple brand enough to use Safari in spite of all the shortcomings don't use it because WebKit is open source or not. They use it because Apple supports it and they trust the brand.

Apple could open source everything and still be a top player for the foreseeable future.

They just want to be -the- top player making a little bit -more- money by monopolizing control of a major software platform even if it means developers have a shitter experience being stuck with decade old software they can't easily update in a safe way.

I use WebKit because it’s good enough and syncs passwords across iOS and multiple macs seamlessly and without a bullshit subscription for a password manager.

It's a single userland component; why would it make the rest of the system GPLv3? I mean, Linux distros ship BASH without it somehow infecting the rest of the system, why would Darwin be any different?

Afaik GPLv3 is "infectious". If you use a v3 licensed component, you basically have to license the entire codebase as v3 to be in compliance. This is the reason why Apple only ship GPLv2 and MIT/BSD licensed components

Is bash integrated into xcode or something, or just sit as a standalone binary?

Ships with the base OS.

Does that count for GPLv3 purposes though?

Ubuntu and Fedora ship GPLv3 bash with a GPLv2 kernel (Linux), without relicensing it, so empirically not.

That's not how it works. An operating system does not become a derivative work by shipping with a program.

The real reason isn't that the system would be GPLv3. The real reason is that GPLv3 includes a patent grant clause, which many companies (Apple included) are very worried about applying to them if they ship GPLv3 code, therefore they don't.

I am just going to say that it does not matter if the software is open or closed source. The people are going to pirate the thing, I mean like there are projects on linux that literally make the posibility of having a VM of MAC really easy.

I mean like I kind of understand the point that you are trying to put, but Apple is not trying to make software for industrial applications, they are making software for end users and AWS literally has nothing to do with that.

Apple hasn't made money from selling their OS for almost a decade

Yes and no. I'm sure they'd lose approximately some customers if were as easy to install macOS on commodity hardware as it is to install, say, Linux.

That is already true anyway with OSX86. I have known a number of people too poor to afford macs that rig up a hackintosh.

Apple has never stopped the DIY crowd. Their core market is the people that want the support and the branded aluminum.

That’s not strictly true. It’s hard work keeping a hackintosh working. I think apple is part of that.

What makes you think they don't include the price of the OS when you buy their hardware? In fact, that's how many justify paying a higher price for Apple products - you get macOS, Pages / Numbers / Keynote, iMessage / Facetime etc. That's also why they stop supporting old hardwares after a period.

> I find this attitude kind of troubling around here when every other day there's some "open source" project that has had to change licensing because insert cloud provider is stealing their lunch making it impossible for them to make a living.

When such licenses are to another free software license (like AGPLv3), you won't here complaints from most F/OSS people on the basis of the license being untrue to F/OSS.

You will hear complaints from customers who now have to change what they're doing (pony up for a different license or switch to a fork). That's not an attitude problem, just a reality of having your toolchain disrupted.