It's a bit strange to open a pull request from "Developer-Ecosystem-Engineering" instead of an individual account. I wonder if every interaction from this account has to be approved by a board or something.
It usually comes in two flavors - individual contribution as you doing something on your own time and equipment and official contributions when the company itself contributes to a project.
This looks to be the latter rather than the former so it would make sense it would come from an Apple account.
My understanding is that Apple's policy is highly unusual in that "individual contribution as you doing something on your own time and equipment" are pretty much not allowed at all.
I am not sure exactly but I suspect this is employee-specific and may be only for those working on sensitive projects.
I worked at Apple years ago and it was never in my contract or mentioned to me. And there are plenty of more recent developers e.g. Holden Karau who were contributing to open source projects in their spare time whilst working at Apple.
I know of developers who made quite a bit of $$$ being first out the door with applications utilizing SDKs that they wrote. MS is perfectly happy with their own developers showing off shiny new features.
Interesting but not surprising I guess.
On the day of employee orientation, they specifically talk about moonlighting and HOW to do it.
"Do not use any hardware we provide for you, and do not use any software you installed from the corporate network, buy your own copy of development tools and licenses, you can use the free Azure credits we give you but not the ones linked to your employee login, make sure you use the credits on your personal account."
They do require you not write software that directly competes with existing Microsoft software, for obvious reasons, but other than that it is fair game.
But this doesn't even cover the whole of it. At multiple times, Microsoft has actively encouraged their employees to write software as a side hustle! They've launched internal competitions "We have a cool new SDK, write some software and put it on the MS Store! Best rated software wins some prize!"
The entire "developers first" culture there extends to how they treat their own employees.
Heck MS has a long tradition of employees leaving to start a new company and MS buying that company up a few years later. I suspect that during the 90s/early 2000s it was seen as a good way to innovate, similar to incubator labs within companies now days.
"When Steve came back, one of his company-wide edicts was that the names of individuals must be removed from about boxes."
He also went further than that by illegally colluding with competitors to lower wages for employees. [0] [1]. What a great man.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/emails-eric-schmidt-sergey-b...
[1] https://9to5google.com/2012/01/27/court-filings-show-steve-j...
It’s better than bitching about bad support without doing anything. But at the most fundamental of levels it’s really the company working for their customers, through a third party’s project.
I’m perfectly happy to celebrate win-win outcomes.
You are aware that there are more than two options?
“Hooray, you did the thing you’re supposed to do. Good job you”.
Even when restricting that to “open source projects that (cl)aim to run on latest MacOS”, I think that’s not something a vendor is “supposed to do”.
So, if Apple only “is supposed to” support some projects, what objective criteria should it use to pick them?
I think it’s completely fine if Apple wouldn’t support any open source. I also think it’s completely fine if developers would choose not to write software for their OS because of that.
So in practice, not very often
Of course they will commit to open source projects if it suits their needs (if they use those projects). But people have different opinion on what Apple's needs are.
Judging by the Engineering account being used to submit this patch, this is likely to be an example of the latter.
What does exist is specially "blessed" FAANG teams who are cleared to contribute to specific open-source projects that are critical to the business. Amazon has a team who contributes to the linux kernel for hypervisor support, for example.
Well done to who ever it was.
It could also be that someone would rather not be out in public, which is also understandable.