Microsoft is very responsive on GitHub issues I have filed, and I have benefited a lot from their open source offerings, namely VS Code and F#.
It, however, leaves a bad taste if you are running an open-source show, with the marketing to match but it becomes clear and clear that it's mostly for show.
Perhaps one can make the same argument about Apple and privacy (that it's just for show) but Apple somehow could make it one of their value proposition, while IMHO Microsoft failed to do that with their open-source expansion. Always felt like a half-hearted attempt.
Many Apple (especially iOS) developers seem to be just generally frustrated about the platform, but suck it up and deal with it because they have to if they want to be in the App Store.
Additionally, I don't think Apple has been anywhere near as fervent as Microsoft about embracing open source. Sure, Darwin (a fairly tiny part of macOS/iOS) is open source, but Apple seems to only grudgingly embrace and use open source components when it suits their purposes. Consider how they've been shipping a super-old version of bash because they're paranoid about GPLv3, how they've been heavily involved in LLVM and clang (at least in part for licensing reasons), and how they barely mention anymore that WebKit is based on KHTML. And it's a safe bet that if KHTML hadn't been more permissively-licensed, Apple would have happily kept WebKit closed.
To release any application in Apple ecosystem you have to pay for developer account each year. You might play around with stuff - but I don't believe anyone would be developing on their platform just for fun.
Microsoft gives stuff away for free - loads of stuff - there is much more people who will play/try out/start some projects with free stuff. But then the more people the easier is to see ones that are not happy and would like more. Then this mass of people is active on multiple forums, not only on .NET dev subreddits.
Then as they see nice income stream - some inconvenience is written off as cost of doing business.
Then it is just not that many of them.
That doesn't make Microsoft's double-talk okay, Apple never pretended to :heart: opensource.
But they did. They claimed part of Mac OS, Darwin, is open source. Like Google like to brag about Android being Open Source even if you have to put a ton of proprietary software on top of the open source parts to make it usable.
Apple didn't take ownership and then start closing CUPS, but they have also never pretended to be a friend of OpenSouce. They haven't produced anything opensource since then. There have been a couple of projects, like their rebranding of KHTML that suited their purposes but they never donated time or money back, or even pretended to help upstream.
If you look at the Asahi Linux on M processors, Apple don't hinder and may have arguably done things in a way to not block them but they certainly have not helped or even claimed that it was a good thing.
Two counter-examples:
They open sourced Swift in 2015 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language)#H...), and Swift-DocC in 2021 (https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-docc/)
Apple bought CUPS in 2007 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS#History)
Except dot net devs. Which is the point.
CUPS was critical infrastructure for Apple, so they bought it. Since it is GPL they couldn't close it, hence they abandoned it.
Apple are not your friend, but they never claimed to be, you just might have an overlapping interest, Microsoft hold big "We Heart Linux" events.
The vast majority of iOS developers. Swift 1.0 wasn’t open source, and IIRC when it was announced there wasn’t even a promise that it would be open source. I think Chris Lattner did signal they were willing to seriously consider it some time in the future; that was all.
There is a lot of money to be made in iOS, so people will use whatever Apple forces them to use, whether it’s open source or not. If some would leave money on the table on ideological grounds, all the better for everyone else.
I think I clearly showed they have.
The proximity with Linux was an accident. NeXT is from the late 80s, pre Linux, and NeXT was the baggage OS X had to work with. They didn't strip out the Unix parts, but also didn't widely proclaim it was "close to Linux". It was mostly the developer community touting it as an advantage of macOS, with Apple later admitting "yeah yeah that's also cool" and later shipping Python and Ruby alongside Perl just for completion.
Even when Apple clearly tried to help Homebrew by offering a Xcode-less toolchain there was not even a peep about the purpose of "Command Line Tools". It took them years to acknowledge it existed.
Also, like the sibling response said, Linux only started being as widely used later than OS X.
If anything Apple offered Solaris, Irix refugees a viable desktop transition.
Just check StackOverflow 2021 survey - Swift is like 5%
Yea, it's "just" runtime and giant compiler infrastructure that are open?