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Comment by zimbatm | Hacker News Reader

Are there any places where Apple contributes back to the open source ecosystem?

Their engineers are prohibited from contributing back to the ecosystem so it's not possible to engage with them in a reasonable manner.

They don't acknowledge popular open source projects. Is it too much to ask to even have a single engineer talk to popular projects like Homebrew?

They make us pay to build on their platforms. CI is more expensive, harder to get access to. Emulation is prohibited.

Everywhere I look, it looks like they are a negative force. Sucking out good will and not giving anything back.

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> Their engineers are prohibited from contributing back to the ecosystem

Things have changed and this is no longer true. A significant number of projects receive frequent contributions from Apple engineers. The majority of active committers on Apache Cassandra are at Apple for example, contributing major features such as a new transactional system[1].

My team actively contributes to Spinnaker, and we're currently hiring someone with a focus on open-source contributions, quoting the second "key qualification" in the job listing[2]: "Interest in developing with open source software and contributing back to the community".

[1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/CASSANDRA/CEP-15...

[2] https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200361051/apple-cloud-p...

> Interest in developing with open source software and contributing back to the community

That's a bit odd phrasing, that has guilt undertone. Individuals are unlikely using open source for personal financial gain, but somehow this sounds like they actually "owe" something, kind of shifting the blame from corporations that are actually making money with open source software and often not paying contributors anything.

Also hiring someone to contribute to open source, makes that person likely represent interest of the corporation rather than the project they will contribute to and these are not always aligned. It also takes time of maintainers to actually review and gauge value and viability of the contribution rather than actually spending time on development of the project.

I think much better idea to "contribute back" is to actually pay the existing contributors rather than having own pet one.

I didn't write the job listing, but I understand it as being interested in OSS contributions, maybe already being a contributor to some projects.

> hiring someone to contribute to open source, makes that person likely represent interest of the corporation

That's true, and this is why my team is active within the project by having a member on the Technical Oversight Committee and several others in SIGs. The point is not to push our own agenda, we have made a lot of changes that are mainly relevant to our use cases and that don't necessarily make sense to upstream. Whenever we work on features that we know others would benefit from, we engage with the project's relevant committees and make the changes requested in pull request reviews.

To be clear, I don't speak for my employer and this is only my own experience. Not all teams are like this.

> I think much better idea to "contribute back" is to actually pay the existing contributors rather than having own pet one.

Contributing features and supporting existing contributors in other ways are not incompatible. We have a whole team working on this code base full time, and so do other companies. Of course all of these people collaborate. This project is not really run by volunteers but mostly receives contributions from a number of companies (originally created at Netflix, large parts came from Google, etc).

edit: See TOS members here for a list of the companies involved: https://cd.foundation/blog/2022/11/01/new-spinnaker-technica...

They donate money and resources to blender! https://www.blender.org/press/apple-joins-blender-developmen...

They also do code contributions as well (porting various components of Blender to work on Metal)

> Are there any places where Apple contributes back to the open source ecosystem?

They've donated $1,000–$4,999 to The FreeBSD Foundation this year[1] :-)

[1] https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/?donationTyp...

I'm glad they donated.

The amount is a lot less than I expected, given the size of Apple's pockets.

It could be that the donation comes from matching the donations of some employees, or similar programs.

I assume this kind of small donation is usually in return for some favor. Ie. Can you help debug and fix this bug. It looks like about 2 days work, so we'll donate $2000.

4,999 is also just at the upper limit most mid tier managers are allowed to spend without getting an approval process involved.

Apple contribute a lot to open source, and I think your last statement of them being a negative force is kind of ridiculous given some of the work that heavily depended on their engineering.

Firstly, they have a site that lists some of their work https://opensource.apple.com/ but going further, projects like Chrome wouldn’t exist without Safari having forked KHTML and then massively worked on WebKit. Clang + LLVM would likely not exist in their current form either (clang started at Apple, llvm was earlier but a lot of early push came from them). Which in turn would have changed the landscape today regarding other languages like Rust.

Those are just two of the major ones. There are other major ones like OpenCL that come to mind too, let alone other projects that get code contributions (OBS, Blender, etc…)

They probably don’t contribute as much as they could , in an ideal world, but the foundation of your comment is untrue.

LLVM and WebKit are two key examples

That's because they have no other choice.

LLVM needs to be extended to support their platforms and it's too expensive to maintain a fork.

WebKit was forked from a LGPL project (KHTML) so they have to keep publishing the source.

Blessed is the GPL. We need more of that and less of MIT.

Foundationdb is a pretty big thing to open source

They also "forget" attribution: https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2012/03/08/welcome-apple/

The 10 year old post says they added it shortly after. Plenty of companies small and big forget the Openstreetmap attribution. Apple these days has a full-time team of employees working on improving OSM data, with dedicated public contact person.

They contribute back to OpenStreetMap:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Organised_Editing/Activi...

...

Swift?

They declined to hire the homebrew guy because he sucked at whiteboarding. Apple is terrible for FOSS. I like their phones but I’d never write for them or use/support their machines.

Edit: I was wrong, twas the Goog, in fact.

It was Google and not Apple.

source: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768

Apple did end up hiring him for a short period.

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