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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

Anything development related from Apple is inherently disinteresting unless it's aimed at Apple, is for Apple and you're building for Apple.

Apple has done nothing cross platform or open source or community oriented so if they come out with something that's intended to be more general is has no base, no users, no audience of non-Apple developers to land on.

I'm not anti Apple - I love MacOS and Apple is my main machine. I'm just pragmatic about Apple technologies - they are all for usage inside the Apple bubble.

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> Apple has done nothing cross platform or open source or community oriented

Cups - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS

Swift - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language)

Zeroconf - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonjour_(software)

I think they're bad, opaque opensource maintainers, but they did release some popular things that have communities on other systems.

I do wish they just contributed to nickel or something else though rather than doing their NIH as usual.

CUPS was done by Easy Software Products, in 1997. Apple adopted it only in 2002.

Swift is a language entirely in the control of Apple, mainly targeting Apples platforms. With little to no community engagement.

Bonjour is not really cross platform, and not really open source either as it has lots of strings attached to the license and terms one can use it under.

(I wouldn't say that Apple has done "nothing" -- but to credit them for doing much is also a stretch)

HLS -- created by Apple, just about everybody uses it for streaming on the web.

And I think CSS animations and transforms mostly came out of Apple; at any rate, they're very similar to the animations and transforms in UIKit that originally came from NeXT.

Apple being gung-ho to push a technology to further nail Flash to the cross whether the actual reason, at least is consistent with their MO and not some great contribution to open standards.

As long as HLS is more open than Flash was, why not? It could be both of those things.

Ha, I was only referring to the CSS animations. That seemed at the time to be more pressing. But no disagreement.

> I do wish they just contributed to nickel or something else though rather than doing their NIH as usual.

They’re contributing to a ton of OSS that’s NIH:

https://opensource.apple.com/projects/

K8s, spark, cassandra, netty, zookeeper, solr, containerd

> I do wish they just contributed to nickel or something else though rather than doing their NIH as usual.

Did Nickel exist in 2018? (Someone here said that Pkl did.)

WebKit? FoundationDB?

I didn't include webkit since it's a forked KHTML, which wasn't theirs.

I didn't include Linux because it's just a Unix reimplementation, not theirs.

or:

I didn't include Firefox because it's just an NCSA Mosaic fork, not theirs.

The point being, whoever does most of the work and maintenance owns something, not who came up with some early predecessor.

Yes.

Entire timeline of JavaScript engines.

https://egbert.net/blog/articles/javascript-jit-engines-time...

There's hardly anything left of that.

At first glance, this is interesting in that it’s the least Apple-ish open source project I can remember seeing. I can definitely see uses for it right now in non-Apple-ecosystem projects where you’re not already invested in a different tool.

I think they funded development of Clang and LLVM.

And WebKit, which is the rendering engine in Chrome. (Though Google now maintains their own fork).

What's clang, chopped liver?

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