Open Source Software used by Apple | Hacker News Reader

Open Source Software used by Apple

apple.com

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To be honest, "OpenSource + Apple" is a huge, meaningless joke and all the downvoting on HN will not change that.

Why, because you say so?

Because using != supporting.

Exactly what i meant. :)

I'll tell the CUPS and WebKit teams no one is using their work and they should work on something else.

Yeah, CUPS... There was something... https://lwn.net/Articles/485617/

Also, please explain to me one thing:

Why did Apple make Safari closed source but the LGPL licensed Webkit open source?

One answer might be that Apple has no choice for Webkit but to remain open source thanks to the LGPL and its "ancestor" KHTML but it chose some proprietary license for Safari to "protect" itself from competition stealing Apples precious work.

Now your answer :)

Sure, but what I'm missing is a support for these claims. Using != supporting is true by it self, but to what extent is that practiced in Apple's case specifically? It's still just a claim with no supportive argument at all. Some projects that Apple supports and contributes/has contributed to that comes to mind, launchd, libdispatch, ALAC, OpenCL, LLVM, Quicktime streming server, and Webkit to name a few.

My support is this one:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/103674611711666213369/posts/7j1c...

They move from GPL, how and why does that make their open source use "a huge meaningless joke"?

You may have noticed the column "overall packages" which shows a significant (and steady) drop over the last releases, even in Apples own open source license.

Yes, yes I did. But I also noticed that the table leaves out other licenses like Apache, MIT and BSD so it doesnt tell you what you think it does. Of the examples I gave, only one uses Apple's APSL license. Never mind.

I was about to write that as well, Apple are using less Apple APSL themselves and moving to wards Apache 2.0 License, and using more BSD / MIT equivalent. Since the Table only includes GPL / LGPL and the not used APSL no wonder why the numbers are dropping.

And so what? To be honest, the statistic would say enough with only the overall column shown.

What do you think what is the outcome when the overall open source software used nearly halved?

I leave this as an exercise to the reader (Hint: the last version of Mac OS X contains less open source software then every version before, overall and in licenses).

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