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Comment by wkat4242 | Hacker News Reader

It's not. Apple (or rather NeXT) took some of the userland for macOS but it's not contributing back and it doesn't have much influence. It's more like a fork a long time ago.

A few companies do. Skype and Netflix did but hardly use it now (at least Skype left it, not sure about Netflix but I never hear about it from bsd devs). Ix systems and netgate do but they're tiny.. No, it's not influenced in a trivial way and certainly not by apple.

This is a huge difference to Linux where the vast majority of kernel commits come from big tech and have nothing to do with things end users care about. Also there's nothing in the FreeBSD world like the Linux Foundation which is basically a corporate lobby group.

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> but it's not contributing back and it doesn't have much influence.

I understand the former. But with how Apple operates, it's really hard to believe they'd pull downstream from something they don't have some kind of soft power over. They do still pull downstream AFAIK? Maybe that's changed?

>Ix systems

I did some reading and saw a FreeBSD contributor ended up going to Apple until 2013 before he founded this company. https://www.ixsystems.com/clients/ Apple is listed here. Six degrees of separation and all, but probably not a coincidence. Nothing wrong with that, business is a social structure. This is how they work. We make and keep friends, even if only professionally. Backchannels are where real deals are made. But this to me is not nothing. No corporate influence means there's a lot of nice things you don't get. You just can't afford the manpower. It looks more like 9 Front than a BSD that has some serious billion-dollar problems under its belt.

That sounds harsh, not a judgement. Just very deep skepticism of the assertion of no influence. I'm realizing there's not a lot that can be done to sway that intentionally.

> This is a huge difference to Linux

This I'm well aware of. I just like having a perspective across the fence. These days they're starting to get a little too aggressive for my tastes. FreeBSD seems fine in comparison.

> But with how Apple operates, it's really hard to believe they'd pull downstream from something they don't have some kind of soft power over. They do still pull downstream AFAIK? Maybe that's changed?

Apple doesn't merge often. They basically haven't merged kernel tcp since 2002. When I started using OSX in 2011, they hadn't merged userland for several years, and when I stopped in 2019, they had only merged once.

They famously stopped picking up bash when upstream changed the license, and most of the FreeBSD userland doesn't change that frequently, so most things you wouldn't notice a difference. cal(1) started highlighting the current day at some point, tar probably grew new compresion arguments, etc.

Apple certainly was a major contributor/driving force/etc of LLVM for a while, not sure if they still are? And LLVM was adopted by FreeBSD, so maybe that's where this idea is coming from?

> And LLVM was adopted by FreeBSD, so maybe that's where this idea is coming from?

Partially, but after seeing the Jordan Hubbard connection, there's a lot of layers to this. May have reinforced my biases, but it's definitely non-trivial according to my hippie-tier anarchist baseline. Oops. Worst case scenario of answering your own question.

But your reply does give me actually contradicting evidence. It wouldn't surprise me that distance has grown to the point of total atrophy, given the general trajectory Apple has been on since 2012 or so. This is why I ask these questions, because the people on the ground give the most informative answers.

As Ptahhotep advises circa ~2300BCE:

> Fine words are more sought after than greenstone, but can be found with the women at the grindstone.

> May have reinforced my biases, but it's definitely non-trivial according to my hippie-tier anarchist baseline.

The definition of 'trivial' would come into play yes. I would only consider it non-trivial if a commercial party can (and does) influence the direction of development. I don't think Apple does so. Even Netflix. In the Linux world there's billions of investment and many contributors are directly employed by big business. The waters are much murkier there.

Again, I'm not saying it's a bad thing. It's just not something I want which is one of the reasons I picked FreeBSD. Other reasons were the great ports collection, the division between OS and apps (you can have rolling apps but a stable OS), the traditionalism (only change things if it's really needed) and the single main flavour of the OS which makes support much easier. Also the excellent documentation.

> No corporate influence means there's a lot of nice things you don't get.

Yes that is the flipside. But I don't mind that. If you choose your hardware carefully it works fine.

Note that this is not too different from using Windows or Mac. Your hardware is also chosen carefully to work with those, just not by you but by the vendor. With FreeBSD you're more involved with the nuts & bolts and this is exactly what I want. I don't want my OS to be a black box I don't understand.

>>Netflix did but hardly use it now

Unless I misunderstood you, Netflix delivers all video content via FreeBSD and contributes code back and money to the foundation.

I had read they were migrating to Linux but I could be wrong. I just never hear much about Netflix in FreeBSD circles.

If they still use it they are more of a user than an influencer in its development.

They use it and influence its development. You can search freebsd git repo, you'll see Netflix all over it for many years Including 2025. They've added many large features across the code base.

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