It is odd that Apple doesn't chip in here... they've originated so much decent stuff in the OSS space. Seems like a huge missed opportunity.
Why would they "chip in" here?
Amazon do the same with the fire.
It wouldn't be economically rational for Apple to bring down its own moat.
When they switched to x86, it didn't take long for them to release Boot Camp, so they could take Windows users' money, too.
How could that possibly disrupt their Software/Services infra?
I am not an Apple user. Do you _have_ to pay for iCloud if you buy the laptop? I don't think so.
Asahi-on-Mac would bring in irrelevant numbers for a company of Apple's size.
Sure they are probably thousands if not millions of (in the positive sense) nerds and geeks posting on HN about buying a Mac first hand, not second hand, solely to put Linux on it but even then would be a drop in the ocean compared to the remained sales.
Still if you have numbers on that I'd love to be wrong about it.
So I end up with a MacBook with macOS. Some may refuse to do that but I expect that's only a tiny missed opportunity.
llvm also existed from before although apple supported the development.
I was curious if apple had actually started any FOSS project.
Also, Bonjour originated at Apple and it is cross-platform, although Avahi probably is more popular
CUPS is associated with Apple as well, but it seems that it also did not originate there
last thing i found https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/03/26/apples-dormant-cups/
Copyright: 2003-2017 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
I’m not 100% certain if they started with any bits of the previous aarch64 backend or not though.
1) khtml was a really minimal renderer in KDE before apple pumped tens of millions into turning it into the first really modern web2.0 browser, you really can not underestimate the amount of money jobs was willing to pump to make that thing what it became by the time the iphone launched.
2) llvm was essentially apple's bet on a grad student hire and him and his lab's academic project. I knew and worked with several of those former uiuc guys. llvm and clang as we know them today were heavily built at apple.
Also, you are totally (and purposefully probably) misquoting me. I said __clang__ and the __llvm arm64 backend__ were done by apple, and they were almost entirely from scratch from the start at Apple.