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Comment by worldsayshi | Hacker News Reader

Apple willingly releasing open source stuff feels rather counter to some of their other philosophy. (still)

They didn't release anything willingly. KHTML was LGPL so they were forced by the license to release it as open source. However the LGPL allows building apps on top of libs without releasing them as open source though and that's what apple did, they did not release Safari as open source, only webkit. So everything they could release as proprietary they did, they only open sourced the parts they were forced to.

To be fair, they later rewrote KJS as JavaScriptCore and released it as open source using the BSD license, and also WebCore and more. See http://apple.com/opensource/ for more. By that time, many companies including Microsoft realized that releasing and contributing to open source was not only beneficial but also unavoidable.

They were forced to release the code by the license, but they picked the code knowing that from the beginning.

Well this was also after a year of working on a fork in seclusion. The project by then had diverged quite a bit, and had quite a differing philosophy from the original.

Back in those days, Apple was all about open-source - I still have an OSX 10.2 (Jaguar) box somewhere where the main headline is about Apple and open-source.

(Just found this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevenf/5393674266/)

I guess there's still a lot of open-source in OSX, but they don't need to shout about it now that they are no longer the underdogs.

I think they were just trying to piggy-back on BSD reputation as stable and mature system, so they played the buddy-buddy card. Once OS X settled in its place, this was no longer needed, so the open source love faded.

It's not like the open source itself or the open source love thrived anywhere else in the Desktop anyway...

While there might be less shouting about open source contributions nowadays, arguably the contributions themselves are much more useful.

Certainly WebKit has been widely adopted outside Apple, clang/llvm is slowly, but surely gaining converts, and libdispatch is IMHO deserving of wider interest, even though it may not be widely adopted on non-Apple platforms.

Actually open source has been a huge part of Apple ever since they acquired NeXT (or was it the other way around). The majority of OSX/iOS is open source and they have contributed in big ways to a number of projects e.g. LLVM, OpenCL, GCD, LaunchD, ZeroConf.

http://www.opensource.apple.com

It's really just a perception problem on your part.

> The majority of OSX/iOS is open source

Really? Large chunks of both are not, so how do you know it's the majority of it that is?

That said, it is rather simple to consider : as a general idea, the UI layer (Cocoa for OS X, CocoaTouch for iOS) and a few other things are closed. The rest is pretty open, as darwin in general is OSS.

Not the lower "Darwin" layers of iOS, they've never released that.

The "darwin layer" in iOS is fairly inexistant. When have you started a shell on a non-jailbroken iPhone? ;)

I actually meant all the lower layers including kernel and drivers etc. Which do exist, and have not been released.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)

"Darwin is now only available as source code,[4] except for the ARM variant, which has not been released in any form separately from iOS."

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