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Comment by hmo09 | Hacker News Reader

Apple already have more developers contributing to useful upstream code than Canonical (Webkit, cups, LLVM).

Placating the tech crowd by giving away fragments of low level code is really just marketing and a way to retain talent that would otherwise refuse to work for them. It's not as if their users can actually use any of that stuff to change how their macs work (without switching to a different OS or browser).

WebKit for one has fairly wide adoption outside of pure Mac OS X. As for the rest of it, just because something is open source don't expect many people to use it.

Yes but then it's also being developed by far more companies than Apple.

For 2012 Google submitted roughly twice as much code to Webkit as Apple (which came second), apart from them we have smaller yet notable contributors like RIM and Nokia (7% and 5% respectively).

Let's not forget that reduced maintenance costs are often touted as a reason to opensource code in the first place. And when you consider it was developed by Apple and so presumably fit there needs well when released it as working code, it's not surprising that adapting it to new use cases involves more work than maintaining it.

It was developed by the KDE project as KHTML. The reason that it's open-source is that it was Apple's fork of an existing free software project.

You'd be complaining if they contributing nothing. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

He said they weren't doing enough. You're pointing out he'd also complain if they did even less.

Seriously?

Actually, I was just pointing out that they are not open in any meaningful sense of the word - their products are very, very closed and controlling and that's how they like it. Comparing them to Canonical is in my opinion very silly for that reason, it's apples to oranges.

Apple is the biggest tech company in the world. Canonical is a company, that focuses on Linux User experience.

Didn't Apple buy CUPS specifically so that they could keep parts of it proprietary?

They're definitely only funneling money into LLVM so they can drop their dependencies on GCC, which will probably have a net harmful effect on the free software culture.

> They're definitely only funneling money into LLVM so they can drop their dependencies on GCC

Definitely and only? How did you determine this?

It's sort of obvious? I can't see any other reason Apple would have for it, other than making compilers researchers have slightly easier lives. It'd certainly make sense after they were forced to open source the frontend for Objective-C.

Apple had two technical needs that GCC could not reasonably satisfy. One was to compile Core Image filters. When you make a chain of filters, they treat it as a single complicated filter which they JIT compile and optimize for your GPU or CPU (I believe they decide at run time which to target based on what will be best for the particular complex filter you have defined).

Another technical need they had was for a compiler system that could be easily and tightly integrated with other tools, such as IDEs and debuggers.

Either of the above would have required extensive modifications to GCC, and they would not have been able to get those modifications into the upstream. The result would be Apple would have to maintain a fork of GCC. They'd be spending a lot of effort porting things from upstream into their fork.

So would you say that Apple is definitely only funding LLVM so they can drop their dependency on GCC?

Circular snark is circular.

> which will probably have a net harmful effect on the free software culture.

Mind explaining how funding the development of free software hurts free software?

1) Replace GPL code with BSD code 2) Release a subset of the features to open source community

Why would Apple be so allergic to GPL unless they want the ability to close stuff? If really you think Apple would stay open if they dominated the market look at the iPhone.

This is only "hurting free software" if you are a complete radical like rms, who believes that any closed source software is an affront to humanity, blah, blah. Otherwise, it doesn't matter what Apple closes, as everything that was Free before, is still Free afterwards. If you don't like Apple's stuff, fork it. If you don't like closed source software, don't use it. I don't see anybody putting a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to use Apple stuff.

This is a shallow view of the situation.

Your metric is essentially "no knowledge is lost from the Free world." However, this means that all free software developers could die tomorrow and your metric would be satisfied.

A better metric is "the most free software that could be made is made." Switching from a GPLd compiler platform to a non-copyleft "freemium" Apple platform is worse for this.

If you don't care about free software as a political goal, there is no purpose to have this discussion in the first place, as you don't care about free software being hurt.

I think you're setting up a false dichotomy here. "You care" or "you don't care". Reality is more nuanced than that. Also, the idea of "all free software developers dying tomorrow' is just hyperbole, since the chances of that happening are essentially nil.

Yes, we'd all like to maximize the amount of F/OSS software in the world. F/OSS is a Good Thing, and I founded a company based around F/OSS for a reason. But it's not this horrible tragedy / affront to humanity, if Apple (or whoever) takes a step away from a purist "Free" software position.

To put it another way: no one owes you (or me, or anybody else) a world full of all the Free software we want. And even more so when plenty of people in the world don't care about software freedom. As long as those of us who do care have the option to fork and continue development of projects, then the actual freedom remains, as far as I'm concerned.

> Also, the idea of "all free software developers dying tomorrow' is just hyperbole, since the chances of that happening are essentially nil.

That is exactly my point. You proposed a metric for the health of the free software culture: "Nothing that is free now is non-free in the future." This is a bad metric because if you eliminate all free software development, it reports "everything is okay."

You proposed a metric for the health of the free software culture: "Nothing that is free now is non-free in the future."

It seems to me that you're turning something analog into something binary. "Nothing that is free now is non-free in the future" is true, relative to any particular project, and is - as a worst case - not so horrible. But applying that to "free software culture" in general, as a comparison to the idea of ALL free software development stopping, doesn't sound reasonable to me. It's like you're suggesting that, say, Apple, moving away from GPL'd "Free" software towards BSD software (and possibly a "free core" model) automatically implies that everybody else does too. But that's just as likely to happen as your hypothetical of every Free software developer dying tomorrow.

The "every free software developer dying tomorrow" is a hypothetical statement that has nothing at all to do with Apple. It was in my comment because it's a great way to illustrate that even if things aren't explicitly subtracted from the Free world, the Free world is harmed if its growth is slowed.

the Free world is harmed if its growth is slowed.

OK, but "harmed" is a broad term. I'm harmed if I stub my toe, but I'm also "harmed" if I fall of a bridge and land on my head and crack 4 vertebrae. But there's a big difference between those things.

And anyway, my point was (at least partly) that the growth doesn't necessarily stop because of - for example - the Apple deal (or something like it) because people can always fork. And if the last GPL'd version of something that goes closed is popular enough, it gets forked. See: Nessus[1] / OpenVAS[2].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nessus_%28software%29

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVAS

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