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Comment by mhomde | Hacker News Reader

Open Source, wow that was unexpected from Apple

It's calculated. Reception would be distinctly negative if something as crucial as health research were closed source—here, the utility is in the transparency as well as apple's traditional offers of usability and reliability.

Plus, these are all academic partners - that code usually needs to be open source to publish.

It's not "usually". More like "rarely". Papers without code are very common.

> Reception would be distinctly negative if something as crucial as health research were closed source

I don't know about that. HealthKit is essentially closed and no one seems to mind, and it's all about the data ultimately anyway. Maybe it's a regulatory thing? Regardless, it's nice to see.

HealthKit is a glorified database. Would definitely like to see it open sourced, though.

Can you name an app that is not "a glorified database"? Seems to apply for almost anything. Hacker News, Facebook, Twitter and so on... It's all about putting in and getting data from a database

> Can you name an app that is not "a glorified database"?

Apps, sure. Tools? Hell no. File processors, browsers, libraries.... But HealthKit adds virtually no value aside from the schema of health data. There's not much to be gained from opening it. Honestly, I'd argue the same about hacker news and reddit: it's great that reddit is open source, but it's hardly necessary for me to perform research on it because the semantics of loading/storing/existing are so well defined.

HealthKit is not an app.

What's the point about speculating about motivation? Whether motivated by altruism or calculated strategy, who cares?

These kinds of discussions tend to devolve into platform bickering rather than substantive commentary.

> These kinds of discussions tend to devolve into platform bickering rather than substantive commentary.

True. However, occasionally (I at least) learn something new from these conversations.

Why would that be unexpected? Apple does plenty of things open source, just not GPL.

Apple usually only does things open source when it's required of them. I can't think of one piece of useful Apple open source software that's open.

I'd consider Webkit pretty useful.

clang too...

WebKit has been open sourced 10 years ago. CUPS is even older than that. What has Apple been up to recently?

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You know, you could name projects instead of clicking the upside-down arrow. Clang comes to mind (not LLVM). Google and others contribute heavily to clang, but Apple started it. They deserve credit for that. Anything else?

Vikram Adve and Chris Lattner started LLVM at the University of Illinois in 2000. Only 5 years later, Apple got involved and hired Lattner.

Webkit was derived from KHTML, which is LGPL.

However, the bulk of modern Webkit is BSD 2.0, using LGPL libraries. Apple (and the other contributors) were under no obligation to contribute that bit.

Don't say forget CUPS

Clang/llvm

CUPS

Keep in mind when responding that Webkit, Clang/LLVM, and Cups are all not created by Apple, they're all preexisting projects or forks that essentially necessitated doing their work in the open.

Noted, but I'd argue that contributing to existing open source projects is better for the general populace than reinventing wheels.

Clang/LLVM is BSD, what do you mean by "necessitated doing their work in the open"?

He probably means that making it open source would benefit Apple moreso than if they kept it closed, not out of the goodness of their hearts

> they're all preexisting projects or forks that essentially necessitated doing their work in the open.

That's true of Cups and part of WebKit (most of the actual browser engine is BSD-licensed, but there are LGPL libraries used); however, Apple was certainly under no obligation to contribute its changes to LLVM back, or to contribute clang back _at all_.

Apple owns CUPS though, I highly suggest that you read the license terms[1] for it now:

License Exceptions

1. (a) Software that is developed by any person or entity for an Apple Operating System ("Apple OS-Developed Software"), including but not limited to Apple and third party printer drivers, filters, and backends for an Apple Operating System, that is linked to the CUPS imaging library or based on any sample filters or backends provided with CUPS shall not be considered to be a derivative work or collective work based on the CUPS program and is exempt from the mandatory source code release clauses of the GNU GPL.

[1] http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/doc-1.5/license.html

AFAIK Clang (not LLVM) was entirely created by Apple and could have been proprietary

Also the x86 Darwin kernel was made open source with no benefit to Apple, and winocm managed to port it to ARM too (although it's pretty debatable if it actually provides anything useful)

Why does that matter?

>Apple does plenty of things open source

most of the time, it's broken or need closed source dependencies.

Open Source in this case might not make much of a difference. If this is written in Swift and only runs under iOS, or if it ties with a certain Apple service that requires certificates issued by Apple it won't make much of a difference if you can read the full source code, even if it's released under an MIT or similarly open license.

As long as the data this gathers can't be used (or contributed to) by a third party, it's still a 100% Apple property, regardless of code availability.

We'll see how this stuff actually works in practice pretty soon, but as this is more than just a chunk of code to run on a device, what exactly is going to be "open" here?

A formal standard that can be implemented and used by other platforms, both on the device and server side, would be great. But Apple's last promise to make something they developed "open" (iMessage as a standard) evaporated and has since been completely proprietary.

No, it was facetime they were going to make an open standard. And patent trolls killed that. So..

Kind of a no-brainer if universities are going to be involved in building apps for it.

Wonder if they announced anything about external addon biosensors?

iOS and Mac OS are closed systems with lots of open source components.

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