4 ms·

Apple: Open Source

50 points by mmastrac 11y ago

tedmiston 11y ago
> Apple, the first major computer company to make Open Source development a key part of its software strategy, continues to use and release significant quantities of open source software. "first major computer company" Interesting phrasing.
- frame_perfect 11y ago
  Probably to differentiate themselves from pure software companies like Mozilla, in which case that claim would almost certainly be false.
- cryptoz 11y ago
  Yes, especially since they specifically removed computer from their company name almost 10 years ago.
  - mcphage 11y ago
    They never stopped being a computer company, though. The word "Computer" doesn't have to be in your name to qualify.
latenightcoding 11y ago
"Apple, the first major computer company to make Open Source development a key part of its software strategy" Wait what? Am I missing something here
- peterhadlaw 11y ago
  You're not alone in your confusion.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- shykes 11y ago
  I guess they're referring to projects like Darwin (released in 2000) and Webkit (open-sourced in 2005). They also invested heavily in LLVM starting in 2005. Those are all major strategic investments into open-source, at a time where companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon were not making any comparable investments that I can think of. For example, in 2005 Android was freshly acquired by Google, Chrome was still 3 years away. Go was introduced in 2009. One exception I can think of is IBM which invested heavily in Linux around the same time Apple was open-sourcing Darwin. Overall, their claim is arguable but certainly not without merit. EDIT: remember when IBM covered the streets of San Francisco in Linux graffiti, and were threatened with a huge fine when the paint didn't wash off as planned? http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2001-04-25-ibm-linux-graffiti.htm http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2001-04-25-ibm-linu...
  - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
    There's also Sun, who open-sourced StarOffice in 2000.
    - nnutter 11y ago
      That's where the ambiguity of "major computer company" comes in. Probably the same with IBM. They are probably implying "major personal computer company" but couldn't say "major PC company" because PC = Windows.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
        TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
        > Apple is the only one keeping the PC misnomer alive today (and should really cut it out; see: misnomer). Not really. Apple's usage of the word "PC" reflects popular usage.
        deleted 11y ago
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  Thinking about it a bit, this claim would probably be true if only they added "one of" before "the first".
peterhadlaw 11y ago
Do they seriously think they can pull the marketing lingo shroud over actual developers?
- frame_perfect 11y ago
  > Apple, the first major computer company to make Open Source development a key part of its software strategy It's actually pretty factual. They open sourced Darwin/WebKit/LLVM/Clang, and legitimized BSD and Unix as a consumer product via OS X... in 2001/2005/2005. The only "big" company that I can think of that made a move that big was Mozilla, which arguably doesn't even compare to a company as huge as Apple. Plus Mozilla open sourced itself out of pure desparation from pressure via Internet Explorer (which, I might remind you, was one of the worst proprietary pieces of shit to scorch this earth, by none other than Microsoft). It's only been a recent thing where companies like Google/Microsoft have been embracing open source. Companies like Gitlab/Docker weren't even concievable back then.
  - seba_dos1 11y ago
    Well, they couldn't not open source WebKit, as at its core lies a fork of LGPL licensed KHTML and KJS (that's why WebCore and JavaScriptCore are LGPL while the rest of WebKit is BSD)
    - frame_perfect 11y ago
      Oh, that's news to me. I guess that makes their claim a bit weaker.
      - saurik 11y ago
        FWIW, LLVM was a thing before Apple got involved (and I remember the project from them, back when it really was a "low-level virtual machine" as its primary purpose). They hired the guy who ran that project and then essentially took over, and have on occasion run "rough shod" over the community: they built their ARM64 backend in secret for the iPhone 5S and essentially forced Google and others to spend a lot of time building out a quality AArch64 toolchain for that same architecture, which everyone else did as part of a public community. When everyone else was pretty much done Apple finally decided they were ready to open source their backend, and used their steering of the project to stall a lot of things while the work was merged. They also had a chilling effect on some developers in the open ecosystem by saying they were going to open source their work: you can find mailing list posts from people saying they didn't want to waste their time as Apple would be providing theirs, which of course they did much much later than they originally scheduled. FWIW, I don't entirely blame Apple here as evil or anything, as I can appreciate "we are the first to care about this chip and we really did all this work ourselves and it would be really demotivating for someone else to just watch us slave away at it and then still be able to come out with a final product only months after us because we gave it away", but they certainly don't deserve the kind of props you bestow upon them by claiming they "open sourced" that project :/.
mietek 11y ago
> OS X combines a proven UNIX foundation with the easy-to-use Mac interface to bring multicore technology and 48-bit power to the mass market. 48-bit power?…
- nnutter 11y ago
  Oh Johnny Ivy... you strike again.
- thrownaway2424 11y ago
  Perhaps that statement refers to the 48-bit x86-64 virtual memory address space.
  - microcolonel 11y ago
    Maybe it refers to PAE and hasn't been updated since they dropped i686?
- ddacunha 11y ago
  I think they are referring to the address space (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64) > The AMD64 architecture defines a 64-bit virtual address format, of which the low-order 48 bits are used in current implementations.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
microcolonel 11y ago
Webkit was introduced by Apple like OpenOffice was introduced by Apache.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  WebKit was a fork of KHTML originally... but does that mean Apple didn't introduce it?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - microcolonel 11y ago
    I don't know, all I said is that much like Apache OpenOffice is a fork of OpenOffice, WebKit is a fork of KHTML. Not sure that's what most people mean when they say "introduce". Like for example, if I were operating a public water supply: I could say that I introduced the practice of chlorinating water, but obviously the practice has been demonstrated with other water supplies. Have I introduced it, or just adopted it? It would be more accurate to say that Apple adopted KHTML as WebKit, then made major contributions to it.
chrisra 11y ago
Maybe my ignorance is showing, but I've felt like Apple has been the least involved major company of them all when it comes to community stuff. They feel so aloof to me. My impression is Microsoft used to be that way but is changing.
- frame_perfect 11y ago
  Darwin, LLVM, Clang. Also: WebKit, Objective-C. (debatable since the GPL forced their hand)
- coldtea 11y ago
  Well, Safari/Chrome/Android browser/etc is a result of an open source project Apple adopted (KHTML), expanded and developed way beyond the original code. And while Webkit couldn't merge back into KHTML easily, it became the basis for a full blown Open Source engine of its own with tons of adoption. Also LLVM. Apple heavily funded work on it, and it's now used by everybody who's anybody in the industry, from Google to MS. Apple just doesn't care to go into much community development by committee (bazaar) because they have their own (cathedral-like) agenda to follow.
Joof 11y ago
Open source development might be arguable with Darwin (although I think IBM still has earlier major investments), but open source philosophy is certainly not the case.
seba_dos1 11y ago
"Apple, the first major computer company to make Open Source development a key part of its software strategy" Well, I guess that's arguable. "WebKit — the open source rendering engine introduced by Apple" Yeah, "forked from KHTML" wouldn't sound as nice as "introduced by Apple". "OS X combines a proven UNIX foundation with the easy-to-use Mac interface to bring multicore technology and 48-bit power to the mass market." Wait, what?
- themartorana 11y ago
  The other 16 bits are proprietary.
- johncolanduoni 11y ago
  They're likely referring to the fact that x86-64 only uses 48 bit addresses (they're sign extended to fit in a 64 bit register/memory block). As to why they chose to use this in marketing instead of 64 bit, that is a mystery.
- lelandbatey 11y ago
  It's taken till Donald Trump began making headlines using the same "just keep lying till they believe you" that I've been able to put to words why I dislike Apple's marketing copy. It's an optimistic spin at best, frequently downright false.
- geofft 11y ago
  Most (all?) amd64 processors only actually use 48 bits of the 64-bit virtual address space. It's split into 00000000 00000000 - 00007fff ffffffff and ffff8000 00000000 - ffffffff ffffffff, so you can do the usual thing of userspace at the bottom and kernelspace at the top, but it continues to be backwards-compatible if we ever need more than 48 bits of virtual address space. From the Intel programmer's manual: > In 64-bit mode, an address is considered to be in canonical form if address bits 63 through to the most-significant implemented bit by the microarchitecture are set to either all ones or all zeros. > Intel 64 architecture defines a 64-bit linear address. Implementations can support less. The first implementation of IA-32 processors with Intel 64 architecture supports a 48-bit linear address. This means a canonical address must have bits 63 through 48 set to zeros or ones (depending on whether bit 47 is a zero or one). This is a confusingly obscure and pedantic point to make on a marketing page, though. Most kernel hackers on 64-bit platforms barely think about this.
TheAceOfHearts 11y ago
I went to a reactjs meetup at Apple a few days ago. There they showed off Revis, a react library for making charts and visualizations that looked really interesting, with the selling point being that it enables you to create graphs declaratively. They said they had plans of open sourcing it, although they didn't give a due date. Another thing they indirectly showed off was a reactjs playground which was very similar to swift playgrounds. I say indirectly, because the person that was presenting was showing revis using it. There's some public playground components that are around (e.g. component-playground [0]), but it's the type of thing where I think there's still room to experiment and innovate. Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle video [1] comes to mind. I don't know how big the web presence at Apple has been in the last few years, but I'm hopeful that this is a sign that it's growing and that it'll push more resources to the Safari team so it'll keep up better with other browser vendors. Although they have a history of open source, I don't think they've open sourced much JavaScript? From googling around all I could find was that they were one of the biggest contributors to SproutCore [2], which looks fairly dated by today's standards. [0] http://projects.formidablelabs.com/component-playground/ http://projects.formidablelabs.com/component-playground/ [1] https://vimeo.com/36579366 https://vimeo.com/36579366 [2] http://sproutcore.com/ http://sproutcore.com/
- microcolonel 11y ago
  I work at a web shop, and we're convinced that Apple is deliberately failing to make improvements to Safari (specifically on iOS). The theory is that they are conspiring to lock in people who depend on the platform, but also prevent them from delivering anything approaching the quality of native apps on iOS. Though usually I try to avoid thinking of conspiracy; the more I work with their platform, the more reasonable this theory sounds. I have been solicited to work on WebKit for Apple, but given how isolated Apple employees seem from the world, I don't think I could do it. I'm not willing to sign away my personality or existence for cash-on-hand. I suspect they're having trouble hiring people to work on WebKit, because although I think I'm a pretty good developer, I'm not the top of the barrel when it comes to WebKit developer candidates.
  - Gorbzel 11y ago
mrdrozdov 11y ago
Waiting for Apple's TensorFlow alternative.
mrdrozdov 11y ago
This is more impressive than Goldman Sachs's open sourcing effort. https://github.com/goldmansachs https://github.com/goldmansachs
msoad 11y ago
I recently interviewed at Apple. They told me you can not contribute to open source even on your own time if you get hired! They said we use "tons of open source software" but we don't contribute back because it's going to "impact company's picture".
- chrisra 11y ago
  Why would contributing make them look bad? Are they trying to avoid being like everyone else? I guess that's an okay plan unless everyone else is being nice to each other.
  - msoad 11y ago
    Their argument is they are not interested in little contributions. I guess they want a big marketing buzz for everything they do.
- scarface74 11y ago
  So which should I believe, a random poster on Hacker News that says that Apple forbids employees to contribute to open source, or the fact that Apple has many published open source projects?
  - msoad 11y ago
    I guess it depends on the team. Apple unlike Google hires for a specific team. Team that I was talking with would not allow open source contributions. This is true for most of Apple. I have a lot of friends working in Apple. They sent project Titan people to a battery conference with a fake company name which they actually registered and made people believe it's a real company. It has a Crunchbase profile and all that. They published zero papers from their battery research. That's the Apple you should know.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
sajal83 11y ago
> Apple, the first major computer company to make Open Source development a key part of its software strategy Sounds true assuming Apple thinks of itself as "the only major computer company"
ajdlinux 11y ago
Update: they've changed the wording on https://developer.apple.com/opensource/ https://developer.apple.com/opensource/ "Open source software is at the heart of Apple platforms and developer tools, and Apple continues to contribute and release significant quantities of open source code."

50 points by mmastrac 11y ago

> Apple, the first major computer company to make Open Source development a key part of its software strategy, continues to use and release significant quantities of open source software. "first major computer company" Interesting phrasing.

frame_perfect 11y ago
Probably to differentiate themselves from pure software companies like Mozilla, in which case that claim would almost certainly be false.
cryptoz 11y ago
Yes, especially since they specifically removed computer from their company name almost 10 years ago.
- mcphage 11y ago
  They never stopped being a computer company, though. The word "Computer" doesn't have to be in your name to qualify.

latenightcoding 11y ago

"Apple, the first major computer company to make Open Source development a key part of its software strategy" Wait what? Am I missing something here

peterhadlaw 11y ago
You're not alone in your confusion.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
shykes 11y ago
I guess they're referring to projects like Darwin (released in 2000) and Webkit (open-sourced in 2005). They also invested heavily in LLVM starting in 2005. Those are all major strategic investments into open-source, at a time where companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon were not making any comparable investments that I can think of. For example, in 2005 Android was freshly acquired by Google, Chrome was still 3 years away. Go was introduced in 2009. One exception I can think of is IBM which invested heavily in Linux around the same time Apple was open-sourcing Darwin. Overall, their claim is arguable but certainly not without merit. EDIT: remember when IBM covered the streets of San Francisco in Linux graffiti, and were threatened with a huge fine when the paint didn't wash off as planned? http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2001-04-25-ibm-linux-graffiti.htm http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2001-04-25-ibm-linu...
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  There's also Sun, who open-sourced StarOffice in 2000.
  - nnutter 11y ago
    That's where the ambiguity of "major computer company" comes in. Probably the same with IBM. They are probably implying "major personal computer company" but couldn't say "major PC company" because PC = Windows.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
      - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
        > Apple is the only one keeping the PC misnomer alive today (and should really cut it out; see: misnomer). Not really. Apple's usage of the word "PC" reflects popular usage.
        deleted 11y ago
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
Thinking about it a bit, this claim would probably be true if only they added "one of" before "the first".

peterhadlaw 11y ago

Do they seriously think they can pull the marketing lingo shroud over actual developers?

frame_perfect 11y ago
> Apple, the first major computer company to make Open Source development a key part of its software strategy It's actually pretty factual. They open sourced Darwin/WebKit/LLVM/Clang, and legitimized BSD and Unix as a consumer product via OS X... in 2001/2005/2005. The only "big" company that I can think of that made a move that big was Mozilla, which arguably doesn't even compare to a company as huge as Apple. Plus Mozilla open sourced itself out of pure desparation from pressure via Internet Explorer (which, I might remind you, was one of the worst proprietary pieces of shit to scorch this earth, by none other than Microsoft). It's only been a recent thing where companies like Google/Microsoft have been embracing open source. Companies like Gitlab/Docker weren't even concievable back then.
- seba_dos1 11y ago
  Well, they couldn't not open source WebKit, as at its core lies a fork of LGPL licensed KHTML and KJS (that's why WebCore and JavaScriptCore are LGPL while the rest of WebKit is BSD)
  - frame_perfect 11y ago
    Oh, that's news to me. I guess that makes their claim a bit weaker.
    - saurik 11y ago
      FWIW, LLVM was a thing before Apple got involved (and I remember the project from them, back when it really was a "low-level virtual machine" as its primary purpose). They hired the guy who ran that project and then essentially took over, and have on occasion run "rough shod" over the community: they built their ARM64 backend in secret for the iPhone 5S and essentially forced Google and others to spend a lot of time building out a quality AArch64 toolchain for that same architecture, which everyone else did as part of a public community. When everyone else was pretty much done Apple finally decided they were ready to open source their backend, and used their steering of the project to stall a lot of things while the work was merged. They also had a chilling effect on some developers in the open ecosystem by saying they were going to open source their work: you can find mailing list posts from people saying they didn't want to waste their time as Apple would be providing theirs, which of course they did much much later than they originally scheduled. FWIW, I don't entirely blame Apple here as evil or anything, as I can appreciate "we are the first to care about this chip and we really did all this work ourselves and it would be really demotivating for someone else to just watch us slave away at it and then still be able to come out with a final product only months after us because we gave it away", but they certainly don't deserve the kind of props you bestow upon them by claiming they "open sourced" that project :/.

mietek 11y ago

> OS X combines a proven UNIX foundation with the easy-to-use Mac interface to bring multicore technology and 48-bit power to the mass market. 48-bit power?…

nnutter 11y ago
Oh Johnny Ivy... you strike again.
thrownaway2424 11y ago
Perhaps that statement refers to the 48-bit x86-64 virtual memory address space.
- microcolonel 11y ago
  Maybe it refers to PAE and hasn't been updated since they dropped i686?
ddacunha 11y ago
I think they are referring to the address space (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64) > The AMD64 architecture defines a 64-bit virtual address format, of which the low-order 48 bits are used in current implementations.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

microcolonel 11y ago

Webkit was introduced by Apple like OpenOffice was introduced by Apache.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
WebKit was a fork of KHTML originally... but does that mean Apple didn't introduce it?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- microcolonel 11y ago
  I don't know, all I said is that much like Apache OpenOffice is a fork of OpenOffice, WebKit is a fork of KHTML. Not sure that's what most people mean when they say "introduce". Like for example, if I were operating a public water supply: I could say that I introduced the practice of chlorinating water, but obviously the practice has been demonstrated with other water supplies. Have I introduced it, or just adopted it? It would be more accurate to say that Apple adopted KHTML as WebKit, then made major contributions to it.

chrisra 11y ago

Maybe my ignorance is showing, but I've felt like Apple has been the least involved major company of them all when it comes to community stuff. They feel so aloof to me. My impression is Microsoft used to be that way but is changing.

frame_perfect 11y ago
Darwin, LLVM, Clang. Also: WebKit, Objective-C. (debatable since the GPL forced their hand)
coldtea 11y ago
Well, Safari/Chrome/Android browser/etc is a result of an open source project Apple adopted (KHTML), expanded and developed way beyond the original code. And while Webkit couldn't merge back into KHTML easily, it became the basis for a full blown Open Source engine of its own with tons of adoption. Also LLVM. Apple heavily funded work on it, and it's now used by everybody who's anybody in the industry, from Google to MS. Apple just doesn't care to go into much community development by committee (bazaar) because they have their own (cathedral-like) agenda to follow.

Joof 11y ago

Open source development might be arguable with Darwin (although I think IBM still has earlier major investments), but open source philosophy is certainly not the case.

seba_dos1 11y ago

"Apple, the first major computer company to make Open Source development a key part of its software strategy" Well, I guess that's arguable. "WebKit — the open source rendering engine introduced by Apple" Yeah, "forked from KHTML" wouldn't sound as nice as "introduced by Apple". "OS X combines a proven UNIX foundation with the easy-to-use Mac interface to bring multicore technology and 48-bit power to the mass market." Wait, what?

themartorana 11y ago
The other 16 bits are proprietary.
johncolanduoni 11y ago
They're likely referring to the fact that x86-64 only uses 48 bit addresses (they're sign extended to fit in a 64 bit register/memory block). As to why they chose to use this in marketing instead of 64 bit, that is a mystery.
lelandbatey 11y ago
It's taken till Donald Trump began making headlines using the same "just keep lying till they believe you" that I've been able to put to words why I dislike Apple's marketing copy. It's an optimistic spin at best, frequently downright false.
geofft 11y ago
Most (all?) amd64 processors only actually use 48 bits of the 64-bit virtual address space. It's split into 00000000 00000000 - 00007fff ffffffff and ffff8000 00000000 - ffffffff ffffffff, so you can do the usual thing of userspace at the bottom and kernelspace at the top, but it continues to be backwards-compatible if we ever need more than 48 bits of virtual address space. From the Intel programmer's manual: > In 64-bit mode, an address is considered to be in canonical form if address bits 63 through to the most-significant implemented bit by the microarchitecture are set to either all ones or all zeros. > Intel 64 architecture defines a 64-bit linear address. Implementations can support less. The first implementation of IA-32 processors with Intel 64 architecture supports a 48-bit linear address. This means a canonical address must have bits 63 through 48 set to zeros or ones (depending on whether bit 47 is a zero or one). This is a confusingly obscure and pedantic point to make on a marketing page, though. Most kernel hackers on 64-bit platforms barely think about this.

TheAceOfHearts 11y ago

I went to a reactjs meetup at Apple a few days ago. There they showed off Revis, a react library for making charts and visualizations that looked really interesting, with the selling point being that it enables you to create graphs declaratively. They said they had plans of open sourcing it, although they didn't give a due date. Another thing they indirectly showed off was a reactjs playground which was very similar to swift playgrounds. I say indirectly, because the person that was presenting was showing revis using it. There's some public playground components that are around (e.g. component-playground [0]), but it's the type of thing where I think there's still room to experiment and innovate. Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle video [1] comes to mind. I don't know how big the web presence at Apple has been in the last few years, but I'm hopeful that this is a sign that it's growing and that it'll push more resources to the Safari team so it'll keep up better with other browser vendors. Although they have a history of open source, I don't think they've open sourced much JavaScript? From googling around all I could find was that they were one of the biggest contributors to SproutCore [2], which looks fairly dated by today's standards. [0] http://projects.formidablelabs.com/component-playground/ http://projects.formidablelabs.com/component-playground/ [1] https://vimeo.com/36579366 https://vimeo.com/36579366 [2] http://sproutcore.com/ http://sproutcore.com/

microcolonel 11y ago
I work at a web shop, and we're convinced that Apple is deliberately failing to make improvements to Safari (specifically on iOS). The theory is that they are conspiring to lock in people who depend on the platform, but also prevent them from delivering anything approaching the quality of native apps on iOS. Though usually I try to avoid thinking of conspiracy; the more I work with their platform, the more reasonable this theory sounds. I have been solicited to work on WebKit for Apple, but given how isolated Apple employees seem from the world, I don't think I could do it. I'm not willing to sign away my personality or existence for cash-on-hand. I suspect they're having trouble hiring people to work on WebKit, because although I think I'm a pretty good developer, I'm not the top of the barrel when it comes to WebKit developer candidates.
- Gorbzel 11y ago

mrdrozdov 11y ago

Waiting for Apple's TensorFlow alternative.

mrdrozdov 11y ago

This is more impressive than Goldman Sachs's open sourcing effort. https://github.com/goldmansachs https://github.com/goldmansachs

msoad 11y ago

I recently interviewed at Apple. They told me you can not contribute to open source even on your own time if you get hired! They said we use "tons of open source software" but we don't contribute back because it's going to "impact company's picture".

chrisra 11y ago
Why would contributing make them look bad? Are they trying to avoid being like everyone else? I guess that's an okay plan unless everyone else is being nice to each other.
- msoad 11y ago
  Their argument is they are not interested in little contributions. I guess they want a big marketing buzz for everything they do.
scarface74 11y ago
So which should I believe, a random poster on Hacker News that says that Apple forbids employees to contribute to open source, or the fact that Apple has many published open source projects?
- msoad 11y ago
  I guess it depends on the team. Apple unlike Google hires for a specific team. Team that I was talking with would not allow open source contributions. This is true for most of Apple. I have a lot of friends working in Apple. They sent project Titan people to a battery conference with a fake company name which they actually registered and made people believe it's a real company. It has a Crunchbase profile and all that. They published zero papers from their battery research. That's the Apple you should know.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

sajal83 11y ago

> Apple, the first major computer company to make Open Source development a key part of its software strategy Sounds true assuming Apple thinks of itself as "the only major computer company"

ajdlinux 11y ago

Update: they've changed the wording on https://developer.apple.com/opensource/ https://developer.apple.com/opensource/ "Open source software is at the heart of Apple platforms and developer tools, and Apple continues to contribute and release significant quantities of open source code."