10 ms·

Apple is doubling down on open source

109 points by happy-go-lucky 10y ago

kmf 10y ago
This is a Google AMP page, so it displays pretty strangely on desktop browsers (full-width paragraphs) -- here's the normal URL. http://www.techrepublic.com/article/apple-is-doubling-down-on-open-source/ http://www.techrepublic.com/article/apple-is-doubling-down-o...
- userbinator 10y ago
  I actually prefer the AMP version even on a non-mobile browser. It does load noticeably faster.
  - cryptarch 10y ago
    But it sends requests to Google servers, always. It's cool that its lightweight, but not like this. I flagged the post because it downloads a file of obscure, unstandardized format designed to send tracking information to Google. It should at least have an [AMP] tag like other "non-HTML file format" posts do. Edit: I'm sorry if my post comes across as needlessly hostile, any hostility is only directed at the AMP situation. AMP seems very much deliberately designed as an attractive way to get webdesigners to let Google to track more consumers. What the hell is with people excusing the fact that each and every AMP page makes requests to Google servers, as defined by the "standard"?
    - Veratyr 10y ago
      Most sites already use countless tracking/social integrations so I don't consider this particularly harmful. At least the AMP link limits my exposure to Google hosted static files instead of the usual (according to uBlock on the "normal" link) Facebook, Twitter, Google Analytics, Optimizely, CNET, Adobe, Taboola, CBS, Tealium, Soasta, Netseer and ShareThrough.
      - cryptarch 10y ago
        In the case of most sites I can block all that crap. If it's an AMP page, I can't just block the AMP script because it does not gracefully degrade. It's having a broken page until HyperGoogleTextEngine loads.
    - viraptor 10y ago
      I think it's up to the author to decide where they host. Just curious: Would you complain the same way if it was google sites based, but using author's domain? Why/why not? Also, I don't think every page makes requests to google. All the ones I see go to a CDN (one designed for AMP, sure). So standard caching applies. But again, author's choice - are other CDNs any better?
      - cryptarch 10y ago
        This is an attempt to standardize the tracking of users hosted on every site not hosted by Google. I do think its up to the author to decide where they host and this MUST include the page's dependencies! I don't mean they can't have 3rd party dependencies, but no specific 3rd party should be required, especially if they don't support graceful degradation in the case where the 3rd party is unreachable. And on the CDN, it's run by Google, just read the whois data: Registrant Organization: Google Inc.
    - magicalist 10y ago
      > because it downloads a file of obscure, unstandardized format that would be HTML. The fact that it loads from Google's CDN (though it doesn't seem to...maybe the URL was changed?) is a matter of the URL, not the page format.
      - cryptarch 10y ago
        "An AMP page MUST contain a <script async src="https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script> https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script> tag inside their head tag." AMP requires a script loaded from one particular URL and is designed so that it's incompatible with browsers that don't support Javascript, i.e. <img> tags are replaced by <amp-img> and thus images won't work without the AMP script. It might formally be a subset of HTML but it is one that excludes non-JS-supporting user agents by means of custom tags which are interpreted by "the AMP engine" script.
grawlinson 10y ago
Is Apple still reducing dependencies on GPL code? http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/ http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/
- fapjacks 10y ago
  Thanks for posting. This is what I was coming here to say, also.
- grzm 10y ago
  You might find the recent HN discussion on this topic useful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12894721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12894721 From what I gather (welcome to correction, as I haven't looked at this in depth), there are two main things going on here: - replacing GPL code with BSD code - staying with earlier versions of GPL code rather than update to GPLv3 versions
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- abritinthebay 10y ago
  Might want to be honest: not GPL, just GPLv3 Can't really blame them either. This was the exact result that most (outside of the GPL bubble) predicted when v3 was released.
  - mwfunk 10y ago
    Yeah, this should not be a surprise to anyone who's been paying attention for the last 10 years. GPLv3 was incredibly divisive, both inside and outside the open source community. Admittedly, for some people this may have been part of its intent- to draw more lines in the sand, to force out those that the FSF deems as having insufficient ideological purity. The FSF doesn't shy away from calling out its enemies- to my eyes, over the decades it has been far more concerned with condemning what it perceives as being evil, rather than promotion of what it perceives as being good.
blinkingled 10y ago
They could start with making sure atleast major Linux distros work fine on Apple desktop and laptop hardware. It would most likely be hw specific quirks and drivers given most of the hardware they use is standard and already supported by Linux. (With Intel building in their Wi-Fi chips even Broadcom wireless stuff won't be an issue.)
- feld 10y ago
  This has nothing to do with their desire to use open source. In fact, it's blatantly against their goals.
  - blinkingled 10y ago
    Well most of Apple's servers and services run on Linux and there is clearly a demand for Linux laptops from developers. If Apple has to be friendly with OSS supporting Linux will take them a long way - good for developers including Apple's own services/infrastructure folk, broadens up the Workstation market again for Apple etc. Doubling down on Open Source is not really doubling down if you just continue to dump code on github.
    - feld 10y ago
      I think your definition of open source is much different than mine. Requiring cooperation or interaction with the community is very GNU / GPL mindset, not BSD. Many of us are perfectly OK with code drops.
- drivingmenuts 10y ago
  Why is it Apple's responsibility to ensure Linux runs on it's hardware? Shouldn't the major responsibility fall on Linux user's shoulders?
  - blinkingled 10y ago
    Because only Apple knows best about their hardware and there's a market for that. Apple also support Windows via Boot Camp - without that Windows would not be any more functional than say Ubuntu. It isn't like we are talking about full Linux port to their hardware - Apple's hardware deviates from standards for example - Linux people don't really have a way of knowing that. Only Apple could provide the glue required to enable those type of things.
forgettableuser 10y ago
The only thing that has doubled down here is the marketing of the fact they are contributing to open source. They have both been large users and contributors to open source since the switch to OS X (NeXT acquisition). Just off the top of my head, projects they have had a large hand in: WebKit & JavaScriptCore, Objective-C, CUPS, LLVM, Clang, Bonjour/Zeroconf, Darwin, launchd, libdispatch, CoreFoundation, dtrace. And more recently Apple Lossless Encoder, LZFSE compression, and of course Swift. And this is only a tiny fraction of what they are users of.
- DashRattlesnake 10y ago
  Didn't they also take quite a lot from FreeBSD when building OS X?
  - shmerl 10y ago
    Question is, how much did they give back to it?
    - laxd 10y ago
      LLVM/Clang and Grand Central Dispatch comes to mind. The MAC framwork is also a shared effort, but I don't know who is doing the heavy lifting. It's something.
    - forgettableuser 10y ago
      All the ones I listed are the ones where they are significant contributors. The much larger set of where they are mostly users, like the BSD userland tools, curl, Python, Perl, Tcl, Ruby, and so forth, I omitted. There are just too many.
  - xenadu02 10y ago
    NeXTSTEP was based on Mach/BSD from the early days so it isn't recent.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
skissane 10y ago
If they are "doubling down on open source", maybe they could get open source Darwin working again? From what I've heard, while they still release some of the source code, it is no longer in a form in which it can easily be compiled into a usable operating system – e.g. some of the components they release source for can't even be built because they rely on unreleased Apple private header files – basically, things have gone backwards on this front compared to earlier versions of OS X. (From what I've heard, I don't know how true it is, Apple became less open with Darwin, around the time of the PPC-Intel transition, out of fear it was making life easier for people trying to use OS X on non-Apple hardware easier.)
- eddieh 10y ago
  Hmm, there is still at least one Darwin distribution. Darwin build is still available https://github.com/macosforge/darwinbuild https://github.com/macosforge/darwinbuild I'm not sure if the problem is Apple or a lack of interest and community. I'd definitely be up to trying to build it sometime in the future. I'm a little busy at the moment. I'd expect it to take a few days at least based on my experience with Linux from scratch.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >If they are "doubling down on open source", maybe they could get open source Darwin working again? Why? Without the UI and OS X GUI programs it's not something many would care to run as opposed to Linux or FreeBSD, and most haven't.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - skissane 10y ago
    I can think of one use. Suppose I am developing something non-GUI (e.g. a database, an application server, a compiler or interpreter for some programming language, etc.) While macOS is unlikely to be the production deployment platform, getting it running on macOS will make some developers happier (yes, they can always use a VM or Docker to run the Linux version, but running a native macOS version has its advantages.) So, now I have a non-GUI app for (among other platforms) macOS, I want a build machine for compilation and automated tests. Ideally just a VM somewhere (maybe even in the cloud). To legally run macOS in such a way, it needs to run on Apple hardware, which adds expense and complexity. However, I could run a Darwin VM legally on any hardware. Now of course, Darwin isn't quite macOS, but for a non-GUI app it might be close enough (depending on exactly which APIs it uses and whether those APIs fall into the open source Darwin subset). Is that a particularly common use case? Probably not. But there probably are multiple open source projects and maybe even some proprietary software packages for which that use case would exist.
franciscop 10y ago
Remove google-amp/ from the article's url for a better experience
shmerl 10y ago
Let them start supporting free codecs and stop patent aggression, as well as allow FOSS (including other browsers) in their application store. Then we'll see how much they are friends of open source or not. Oh, and you can add to that support for Vulkan on their platforms.
- icebraining 10y ago
  They allow FOSS in their iOS store, just not copyleft licenses.
  - shmerl 10y ago
    > just not copyleft licenses. That's already a problem and discriminates against a major part of FOSS projects.
    - stephenr 10y ago
      Isn't the problem that gpl(3?) is incompatible with the App Store rules? Does apple actually forbid certain licences, or is this just another case of GPL fans assuming everyone else has to adapt to them?
      - shmerl 10y ago
        GPLv3 protects the user against DRM. And if store forbids such licenses, then the store isn't FOSS friendly.
        stephenr 10y ago
        What the gpl claims to do for Users or developers is irrelevant. The question is why a developer can't publish gpl3 code to the App Store? Is it because of an apple rule or is it because gpl3 says the developer can't do that?
        shmerl 10y ago
steele 10y ago
"Apple has been getting religion on open source, but more than code the industry needs its voice." what
- olliej 10y ago
  wut :D (and i know this is a useless comment - my immediate response to the sentence was that :D )
datashovel 10y ago
I think a lot of this is a result of probably not being able to recruit top talent as easily as companies who have "opened up". 1) Many people at top of the talent pool know that the internet makes it possible for them to not only make huge differences at companies they work for, but they can also (if allowed) make enormous differences to the entire world. If they don't have to compromise their free time in order to do that, it's an enormous benefit. 2) The people a company like Apple wants to hire are interviewing the company just as thoroughly as they are interviewing the candidate. If the candidate has not already seen a large portfolio of their work there's no real guarantee (even if you're Apple) that you can convince them that they'll be working on amazing teams with amazing engineers. 3) When you're at the top of the talent pool your goals and incentive structure are almost certainly not tied directly to compensation. Of course you want to be compensated fairly, but when it comes down to it you're passionate about what you do, and as a consequence you've become great at what you do. You generally don't become the best at something because you believe it will compensate you better.
SCdF 10y ago
Show me.
jjirsa 10y ago
ctrl-f, "cassandra", 0 of 0... what's context?

109 points by happy-go-lucky 10y ago

kmf 10y ago

This is a Google AMP page, so it displays pretty strangely on desktop browsers (full-width paragraphs) -- here's the normal URL. http://www.techrepublic.com/article/apple-is-doubling-down-on-open-source/ http://www.techrepublic.com/article/apple-is-doubling-down-o...

userbinator 10y ago
I actually prefer the AMP version even on a non-mobile browser. It does load noticeably faster.
- cryptarch 10y ago
  But it sends requests to Google servers, always. It's cool that its lightweight, but not like this. I flagged the post because it downloads a file of obscure, unstandardized format designed to send tracking information to Google. It should at least have an [AMP] tag like other "non-HTML file format" posts do. Edit: I'm sorry if my post comes across as needlessly hostile, any hostility is only directed at the AMP situation. AMP seems very much deliberately designed as an attractive way to get webdesigners to let Google to track more consumers. What the hell is with people excusing the fact that each and every AMP page makes requests to Google servers, as defined by the "standard"?
  - Veratyr 10y ago
    Most sites already use countless tracking/social integrations so I don't consider this particularly harmful. At least the AMP link limits my exposure to Google hosted static files instead of the usual (according to uBlock on the "normal" link) Facebook, Twitter, Google Analytics, Optimizely, CNET, Adobe, Taboola, CBS, Tealium, Soasta, Netseer and ShareThrough.
    - cryptarch 10y ago
      In the case of most sites I can block all that crap. If it's an AMP page, I can't just block the AMP script because it does not gracefully degrade. It's having a broken page until HyperGoogleTextEngine loads.
  - viraptor 10y ago
    I think it's up to the author to decide where they host. Just curious: Would you complain the same way if it was google sites based, but using author's domain? Why/why not? Also, I don't think every page makes requests to google. All the ones I see go to a CDN (one designed for AMP, sure). So standard caching applies. But again, author's choice - are other CDNs any better?
    - cryptarch 10y ago
      This is an attempt to standardize the tracking of users hosted on every site not hosted by Google. I do think its up to the author to decide where they host and this MUST include the page's dependencies! I don't mean they can't have 3rd party dependencies, but no specific 3rd party should be required, especially if they don't support graceful degradation in the case where the 3rd party is unreachable. And on the CDN, it's run by Google, just read the whois data: Registrant Organization: Google Inc.
  - magicalist 10y ago
    > because it downloads a file of obscure, unstandardized format that would be HTML. The fact that it loads from Google's CDN (though it doesn't seem to...maybe the URL was changed?) is a matter of the URL, not the page format.
    - cryptarch 10y ago
      "An AMP page MUST contain a <script async src="https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script> https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script> tag inside their head tag." AMP requires a script loaded from one particular URL and is designed so that it's incompatible with browsers that don't support Javascript, i.e. <img> tags are replaced by <amp-img> and thus images won't work without the AMP script. It might formally be a subset of HTML but it is one that excludes non-JS-supporting user agents by means of custom tags which are interpreted by "the AMP engine" script.

grawlinson 10y ago

Is Apple still reducing dependencies on GPL code? http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/ http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/

fapjacks 10y ago
Thanks for posting. This is what I was coming here to say, also.
grzm 10y ago
You might find the recent HN discussion on this topic useful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12894721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12894721 From what I gather (welcome to correction, as I haven't looked at this in depth), there are two main things going on here: - replacing GPL code with BSD code - staying with earlier versions of GPL code rather than update to GPLv3 versions
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
abritinthebay 10y ago
Might want to be honest: not GPL, just GPLv3 Can't really blame them either. This was the exact result that most (outside of the GPL bubble) predicted when v3 was released.
- mwfunk 10y ago
  Yeah, this should not be a surprise to anyone who's been paying attention for the last 10 years. GPLv3 was incredibly divisive, both inside and outside the open source community. Admittedly, for some people this may have been part of its intent- to draw more lines in the sand, to force out those that the FSF deems as having insufficient ideological purity. The FSF doesn't shy away from calling out its enemies- to my eyes, over the decades it has been far more concerned with condemning what it perceives as being evil, rather than promotion of what it perceives as being good.

blinkingled 10y ago

They could start with making sure atleast major Linux distros work fine on Apple desktop and laptop hardware. It would most likely be hw specific quirks and drivers given most of the hardware they use is standard and already supported by Linux. (With Intel building in their Wi-Fi chips even Broadcom wireless stuff won't be an issue.)

feld 10y ago
This has nothing to do with their desire to use open source. In fact, it's blatantly against their goals.
- blinkingled 10y ago
  Well most of Apple's servers and services run on Linux and there is clearly a demand for Linux laptops from developers. If Apple has to be friendly with OSS supporting Linux will take them a long way - good for developers including Apple's own services/infrastructure folk, broadens up the Workstation market again for Apple etc. Doubling down on Open Source is not really doubling down if you just continue to dump code on github.
  - feld 10y ago
    I think your definition of open source is much different than mine. Requiring cooperation or interaction with the community is very GNU / GPL mindset, not BSD. Many of us are perfectly OK with code drops.
drivingmenuts 10y ago
Why is it Apple's responsibility to ensure Linux runs on it's hardware? Shouldn't the major responsibility fall on Linux user's shoulders?
- blinkingled 10y ago
  Because only Apple knows best about their hardware and there's a market for that. Apple also support Windows via Boot Camp - without that Windows would not be any more functional than say Ubuntu. It isn't like we are talking about full Linux port to their hardware - Apple's hardware deviates from standards for example - Linux people don't really have a way of knowing that. Only Apple could provide the glue required to enable those type of things.

forgettableuser 10y ago

The only thing that has doubled down here is the marketing of the fact they are contributing to open source. They have both been large users and contributors to open source since the switch to OS X (NeXT acquisition). Just off the top of my head, projects they have had a large hand in: WebKit & JavaScriptCore, Objective-C, CUPS, LLVM, Clang, Bonjour/Zeroconf, Darwin, launchd, libdispatch, CoreFoundation, dtrace. And more recently Apple Lossless Encoder, LZFSE compression, and of course Swift. And this is only a tiny fraction of what they are users of.

DashRattlesnake 10y ago
Didn't they also take quite a lot from FreeBSD when building OS X?
- shmerl 10y ago
  Question is, how much did they give back to it?
  - laxd 10y ago
    LLVM/Clang and Grand Central Dispatch comes to mind. The MAC framwork is also a shared effort, but I don't know who is doing the heavy lifting. It's something.
  - forgettableuser 10y ago
    All the ones I listed are the ones where they are significant contributors. The much larger set of where they are mostly users, like the BSD userland tools, curl, Python, Perl, Tcl, Ruby, and so forth, I omitted. There are just too many.
- xenadu02 10y ago
  NeXTSTEP was based on Mach/BSD from the early days so it isn't recent.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago

skissane 10y ago

If they are "doubling down on open source", maybe they could get open source Darwin working again? From what I've heard, while they still release some of the source code, it is no longer in a form in which it can easily be compiled into a usable operating system – e.g. some of the components they release source for can't even be built because they rely on unreleased Apple private header files – basically, things have gone backwards on this front compared to earlier versions of OS X. (From what I've heard, I don't know how true it is, Apple became less open with Darwin, around the time of the PPC-Intel transition, out of fear it was making life easier for people trying to use OS X on non-Apple hardware easier.)

eddieh 10y ago
Hmm, there is still at least one Darwin distribution. Darwin build is still available https://github.com/macosforge/darwinbuild https://github.com/macosforge/darwinbuild I'm not sure if the problem is Apple or a lack of interest and community. I'd definitely be up to trying to build it sometime in the future. I'm a little busy at the moment. I'd expect it to take a few days at least based on my experience with Linux from scratch.
coldtea 10y ago
>If they are "doubling down on open source", maybe they could get open source Darwin working again? Why? Without the UI and OS X GUI programs it's not something many would care to run as opposed to Linux or FreeBSD, and most haven't.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- skissane 10y ago
  I can think of one use. Suppose I am developing something non-GUI (e.g. a database, an application server, a compiler or interpreter for some programming language, etc.) While macOS is unlikely to be the production deployment platform, getting it running on macOS will make some developers happier (yes, they can always use a VM or Docker to run the Linux version, but running a native macOS version has its advantages.) So, now I have a non-GUI app for (among other platforms) macOS, I want a build machine for compilation and automated tests. Ideally just a VM somewhere (maybe even in the cloud). To legally run macOS in such a way, it needs to run on Apple hardware, which adds expense and complexity. However, I could run a Darwin VM legally on any hardware. Now of course, Darwin isn't quite macOS, but for a non-GUI app it might be close enough (depending on exactly which APIs it uses and whether those APIs fall into the open source Darwin subset). Is that a particularly common use case? Probably not. But there probably are multiple open source projects and maybe even some proprietary software packages for which that use case would exist.

franciscop 10y ago

Remove google-amp/ from the article's url for a better experience

shmerl 10y ago

Let them start supporting free codecs and stop patent aggression, as well as allow FOSS (including other browsers) in their application store. Then we'll see how much they are friends of open source or not. Oh, and you can add to that support for Vulkan on their platforms.

icebraining 10y ago
They allow FOSS in their iOS store, just not copyleft licenses.
- shmerl 10y ago
  > just not copyleft licenses. That's already a problem and discriminates against a major part of FOSS projects.
  - stephenr 10y ago
    Isn't the problem that gpl(3?) is incompatible with the App Store rules? Does apple actually forbid certain licences, or is this just another case of GPL fans assuming everyone else has to adapt to them?
    - shmerl 10y ago
      GPLv3 protects the user against DRM. And if store forbids such licenses, then the store isn't FOSS friendly.
      - stephenr 10y ago
        What the gpl claims to do for Users or developers is irrelevant. The question is why a developer can't publish gpl3 code to the App Store? Is it because of an apple rule or is it because gpl3 says the developer can't do that?
        shmerl 10y ago

steele 10y ago

"Apple has been getting religion on open source, but more than code the industry needs its voice." what

olliej 10y ago
wut :D (and i know this is a useless comment - my immediate response to the sentence was that :D )

datashovel 10y ago

I think a lot of this is a result of probably not being able to recruit top talent as easily as companies who have "opened up". 1) Many people at top of the talent pool know that the internet makes it possible for them to not only make huge differences at companies they work for, but they can also (if allowed) make enormous differences to the entire world. If they don't have to compromise their free time in order to do that, it's an enormous benefit. 2) The people a company like Apple wants to hire are interviewing the company just as thoroughly as they are interviewing the candidate. If the candidate has not already seen a large portfolio of their work there's no real guarantee (even if you're Apple) that you can convince them that they'll be working on amazing teams with amazing engineers. 3) When you're at the top of the talent pool your goals and incentive structure are almost certainly not tied directly to compensation. Of course you want to be compensated fairly, but when it comes down to it you're passionate about what you do, and as a consequence you've become great at what you do. You generally don't become the best at something because you believe it will compensate you better.

SCdF 10y ago

Show me.

jjirsa 10y ago

ctrl-f, "cassandra", 0 of 0... what's context?