11 ms·

Very, very cool exercise. For anyone who hasn't been following APFS much though, worth knowing that Apple has stated in their AFPS FAQ [1] that they do intend t

by xoa 10y ago

Very, very cool exercise. For anyone who hasn't been following APFS much though, worth knowing that Apple has stated in their AFPS FAQ [1] that they do intend to directly "document and publish the APFS volume format specification" themselves later this year. Presumably (as they do with other stuff they develop) they want to be able to more easily make breaking changes during the shakedown period of initial public deployment (first on iOS right now, later on Macs, though maybe not a default option until 10.13 this Summer/Fall). That'd be the most helpful in getting read/write into FUSE and other platforms should anyone choose to do so. --- 1. https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/FileManagement/Conceptual/APFS_Guide/FAQ/FAQ.html https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Fi...

avar 10y ago
They said the same about Facetime and iMessages but never opened or documented those, so let's see when and if it actually happens. Apple has a history of false promises when it comes to opening and documenting their protocols & data formats. Edit: I misrecalled that iMessage was announced as something they were opening.
- scarface74 10y ago
  They never promised to open up iMessage. The story behind FaceTime is a little bit more complicated. Steve Jobs said he would open it up without asking the engineers and lawyers who were just as surprised as anyone else about his announcement. As far as Apple not open sourcing anything. https://opensource.apple.com https://opensource.apple.com They also published the full git commit history of Swift from the initial commit.
  - erik 10y ago
    Specifically, there were major lawsuits over patent infringement immediately after Facetime launched.
    - twoodfin 10y ago
      And those lawsuits forced Apple to re-engineer how Facetime worked, from peer-to-peer direct connections to a more Apple-intermediated model[1]. At that point, creating an open standard is less interesting, since you can only communicate with folks using the same "relay server" network. [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/report-after-patent-loss-apple-tweaks-facetime-and-logs-500000-complaints/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/report-after-pat...
  - tyingq 10y ago
    Open sourcing Swift, though, probably benefits Apple more than it does the community. Sans the Apple UI, it doesn't create some opportunity to lose a sale or have Apple like consumer facing apps show up on some other platform. Apple apps already mostly rely on non-apple backend servers. Opening up iMessage or FaceTime would have been more of a statement. Either would allow interoperability on platforms they don't control. Is there something significant they've open sourced, despite some perceived risk?
    - CameronBanga 10y ago
      WebKit? Darwin? ResearchKit? Apple gets this bad rap for OSS, because of Google's good PR a few years back on how "Android was open." But it's not like Google has a better track record of supporting OSS when it comes to products that influence their bottom line. Adwords, Google Search, AdSense, Analytics, etc are not open source, and no one ever complains about that.
      - tyingq 10y ago
        Those are good examples. It was an honest question though, not a proclamation that Apple hasn't open sourced anything. Edit: Maybe Google is getting more credit because of uptake? Chromium, golang, protobufs, material design, etc. So perhaps not how much was open source, but how much of it ended up in non Google projects?
        scarface74 10y ago
        Chromium was a fairly recent fork of WebKit. Webkit was already being adopted by every browser vendor except MS and Mozilla. As far as Golang, I doubt that it has the uptake ofClang (even used by MS), CUPS, or Bonjour. Yes I realized that CUPS was open source before being acquired by Apple but the copyright was owned by Sweets and they could have closed all future enhancement over the last decade.
        unscaled 10y ago
        You're talking about Blink. Chromium is not a rendering engine, but a full browser. Chrome is just chromium with branded assets and a few proprietary features that link it to Google Services. It was first released in 2008, only 3 years after WebKit was open sourced, and about the same it was starting to gain traction outside Apple. Most of the browsers which didn't have their own engine back then were actually using Gecko or embedding an IE webview. Google embracing WebKit was a huge factor in pushing it to become the mainstream rendering engine.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - kuschku 10y ago
    Regarding Apple’s Open Source strategy, the WebKit origin story is a major disaster. They forked an existing project, only did sourcedumps every few months, often stripped of all comments, refused to work with the original devs that they had forked from (the KDE KHTML engine), etc.
    - Tanegashima 10y ago
      Good. GPLv3 software can't be on Apple products, yet every Chromebook ships with it, because Saint Google.
      - jwildeboer 10y ago
        Signal is GPLv3 and readily available on Apples App Store. So no, you are mistaken.
        kasabali 10y ago
        Read your parent again: > GPLv3 software can't be on Apple products it is not saying: > App Store
        kasabali 10y ago
        Looks like I'm not getting my point across, Here is the Tanegashima's post: > ...GPLv3 software can't be on Apple products... And here is jwildeboer's reply: > ... available on Apples App Store. So no, you are mistaken And my point is: No he is not mistaken because you are talking about completely different topics.
        Tanegashima 10y ago
        It's violating GPLv3.
    - scarface74 10y ago
      Since 2010, KDE has been moving away from KHTML to the official WebKit fork.
  - lobster_johnson 10y ago
    Apple's relationship with open source is pretty average. In the end, they use open source strategically. If there's no benefit to open-sourcing something, they won't. Clang, WebKit and Swift are "proper" open source projects, done in the open. But there aren't many of those. They have no open source apps, and most frameworks such as Cocoa, AppKit etc. are completely proprietary. Some of their open source efforts have been half-hearted; Darwin was enthusiastically embraced by the community, then essentially shut down by Apple. The XNU sources are APL, but there's nothing open about its development. I/O Kit is closed, I believe.
    - zie 10y ago
      They do have at least one open source application: https://www.cups.org/ https://www.cups.org/ it's fully open-source, and wholly owned by Apple, however they bought it, they didn't invent it.
      - zeptomu 10y ago
        Interesting, I did not know that Apple is the maintainer of CUPS since 2007.
        lobster_johnson 10y ago
        They hired the guy who originally made it, Michael Sweet [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Sweet_(programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Sweet_(programmer)
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - trasz 10y ago
        They also lead development of LLVM and clang, which is a _huge_ project, and very useful (although sometimes without full realization of that fact) to the Open Source ecosystem.
    - 10y ago
- eridius 10y ago
  It's not Apple's fault that they didn't open up FaceTime. They absolutely were going to, and then they were sued by a patent troll (VirtnetX), and was forced to change how FaceTime works so it relays through Apple's servers instead of going peer-to-peer. Since it was now going through Apple's servers, there was no point in opening up the protocol.
  - avar 10y ago
    IRC also needs someone to run a server. Just because a protocol isn't p2p there's plenty of reason to open it. You can independently develop third party clients, use your own server instead of Apple's etc. They simply lied. They never said "We'll open Facetime, but only if it's implemented as a p2p protocol & client"
    - djrogers 10y ago
      > They simply lied Changing one's mind based on changing circumstances isn't lying- it's common sense. The 'thing' that Steve Jobs wanted to publish as an open protocol stopped existing due to a lawsuit, the 'thing' that replaces it shared only its name.
      - avar 10y ago
        I think that's an absurdly low standard to apply to corporate speech. The CEO of a multi-billion dollar company gets on stage during their main annual product conference and says a newly announced product is going to become an open industry standard. This turns out not to possible in exactly the way the company had planned due to a lawsuit, so the company drops the plan entirely. That's a lie by definition. You asserted that you'd do something and then you didn't do it. Does breaking a promise imply that there can't be any mitigating circumstances? No, I'm sure there were some reasons for why FaceTime wasn't opened. People & companies make product buying decisions based on things like these, e.g. some company might have bought a bunch of iPads for video conferencing expecting that in a couple of years they'd be inter-operable with any device they could buy, including non-Apple devices. This excuse that they couldn't open the p2p thing they initially planned to open is absurd. Apple could absolutely have just opened & standardized what FaceTime ended up being, i.e. an open video chat client/server allowing anyone to run a server. I.e. some sort of IRC or Jabber for video messaging. Even if they couldn't open or release some specific component due to patent concerns they could still have opened & standardized almost everything else, see e.g. how open source video players ship pluggable codec support without direct support for some proprietary & patented codecs. Bringing this back to my original comment on APFS, do I think they won't open that? No, they probably will. I just thought I'd point out that Apple has a documented history of abandoning their open source / standardization plans after making some very public announcements about them, so people should be wary of counting their chickens before they're hatched when it comes to Apple.
- Jerry2 10y ago
  I guess you missed the whole lawsuit thing [0] that forced them to make (initially P2P) Facetime completely centralized at which point it was pointless to open it up. PS: If you're gonna hate on Apple, at least find some valid points about them to hate instead of just spreading bullshit. [0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/report-after-patent-loss-apple-tweaks-facetime-and-logs-500000-complaints/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/report-after-pat...
  - boondaburrah 10y ago
    After having just read that article, and knowing nothing else about it: ... How is that patentable?
    - m1sta_ 10y ago
      Lots of things seem obvious in retrospect.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - kasabali 10y ago
      Welcome to USPTO.
  - bfred_it 10y ago
    Apple did say they were opening it up; then they didn't. How's that bullshit? Even if they did have a legal excuse, that doesn't make it any less true. It could happen again.
    - simonh 10y ago
      I think it's a bit unfair to paint a genuine and honest intention, that is even pursued as far as a court of law, but which is unexpectedly prevented by a third party a 'false promise'.
- IMcD23 10y ago
  Yet they said the same about Swift, ResearchKit, etc. Those are successful open source projects. FaceTime is the only recent project they said they would open up and didn't...and that arguably wasn't their fault.

by xoa 10y ago

avar 10y ago

They said the same about Facetime and iMessages but never opened or documented those, so let's see when and if it actually happens. Apple has a history of false promises when it comes to opening and documenting their protocols & data formats. Edit: I misrecalled that iMessage was announced as something they were opening.

scarface74 10y ago
They never promised to open up iMessage. The story behind FaceTime is a little bit more complicated. Steve Jobs said he would open it up without asking the engineers and lawyers who were just as surprised as anyone else about his announcement. As far as Apple not open sourcing anything. https://opensource.apple.com https://opensource.apple.com They also published the full git commit history of Swift from the initial commit.
- erik 10y ago
  Specifically, there were major lawsuits over patent infringement immediately after Facetime launched.
  - twoodfin 10y ago
    And those lawsuits forced Apple to re-engineer how Facetime worked, from peer-to-peer direct connections to a more Apple-intermediated model[1]. At that point, creating an open standard is less interesting, since you can only communicate with folks using the same "relay server" network. [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/report-after-patent-loss-apple-tweaks-facetime-and-logs-500000-complaints/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/report-after-pat...
- tyingq 10y ago
  Open sourcing Swift, though, probably benefits Apple more than it does the community. Sans the Apple UI, it doesn't create some opportunity to lose a sale or have Apple like consumer facing apps show up on some other platform. Apple apps already mostly rely on non-apple backend servers. Opening up iMessage or FaceTime would have been more of a statement. Either would allow interoperability on platforms they don't control. Is there something significant they've open sourced, despite some perceived risk?
  - CameronBanga 10y ago
    WebKit? Darwin? ResearchKit? Apple gets this bad rap for OSS, because of Google's good PR a few years back on how "Android was open." But it's not like Google has a better track record of supporting OSS when it comes to products that influence their bottom line. Adwords, Google Search, AdSense, Analytics, etc are not open source, and no one ever complains about that.
    - tyingq 10y ago
      Those are good examples. It was an honest question though, not a proclamation that Apple hasn't open sourced anything. Edit: Maybe Google is getting more credit because of uptake? Chromium, golang, protobufs, material design, etc. So perhaps not how much was open source, but how much of it ended up in non Google projects?
      - scarface74 10y ago
        Chromium was a fairly recent fork of WebKit. Webkit was already being adopted by every browser vendor except MS and Mozilla. As far as Golang, I doubt that it has the uptake ofClang (even used by MS), CUPS, or Bonjour. Yes I realized that CUPS was open source before being acquired by Apple but the copyright was owned by Sweets and they could have closed all future enhancement over the last decade.
        unscaled 10y ago
        You're talking about Blink. Chromium is not a rendering engine, but a full browser. Chrome is just chromium with branded assets and a few proprietary features that link it to Google Services. It was first released in 2008, only 3 years after WebKit was open sourced, and about the same it was starting to gain traction outside Apple. Most of the browsers which didn't have their own engine back then were actually using Gecko or embedding an IE webview. Google embracing WebKit was a huge factor in pushing it to become the mainstream rendering engine.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- kuschku 10y ago
  Regarding Apple’s Open Source strategy, the WebKit origin story is a major disaster. They forked an existing project, only did sourcedumps every few months, often stripped of all comments, refused to work with the original devs that they had forked from (the KDE KHTML engine), etc.
  - Tanegashima 10y ago
    Good. GPLv3 software can't be on Apple products, yet every Chromebook ships with it, because Saint Google.
    - jwildeboer 10y ago
      Signal is GPLv3 and readily available on Apples App Store. So no, you are mistaken.
      - kasabali 10y ago
        Read your parent again: > GPLv3 software can't be on Apple products it is not saying: > App Store
        kasabali 10y ago
        Looks like I'm not getting my point across, Here is the Tanegashima's post: > ...GPLv3 software can't be on Apple products... And here is jwildeboer's reply: > ... available on Apples App Store. So no, you are mistaken And my point is: No he is not mistaken because you are talking about completely different topics.
      - Tanegashima 10y ago
        It's violating GPLv3.
  - scarface74 10y ago
    Since 2010, KDE has been moving away from KHTML to the official WebKit fork.
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  Apple's relationship with open source is pretty average. In the end, they use open source strategically. If there's no benefit to open-sourcing something, they won't. Clang, WebKit and Swift are "proper" open source projects, done in the open. But there aren't many of those. They have no open source apps, and most frameworks such as Cocoa, AppKit etc. are completely proprietary. Some of their open source efforts have been half-hearted; Darwin was enthusiastically embraced by the community, then essentially shut down by Apple. The XNU sources are APL, but there's nothing open about its development. I/O Kit is closed, I believe.
  - zie 10y ago
    They do have at least one open source application: https://www.cups.org/ https://www.cups.org/ it's fully open-source, and wholly owned by Apple, however they bought it, they didn't invent it.
    - zeptomu 10y ago
      Interesting, I did not know that Apple is the maintainer of CUPS since 2007.
      - lobster_johnson 10y ago
        They hired the guy who originally made it, Michael Sweet [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Sweet_(programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Sweet_(programmer)
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    - trasz 10y ago
      They also lead development of LLVM and clang, which is a _huge_ project, and very useful (although sometimes without full realization of that fact) to the Open Source ecosystem.
  - 10y ago
eridius 10y ago
It's not Apple's fault that they didn't open up FaceTime. They absolutely were going to, and then they were sued by a patent troll (VirtnetX), and was forced to change how FaceTime works so it relays through Apple's servers instead of going peer-to-peer. Since it was now going through Apple's servers, there was no point in opening up the protocol.
- avar 10y ago
  IRC also needs someone to run a server. Just because a protocol isn't p2p there's plenty of reason to open it. You can independently develop third party clients, use your own server instead of Apple's etc. They simply lied. They never said "We'll open Facetime, but only if it's implemented as a p2p protocol & client"
  - djrogers 10y ago
    > They simply lied Changing one's mind based on changing circumstances isn't lying- it's common sense. The 'thing' that Steve Jobs wanted to publish as an open protocol stopped existing due to a lawsuit, the 'thing' that replaces it shared only its name.
    - avar 10y ago
      I think that's an absurdly low standard to apply to corporate speech. The CEO of a multi-billion dollar company gets on stage during their main annual product conference and says a newly announced product is going to become an open industry standard. This turns out not to possible in exactly the way the company had planned due to a lawsuit, so the company drops the plan entirely. That's a lie by definition. You asserted that you'd do something and then you didn't do it. Does breaking a promise imply that there can't be any mitigating circumstances? No, I'm sure there were some reasons for why FaceTime wasn't opened. People & companies make product buying decisions based on things like these, e.g. some company might have bought a bunch of iPads for video conferencing expecting that in a couple of years they'd be inter-operable with any device they could buy, including non-Apple devices. This excuse that they couldn't open the p2p thing they initially planned to open is absurd. Apple could absolutely have just opened & standardized what FaceTime ended up being, i.e. an open video chat client/server allowing anyone to run a server. I.e. some sort of IRC or Jabber for video messaging. Even if they couldn't open or release some specific component due to patent concerns they could still have opened & standardized almost everything else, see e.g. how open source video players ship pluggable codec support without direct support for some proprietary & patented codecs. Bringing this back to my original comment on APFS, do I think they won't open that? No, they probably will. I just thought I'd point out that Apple has a documented history of abandoning their open source / standardization plans after making some very public announcements about them, so people should be wary of counting their chickens before they're hatched when it comes to Apple.
Jerry2 10y ago
I guess you missed the whole lawsuit thing [0] that forced them to make (initially P2P) Facetime completely centralized at which point it was pointless to open it up. PS: If you're gonna hate on Apple, at least find some valid points about them to hate instead of just spreading bullshit. [0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/report-after-patent-loss-apple-tweaks-facetime-and-logs-500000-complaints/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/report-after-pat...
- boondaburrah 10y ago
  After having just read that article, and knowing nothing else about it: ... How is that patentable?
  - m1sta_ 10y ago
    Lots of things seem obvious in retrospect.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - kasabali 10y ago
    Welcome to USPTO.
- bfred_it 10y ago
  Apple did say they were opening it up; then they didn't. How's that bullshit? Even if they did have a legal excuse, that doesn't make it any less true. It could happen again.
  - simonh 10y ago
    I think it's a bit unfair to paint a genuine and honest intention, that is even pursued as far as a court of law, but which is unexpectedly prevented by a third party a 'false promise'.
IMcD23 10y ago
Yet they said the same about Swift, ResearchKit, etc. Those are successful open source projects. FaceTime is the only recent project they said they would open up and didn't...and that arguably wasn't their fault.