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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

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.
avar 10y ago
They didn't open WebKit. It's a fork of the LGPL'd KHTML code base. Apple is legally obliged to keep it open, so whatever anyone thinks about Apple's open source record using WebKit as an example makes little sense.
- comex 10y ago
  Eh, not quite. Apple could satisfy its LGPL obligations by throwing source dumps of WebCore over the wall - without releasing the rest of WebKit, exposing SVN history, or having a public bug tracker. In fact, for the first two years of Safari's life, that's exactly what they did. Then in 2005 they opened it up properly, voluntarily: https://dot.kde.org/2005/06/07/apple-opens-webkit-cvs-and-bug-database https://dot.kde.org/2005/06/07/apple-opens-webkit-cvs-and-bu...
  - toyg 10y ago
    "Voluntarily" after they were rapped over and over by KDE developers and community...
    - AlphaSite 10y ago
      Ah yes, the KDE community, holders of the ear of Steve Jobs. Frankly, I'm not sure Apple ever cared for their thoughts on the matter.
      - toyg 10y ago
        Of course, they only cared about PR: by pure coincidence, they "voluntarily" changed development model on webkit right after several news outlets had picked up the umpteen blog post by a grumbling KDE developer. Yes, Apple historically doesn't give a shit about the OSS community unless they can exploit it or it becomes a dangerous nuisance. And this is why it gets a bad rep in OSS circles.
    - scarface74 10y ago
      Yes because Apple in general and Steve Jobs in particular is a company that goes out of it way to be accommodating to the masses....
brudgers 10y ago
The big one is maps...though that's not so much open source as open data.
asveikau 10y ago
The comment you're replying to, and all the parents up to the root, like most comments here made no mention of Google. It was a discussion of Apple on its merits. Why do we seem to tie our personal identities to corporate affiliations, to the point of bringing up corporate rivalries out of context and taking sides in them?
toyg 10y ago
Google has nothing to do with this. Apple get their bad rep from their behavior on Darwin, webkit and the GNU bait-and-switch (first adopted with great fanfare, then left to rot and eventually purged mercilessly). The fact that they strenuously refused to let some of their desktop goodness leak back into the OSS world, from the very first day OSX was announced, is also an old pain point.

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.

avar 10y ago

They didn't open WebKit. It's a fork of the LGPL'd KHTML code base. Apple is legally obliged to keep it open, so whatever anyone thinks about Apple's open source record using WebKit as an example makes little sense.

comex 10y ago
Eh, not quite. Apple could satisfy its LGPL obligations by throwing source dumps of WebCore over the wall - without releasing the rest of WebKit, exposing SVN history, or having a public bug tracker. In fact, for the first two years of Safari's life, that's exactly what they did. Then in 2005 they opened it up properly, voluntarily: https://dot.kde.org/2005/06/07/apple-opens-webkit-cvs-and-bug-database https://dot.kde.org/2005/06/07/apple-opens-webkit-cvs-and-bu...
- toyg 10y ago
  "Voluntarily" after they were rapped over and over by KDE developers and community...
  - AlphaSite 10y ago
    Ah yes, the KDE community, holders of the ear of Steve Jobs. Frankly, I'm not sure Apple ever cared for their thoughts on the matter.
    - toyg 10y ago
      Of course, they only cared about PR: by pure coincidence, they "voluntarily" changed development model on webkit right after several news outlets had picked up the umpteen blog post by a grumbling KDE developer. Yes, Apple historically doesn't give a shit about the OSS community unless they can exploit it or it becomes a dangerous nuisance. And this is why it gets a bad rep in OSS circles.
  - scarface74 10y ago
    Yes because Apple in general and Steve Jobs in particular is a company that goes out of it way to be accommodating to the masses....

brudgers 10y ago

The big one is maps...though that's not so much open source as open data.

asveikau 10y ago

The comment you're replying to, and all the parents up to the root, like most comments here made no mention of Google. It was a discussion of Apple on its merits. Why do we seem to tie our personal identities to corporate affiliations, to the point of bringing up corporate rivalries out of context and taking sides in them?

toyg 10y ago

Google has nothing to do with this. Apple get their bad rep from their behavior on Darwin, webkit and the GNU bait-and-switch (first adopted with great fanfare, then left to rot and eventually purged mercilessly). The fact that they strenuously refused to let some of their desktop goodness leak back into the OSS world, from the very first day OSX was announced, is also an old pain point.