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> But, I'm kinda baffled why anyone would volunteer to provide free labor to one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. I give away tons of

> But, I'm kinda baffled why anyone would volunteer to provide free labor to one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. I give away tons of my time for OSS, but I'm not about to get out and push if I've paid for a luxury car. > I'd rather put my time into something that is free and open for everyone, including my future self. Actually, the word "rather" isn't strong enough: I would never give my labor to an $820B corporation. That's exactly what springs to mind. Why should we do Apple's work for them when they are swimming in cash reserves. It beggars belief that anyone would suggest this. Obviously their pain is so great, they're so tightly shackled, their alternatives so limited, that they would rather willingly donate their labor to a wealthy corporation than attempt to take said corporation to task or shock horror jump ship.

captainmuon 9y ago
It's not Apple's work to do. It's not in their interest to document everything. What applies to internal APIs applies to lesser extent to the detailed workings of the OS, like the init system, themeing, etc.. If it is documented, people will depend on it, or write low-level tweaking tools that Apple doesn't want to exist. What is good for customers and developers might not be good for Apple, and vice versa. (A separate issue are the user docs, e.g. how to use Finder. I guess they are good enough, I haven't found the need for such docs.)
- ethbro 9y ago
  This only follows if Apple indeed wants to kill macOS. If they want users... then you kind of need to have even low level documentation. Because the kind of serious apps and third party feature adds that make an OS bearable to use depend on them.
  - mavhc 9y ago
    Of course they want to kill macOS, it's only a small fraction of their profits. They've rewritten all the software they've acquired over the years, Final Cut Pro etc, I'd bet they're internally compatible with whatever their future iOS based desktop OS is.
    - valuearb 9y ago
      It's a $25B+ a year business that earns more profits than all the other PC makers in the world combined. I'm pretty sure they don't want to kill macOS.
      - mavhc 9y ago
        Not saying they want to kill Macs, just move them to a new OS so they can share developers with the 10x larger iOS market. If you have 50% of your OS programmers working on an OS that only 10% of your users use, seems like a waste
        photojosh 9y ago
        But macOS and iOS share enormous amounts of code, if not the majority. The kernel is pretty much the same. APIs usually get support on both systems, with the exception being the UI layer. Indeed, if they have different APIs on the 2 platforms for the same functionality, you can probably bet that pretty soon one will be ported across to the other and the other obsoleted. Recent examples: PDFs, Bluetooth, Media SDKs (AV Foundation etc).
- SwellJoe 9y ago
  If the experience of developing for the OS is terrible because the documentation is terrible, well...an operating system without a thriving application ecosystem is an operating system that is not long for this world. No matter how good the OS may be. Computing history is littered with the corpses of better operating systems (Amiga and BeOS and every UNIX other than Linux come to mind) that didn't have the app ecosystem to keep them alive. Obviously, Apple isn't hurting, but it can take a long time for anyone to notice that a huge tree is rotten in the middle. I don't know if that's true of Apple; they've been pretty successful in the transition to mobile, and their iOS ecosystem seems very healthy, but, if the terrible docs are a company-wide issue, it might be a slow-moving disaster. Docs are unsexy enough to where I could believe Apple would completely fuck them up, just because nobody wants to work on the unsexy stuff and nobody thinks about it when things are going so well for the company.
  - captainmuon 9y ago
    I'm just being charitable and assuming Apple knows what it is doing - e.g. assuming "malice" instead of stupidity. For example, macOS is themeable under the hood. Nearly all Cocoa controls are defined as vector graphics in an "art file", rather than hardcoded in the library. This was probably not done with themability in mind, but is just a side effect of good engineering. I bet there was a meeting where the engineers said "we have this great feature where we can change the theme of all Cocoa apps", and it was decided to not expose that feature for reasons like "brand recognition" and having all macs look alike for support reasons. I'm pretty confident that happened because Microsoft did the same and locked down themes with Windows XP (and somebody stated their reasoning), and also the GNOME project removed theming from the main UI and crammed it into a scary "tweak" tool (one dev said basically that theming is not a desired feature for them). Similar logic applies to other things, like the kernel interface. I fully understand why they come to such decisions - but I as a user and developer (and interested in "hacky" things) would love these things to be documented. I don't think the status it is hurting their bottom-line, or the quality of mac apps (yet). Cocoa stuff seems to be documented decently enough. But I agree, they have to be careful if they don't want to fall behind.
  - vidarh 9y ago
    AmigaOS is more of a zombie - it's still being developed, and has spawned at least two "offspring" in MorphOS and AROS that are both still developed (and ported to new hardware in the case of AROS in particular). And AmigaOS was a shining beacon of efficiently surfacing apps online early on. Aminet [1] provided a robust mirror system and ability to browse a big catalog (still online and updated) of downloadable AmigaOS software. It was a large part in letting AmigaOS remain viable for users much longer than it otherwise would have for most. [1] http://aminet.net/ http://aminet.net/

captainmuon 9y ago

It's not Apple's work to do. It's not in their interest to document everything. What applies to internal APIs applies to lesser extent to the detailed workings of the OS, like the init system, themeing, etc.. If it is documented, people will depend on it, or write low-level tweaking tools that Apple doesn't want to exist. What is good for customers and developers might not be good for Apple, and vice versa. (A separate issue are the user docs, e.g. how to use Finder. I guess they are good enough, I haven't found the need for such docs.)

ethbro 9y ago
This only follows if Apple indeed wants to kill macOS. If they want users... then you kind of need to have even low level documentation. Because the kind of serious apps and third party feature adds that make an OS bearable to use depend on them.
- mavhc 9y ago
  Of course they want to kill macOS, it's only a small fraction of their profits. They've rewritten all the software they've acquired over the years, Final Cut Pro etc, I'd bet they're internally compatible with whatever their future iOS based desktop OS is.
  - valuearb 9y ago
    It's a $25B+ a year business that earns more profits than all the other PC makers in the world combined. I'm pretty sure they don't want to kill macOS.
    - mavhc 9y ago
      Not saying they want to kill Macs, just move them to a new OS so they can share developers with the 10x larger iOS market. If you have 50% of your OS programmers working on an OS that only 10% of your users use, seems like a waste
      - photojosh 9y ago
        But macOS and iOS share enormous amounts of code, if not the majority. The kernel is pretty much the same. APIs usually get support on both systems, with the exception being the UI layer. Indeed, if they have different APIs on the 2 platforms for the same functionality, you can probably bet that pretty soon one will be ported across to the other and the other obsoleted. Recent examples: PDFs, Bluetooth, Media SDKs (AV Foundation etc).
SwellJoe 9y ago
If the experience of developing for the OS is terrible because the documentation is terrible, well...an operating system without a thriving application ecosystem is an operating system that is not long for this world. No matter how good the OS may be. Computing history is littered with the corpses of better operating systems (Amiga and BeOS and every UNIX other than Linux come to mind) that didn't have the app ecosystem to keep them alive. Obviously, Apple isn't hurting, but it can take a long time for anyone to notice that a huge tree is rotten in the middle. I don't know if that's true of Apple; they've been pretty successful in the transition to mobile, and their iOS ecosystem seems very healthy, but, if the terrible docs are a company-wide issue, it might be a slow-moving disaster. Docs are unsexy enough to where I could believe Apple would completely fuck them up, just because nobody wants to work on the unsexy stuff and nobody thinks about it when things are going so well for the company.
- captainmuon 9y ago
  I'm just being charitable and assuming Apple knows what it is doing - e.g. assuming "malice" instead of stupidity. For example, macOS is themeable under the hood. Nearly all Cocoa controls are defined as vector graphics in an "art file", rather than hardcoded in the library. This was probably not done with themability in mind, but is just a side effect of good engineering. I bet there was a meeting where the engineers said "we have this great feature where we can change the theme of all Cocoa apps", and it was decided to not expose that feature for reasons like "brand recognition" and having all macs look alike for support reasons. I'm pretty confident that happened because Microsoft did the same and locked down themes with Windows XP (and somebody stated their reasoning), and also the GNOME project removed theming from the main UI and crammed it into a scary "tweak" tool (one dev said basically that theming is not a desired feature for them). Similar logic applies to other things, like the kernel interface. I fully understand why they come to such decisions - but I as a user and developer (and interested in "hacky" things) would love these things to be documented. I don't think the status it is hurting their bottom-line, or the quality of mac apps (yet). Cocoa stuff seems to be documented decently enough. But I agree, they have to be careful if they don't want to fall behind.
- vidarh 9y ago
  AmigaOS is more of a zombie - it's still being developed, and has spawned at least two "offspring" in MorphOS and AROS that are both still developed (and ported to new hardware in the case of AROS in particular). And AmigaOS was a shining beacon of efficiently surfacing apps online early on. Aminet [1] provided a robust mirror system and ability to browse a big catalog (still online and updated) of downloadable AmigaOS software. It was a large part in letting AmigaOS remain viable for users much longer than it otherwise would have for most. [1] http://aminet.net/ http://aminet.net/