4 ms·

It makes me wonder whether it wouldn't be worthwhile for Apple to reconsider their strategy regarding the GPL and open-sourcing only a part of their system. If

It makes me wonder whether it wouldn't be worthwhile for Apple to reconsider their strategy regarding the GPL and open-sourcing only a part of their system. If they decided to be more open about macOS development, they might have spared their users a lot of unpleasant experiences and avoided many recent complaints.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
simonh 9y ago
How so?
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
  If they do it well (I mean like Mint developers, not like Gnome developers), they could get free dedicated beta testers of their products who would hopefully help them to find and fix the bugs in the new releases of macOS.
  - simonh 9y ago
    Apple has a paid professional QA department. Would amateur volunteers really provide a better service? The cause of many of these bugs is an aggressive annual release cycle and fixed release deadlines, not necessarily insufficient QA. Making a significant part of the QA function voluntary wouldn't help with meeting tight deadlines or dependability of the QA process. The general point of expanding QA resources might help, but it's certainly not a given that making that on a voluntary, best effort, when you get round to it basis would help with the timeliness and reliability of releases without sacrificing some of the other goals Apple and their customers holds dear.
coldtea 9y ago
macOS has much less unpleasant experiences than e.g. each new Ubuntu version brings, with its incompatibilities, changed subsystems, major bugs, and what have you... Not to mention that a lot of majorly used open source stuff have even less developers (despite being nominally open to all to give a hand/debug/etc) than a typical macOS component. To the point that the GTK+ maintainer lamented that it was just him, a single person, doing most of the work, a few years ago -- and begging for others to come help.
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
  I completely agree. However, when we talk about power users who love their system and depend on it to work - and macOS is often used for development work - it's just feels natural that you at least try to fix the problem yourself, and if the fix works well, it's also natural you send it upstream.
- rleigh 9y ago
  GTK+ is maybe a bad example. The developers were not exactly welcoming of contributions or particularly friendly to suggestions. My experience was that they did not foster an environment which was amenable to participation, and that is their loss, but essentially a self-inflicted loss at that.
- frik 9y ago
  GNOME and KDE destroyed their former community, such stupid decisions over and over again. Changing directions, etc. Gnome 2 and KDE 3 were great, then both went downhill. Ubuntu w Unity 7 and Ubuntu MATE are great, but standard GNOME3 is garbage - too many stupid UI warts.
  - ryanpepper 9y ago
    Unity is getting ditched in favour of GNOME3 as of 18.04, which probably means it's going to die...
TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
The whole Darwin FLOSS distro thing died a long time ago.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

simonh 9y ago

How so?

dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
If they do it well (I mean like Mint developers, not like Gnome developers), they could get free dedicated beta testers of their products who would hopefully help them to find and fix the bugs in the new releases of macOS.
- simonh 9y ago
  Apple has a paid professional QA department. Would amateur volunteers really provide a better service? The cause of many of these bugs is an aggressive annual release cycle and fixed release deadlines, not necessarily insufficient QA. Making a significant part of the QA function voluntary wouldn't help with meeting tight deadlines or dependability of the QA process. The general point of expanding QA resources might help, but it's certainly not a given that making that on a voluntary, best effort, when you get round to it basis would help with the timeliness and reliability of releases without sacrificing some of the other goals Apple and their customers holds dear.

coldtea 9y ago

macOS has much less unpleasant experiences than e.g. each new Ubuntu version brings, with its incompatibilities, changed subsystems, major bugs, and what have you... Not to mention that a lot of majorly used open source stuff have even less developers (despite being nominally open to all to give a hand/debug/etc) than a typical macOS component. To the point that the GTK+ maintainer lamented that it was just him, a single person, doing most of the work, a few years ago -- and begging for others to come help.

dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
I completely agree. However, when we talk about power users who love their system and depend on it to work - and macOS is often used for development work - it's just feels natural that you at least try to fix the problem yourself, and if the fix works well, it's also natural you send it upstream.
rleigh 9y ago
GTK+ is maybe a bad example. The developers were not exactly welcoming of contributions or particularly friendly to suggestions. My experience was that they did not foster an environment which was amenable to participation, and that is their loss, but essentially a self-inflicted loss at that.
frik 9y ago
GNOME and KDE destroyed their former community, such stupid decisions over and over again. Changing directions, etc. Gnome 2 and KDE 3 were great, then both went downhill. Ubuntu w Unity 7 and Ubuntu MATE are great, but standard GNOME3 is garbage - too many stupid UI warts.
- ryanpepper 9y ago
  Unity is getting ditched in favour of GNOME3 as of 18.04, which probably means it's going to die...

TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago

The whole Darwin FLOSS distro thing died a long time ago.