I know it appears this way, but Apple really is a huge pain in the ass here. For a long time you couldn't download tar files of those things on their Open Sour

I know it appears this way, but Apple really is a huge pain in the ass here. For a long time you couldn't download tar files of those things on their Open Source site -- you could only browse file-by-file through the web interface. This excepted the things that they were trying to push as standards. Most of the stuff you still can't get from CVS. It took forever when I was trying to track down the source for their libtool a couple years back; when I finally did I patched it to use half of the memory of their version (at the time it was using 1.5 GB just to link some stuff where I worked) and sent the patches in to mailing lists and filed them in a bug report. Never heard anything from Apple on either. The biggest case where that's not true -- where Apple has been pretty integrated into the community development processes from the beginning isn't any of the projects you mention -- it's GCC. Usually they just do what they need to to meet the license requirements.