4 ms·

Apple have a FOSS kernel, one of the three remaining web renderers, CUPS, and a bunch more smaller things. They’re not the most religious of FOSS companies, but

Apple have a FOSS kernel, one of the three remaining web renderers, CUPS, and a bunch more smaller things. They’re not the most religious of FOSS companies, but it’s a bit unfair to say they don’t play well in the places that they play. If you take FOSS to mean only GPL, then yes, I get your point.

mondoshawan 6y ago
XNU is not FOSS, and 99% of the foundation classes, Aqua, and drivers are all proprietary.
- doctor_eval 6y ago
  Why is XNU not FOSS? Has something changed? Is Wikipedia wrong? It says that XNU is APSL which is approved by OSI and FSF. While I agree that much of the good stuff is proprietary (but certainly not all, eg WebKit), that doesn’t mean that the free stuff isn’t free. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Public_Source_License https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Public_Source_License
  - toyg 6y ago
    Webkit was likely "saved" by the original KHTML license being GPL. At the time, Apple were wise enough (or desperate enough) to figure that they could work with such a license, although they were eventually careful to chisel out anything they could into BSD-licensed modules. And still they had to be dragged into the light more or less kicking and screaming (e.g. they had no public VSC until KDE people kicked up a stink in the press, and were just throwing huge swaths of code "over the fence" like they still do with XNU).
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      KHTML is LGPL, isn’t it?
      - toyg 6y ago
        If i remember correctly KDE used to be GPL when webkit started, and was later relicensed. The difference is relatively irrelevant anyway, the way they used KHTML they would have had to release sources even under LGPL. Had KDE used BSD, MIT, or Apache, back then, we likely wouldn't have had webkit.
        robin_reala 6y ago
        I’m trying to find a specific commit to disprove this, but that’s not my recollection. Certainly this blog post from 2005 indicates LGPL: https://web.archive.org/web/20050428230122/http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/view/1001 https://web.archive.org/web/20050428230122/http://www.kdedev...
        toyg 6y ago
        You might be right. Still, it shows the Apple attitude at the time, and how the license helped changing their ways. Note how the post complains they are simply using OSX apis... without the modification-release clauses, webkit as a reusable library would never have happened.
  - Someone 6y ago
    Indeed. Git repo at https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu. Note that that is 2 years behind. You can get a newer source dump from https://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-6153.141.1/ https://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-6153.141.1/. So, open source, but development isn’t done in the open. You can’t really expect you’ll be able to see recent commit messages or even just regular source dumps.
    - spacedcowboy 6y ago
      The development methodology has nothing to do with whether something is FOSS or not. If you're complaining that you want to see daily updates, that's a completely different thing than claiming it's not FOSS (as OP did).
      - lmm 6y ago
        FOSS means being able to develop it the same way they do. That ought to mean being able to see to VCS history, bug trackers and so on - their own developers would use those things when developing.
        robin_reala 6y ago
        It really doesn’t mean that. Neither Stallman’s four freedoms[1] nor Peren’s Open Source Definition[2] have anything to say about code history, bug trackers, development standards etc etc, and they’re the only commonly accepted definitions for what free and open source software is. [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en [2] https://opensource.org/docs/osd https://opensource.org/docs/osd
        lmm 6y ago
        > The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. > In order for freedoms 1 and 3 (the freedom to make changes and the freedom to publish the changed versions) to be meaningful, you need to have access to the source code of the program. Therefore, accessibility of source code is a necessary condition for free software. Obfuscated “source code” is not real source code and does not count as source code. IMO exactly the same logic applies to code history and bug trackers: you need access to those things to be able to study how the program works. A code dump is much the same thing as obfuscated source code: you can build the program from it, but you can't understand the program from it.
doctor_eval 6y ago
Yeah I think it’s more often that FOSS that doesn’t play well with Apple. It’s understandable - Apple keeps a lot of desirable software for itself - but perhaps unfortunate. Federici has said in one of his interviews that Apple wants people to hack on the M1 machines so I’m hopeful that they will be more open than on IOS. All of that said, I won’t hold my breath.
- toyg 6y ago
  > Apple wants people to hack on the M1 machines Of course they do. Like they wanted people to hack on OSX 20 years ago; and once they reached critical mass, they pulled up the drawbridges (dropping anything GNU, dropping Java, restricting access to the OS, pushing AppStore, etc etc). Chances they're going to do exactly the same with M1 and its follow-ups are 99.99%... if anything because their management is largely drawn from the very same people who executed that strategy.
  - spacedcowboy 6y ago
    They dropped anything GNU because of the GPLv3, which was specifically designed to stop what the authors saw as exploitation of others' work. I can see both sides here - the viral nature of GPLv3 is anathema to a company like Apple, so simply walking away was inevitable; and people were exploiting loopholes in the GPLv2 (I have no idea whether Apple was, but there are documented cases of others doing it).
    - toyg 6y ago
      It's just one datapoint - there are plenty more. Simply speaking, when they are the underdog and have to attract developers, they open up; and when they don't need it, they close doors. That's just what they do, it's a perfectly rational strategy (if cynical). They are hardly the only ones at this game, Microsoft does it too. I am just pointing out that promises of openness with Apple typically come with an expiry date.
      - doctor_eval 6y ago

mondoshawan 6y ago

XNU is not FOSS, and 99% of the foundation classes, Aqua, and drivers are all proprietary.

doctor_eval 6y ago
Why is XNU not FOSS? Has something changed? Is Wikipedia wrong? It says that XNU is APSL which is approved by OSI and FSF. While I agree that much of the good stuff is proprietary (but certainly not all, eg WebKit), that doesn’t mean that the free stuff isn’t free. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Public_Source_License https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Public_Source_License
- toyg 6y ago
  Webkit was likely "saved" by the original KHTML license being GPL. At the time, Apple were wise enough (or desperate enough) to figure that they could work with such a license, although they were eventually careful to chisel out anything they could into BSD-licensed modules. And still they had to be dragged into the light more or less kicking and screaming (e.g. they had no public VSC until KDE people kicked up a stink in the press, and were just throwing huge swaths of code "over the fence" like they still do with XNU).
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    KHTML is LGPL, isn’t it?
    - toyg 6y ago
      If i remember correctly KDE used to be GPL when webkit started, and was later relicensed. The difference is relatively irrelevant anyway, the way they used KHTML they would have had to release sources even under LGPL. Had KDE used BSD, MIT, or Apache, back then, we likely wouldn't have had webkit.
      - robin_reala 6y ago
        I’m trying to find a specific commit to disprove this, but that’s not my recollection. Certainly this blog post from 2005 indicates LGPL: https://web.archive.org/web/20050428230122/http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/view/1001 https://web.archive.org/web/20050428230122/http://www.kdedev...
        toyg 6y ago
        You might be right. Still, it shows the Apple attitude at the time, and how the license helped changing their ways. Note how the post complains they are simply using OSX apis... without the modification-release clauses, webkit as a reusable library would never have happened.
- Someone 6y ago
  Indeed. Git repo at https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu. Note that that is 2 years behind. You can get a newer source dump from https://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-6153.141.1/ https://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-6153.141.1/. So, open source, but development isn’t done in the open. You can’t really expect you’ll be able to see recent commit messages or even just regular source dumps.
  - spacedcowboy 6y ago
    The development methodology has nothing to do with whether something is FOSS or not. If you're complaining that you want to see daily updates, that's a completely different thing than claiming it's not FOSS (as OP did).
    - lmm 6y ago
      FOSS means being able to develop it the same way they do. That ought to mean being able to see to VCS history, bug trackers and so on - their own developers would use those things when developing.
      - robin_reala 6y ago
        It really doesn’t mean that. Neither Stallman’s four freedoms[1] nor Peren’s Open Source Definition[2] have anything to say about code history, bug trackers, development standards etc etc, and they’re the only commonly accepted definitions for what free and open source software is. [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en [2] https://opensource.org/docs/osd https://opensource.org/docs/osd
        lmm 6y ago
        > The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. > In order for freedoms 1 and 3 (the freedom to make changes and the freedom to publish the changed versions) to be meaningful, you need to have access to the source code of the program. Therefore, accessibility of source code is a necessary condition for free software. Obfuscated “source code” is not real source code and does not count as source code. IMO exactly the same logic applies to code history and bug trackers: you need access to those things to be able to study how the program works. A code dump is much the same thing as obfuscated source code: you can build the program from it, but you can't understand the program from it.

doctor_eval 6y ago

Yeah I think it’s more often that FOSS that doesn’t play well with Apple. It’s understandable - Apple keeps a lot of desirable software for itself - but perhaps unfortunate. Federici has said in one of his interviews that Apple wants people to hack on the M1 machines so I’m hopeful that they will be more open than on IOS. All of that said, I won’t hold my breath.

toyg 6y ago
> Apple wants people to hack on the M1 machines Of course they do. Like they wanted people to hack on OSX 20 years ago; and once they reached critical mass, they pulled up the drawbridges (dropping anything GNU, dropping Java, restricting access to the OS, pushing AppStore, etc etc). Chances they're going to do exactly the same with M1 and its follow-ups are 99.99%... if anything because their management is largely drawn from the very same people who executed that strategy.
- spacedcowboy 6y ago
  They dropped anything GNU because of the GPLv3, which was specifically designed to stop what the authors saw as exploitation of others' work. I can see both sides here - the viral nature of GPLv3 is anathema to a company like Apple, so simply walking away was inevitable; and people were exploiting loopholes in the GPLv2 (I have no idea whether Apple was, but there are documented cases of others doing it).
  - toyg 6y ago
    It's just one datapoint - there are plenty more. Simply speaking, when they are the underdog and have to attract developers, they open up; and when they don't need it, they close doors. That's just what they do, it's a perfectly rational strategy (if cynical). They are hardly the only ones at this game, Microsoft does it too. I am just pointing out that promises of openness with Apple typically come with an expiry date.
    - doctor_eval 6y ago