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Apple must support base LLVM functionality because it is the core of their extend-embrace-extinguish strategy. This says nothing that they will extend that offe

Apple must support base LLVM functionality because it is the core of their extend-embrace-extinguish strategy. This says nothing that they will extend that offer to their undocumented secret sauce, as you imply.

rgovostes 6y ago
Don't be absurd. LLVM was a research project until Apple hired Chris Lattner and poured money into it to make a viable alternative to GCC. They've been among the project's top contributors (financially and in terms of code) for 15 years. That's quite the long con. Apple creates plenty of proprietary technologies but I can't think of a time they've been credibly accused of crushing an open technology that already existed.
- gcblkjaidfj 6y ago
  it's is a long as OSX. So it perfectly matches the 'long con' time frame. Just don't know why you go about calling amoral business strategies designed to benefit from opensource without giving anything substantial back as a "con". There were alternatives to LLVM and patches to gcc that achieved the same. Apple option to bring llvm up by investing heavily in it has more to do with the licensing than technical aspects.
- monocasa 6y ago
  They did that, in part, because they were subject of one of the first GPL enforcement actions, originally being unwilling to open source their objc GCC frontend. They being Nextstep at the time, but there's not a huge distinction these days. Their investment in LLVM is very much an attempt to keep reproprietization on the table.
  - rgovostes 6y ago
    I absolutely believe that the investment in LLVM was justified to executives as a way to avoid GPL-licensed software, which Apple has long been allergic to. But it should be noted that the GPL violation you refer to was in 1989. Put in context, that was ~16 years before they started investing in LLVM, and they have done so continuously for the past ~15 years.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      Ultimately what the executives think is the reason is the real reason, as we saw from Oravle reproprietizing Solaris. And yes, it was a while back that literally lawyers had to get involved in their blatant GPL violation in the compiler space. We absolutely get to judge a company on it's past actions.
      - rgovostes 6y ago
        > We absolutely get to judge a company on it's past actions. I wholeheartedly agree with that statement, but you are judging a company based on the actions of another company it acquired 7 years later.
        monocasa 6y ago
        I'd argue that Apple of today is closer to Nextstep than Apple of the same time frame. Like, it was literally Steve Jobs making that decision at the time to violate the GPL. The joke for the longest time was that Nextstep bought Apple for negative dollars because of how much senior leadership was carried over from nextstep. It's not like it was some random startup they acquihired for a couple engineers.
    - tzs 6y ago
      It should also be noted that GCC was not suited technically, by design, for what Apple wanted out of a compiler at the time. The JIT stuff they were doing with image filters for Core Image and Core Video and the IDE integration they were doing in Xcode could not be done in GCC at the time regardless of licensing without making massive changes, which would not have been accepted upstream. GCC at the time was intentionally designed and implemented to make it hard to use parts of it independently, such as just using the parser to make a syntax tree for your IDE to use for highlighting or suggestions, or using the code generator in a JIT. There had been suggestions and patches to make GCC more modular and separable, but they were rejected because being more modular would make it easier for proprietary software to interact with GCC components. It was only after LLVM and clang started getting widespread use that GCC became more open to the idea of it becoming more flexible like LLVM.
  - legulere 6y ago
    The way you put it non copyleft licenses are just there for bait and switch. I don’t know any case where that happened where there was outside contributions.
    - monocasa 6y ago
      Oracle reproprietized all of Solaris, including the outside contributions up to that point. And I assume that Apple has support for these instructions this whole thread is about in their toolchains, so if that's the same version that's in xcode, reproprietization is already happening. Leaving reproprietization on the table is the whole point of non-copyleft open source.
      - legulere 6y ago
        Solaris was released under a copyleft license (CDDL). How did they do that. When I google it I find your comment as the first result.
        monocasa 6y ago
        They required a copyright assignment as well. They then re licensed everything as proprietary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2281s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2281s
- legulere 6y ago
  CUPS is the closest where you could accuse Apple of doing that I guess.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    ... and in the CUPS case I could see it more of a situation where they wanted good printing support, saw that unix printing was a horrible mess, but that CUPS had promise, decided to bring it in-house in order to make it work well on macOS, and then after that was done, stopped really caring about it all that much. Because printing is just so unsexy in general, and tends to get neglected everywhere.
  - rgovostes 6y ago
    Put another way: "Apple pays project leader Bay Area salary + pre-iPhone AAPL stock to support open source development for more than a decade." (There are certainly more projects Apple relies on that deserve this!) Most of Apple's extinguished open source projects are ones they started themselves and then abandoned.

rgovostes 6y ago

Don't be absurd. LLVM was a research project until Apple hired Chris Lattner and poured money into it to make a viable alternative to GCC. They've been among the project's top contributors (financially and in terms of code) for 15 years. That's quite the long con. Apple creates plenty of proprietary technologies but I can't think of a time they've been credibly accused of crushing an open technology that already existed.

gcblkjaidfj 6y ago
it's is a long as OSX. So it perfectly matches the 'long con' time frame. Just don't know why you go about calling amoral business strategies designed to benefit from opensource without giving anything substantial back as a "con". There were alternatives to LLVM and patches to gcc that achieved the same. Apple option to bring llvm up by investing heavily in it has more to do with the licensing than technical aspects.
monocasa 6y ago
They did that, in part, because they were subject of one of the first GPL enforcement actions, originally being unwilling to open source their objc GCC frontend. They being Nextstep at the time, but there's not a huge distinction these days. Their investment in LLVM is very much an attempt to keep reproprietization on the table.
- rgovostes 6y ago
  I absolutely believe that the investment in LLVM was justified to executives as a way to avoid GPL-licensed software, which Apple has long been allergic to. But it should be noted that the GPL violation you refer to was in 1989. Put in context, that was ~16 years before they started investing in LLVM, and they have done so continuously for the past ~15 years.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    Ultimately what the executives think is the reason is the real reason, as we saw from Oravle reproprietizing Solaris. And yes, it was a while back that literally lawyers had to get involved in their blatant GPL violation in the compiler space. We absolutely get to judge a company on it's past actions.
    - rgovostes 6y ago
      > We absolutely get to judge a company on it's past actions. I wholeheartedly agree with that statement, but you are judging a company based on the actions of another company it acquired 7 years later.
      - monocasa 6y ago
        I'd argue that Apple of today is closer to Nextstep than Apple of the same time frame. Like, it was literally Steve Jobs making that decision at the time to violate the GPL. The joke for the longest time was that Nextstep bought Apple for negative dollars because of how much senior leadership was carried over from nextstep. It's not like it was some random startup they acquihired for a couple engineers.
  - tzs 6y ago
    It should also be noted that GCC was not suited technically, by design, for what Apple wanted out of a compiler at the time. The JIT stuff they were doing with image filters for Core Image and Core Video and the IDE integration they were doing in Xcode could not be done in GCC at the time regardless of licensing without making massive changes, which would not have been accepted upstream. GCC at the time was intentionally designed and implemented to make it hard to use parts of it independently, such as just using the parser to make a syntax tree for your IDE to use for highlighting or suggestions, or using the code generator in a JIT. There had been suggestions and patches to make GCC more modular and separable, but they were rejected because being more modular would make it easier for proprietary software to interact with GCC components. It was only after LLVM and clang started getting widespread use that GCC became more open to the idea of it becoming more flexible like LLVM.
- legulere 6y ago
  The way you put it non copyleft licenses are just there for bait and switch. I don’t know any case where that happened where there was outside contributions.
  - monocasa 6y ago
    Oracle reproprietized all of Solaris, including the outside contributions up to that point. And I assume that Apple has support for these instructions this whole thread is about in their toolchains, so if that's the same version that's in xcode, reproprietization is already happening. Leaving reproprietization on the table is the whole point of non-copyleft open source.
    - legulere 6y ago
      Solaris was released under a copyleft license (CDDL). How did they do that. When I google it I find your comment as the first result.
      - monocasa 6y ago
        They required a copyright assignment as well. They then re licensed everything as proprietary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2281s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2281s
legulere 6y ago
CUPS is the closest where you could accuse Apple of doing that I guess.
- kelnos 6y ago
  ... and in the CUPS case I could see it more of a situation where they wanted good printing support, saw that unix printing was a horrible mess, but that CUPS had promise, decided to bring it in-house in order to make it work well on macOS, and then after that was done, stopped really caring about it all that much. Because printing is just so unsexy in general, and tends to get neglected everywhere.
- rgovostes 6y ago
  Put another way: "Apple pays project leader Bay Area salary + pre-iPhone AAPL stock to support open source development for more than a decade." (There are certainly more projects Apple relies on that deserve this!) Most of Apple's extinguished open source projects are ones they started themselves and then abandoned.