4 ms·

What? NeXT open-sourced their Objective-C gcc extensions in 1992, a half-decade before Apple bought them.

fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
Yeah, it’s a Steve Jobs thing. As far as I can tell, this is a significant factor in the rise of LLVM. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9158017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9158017
- rodgerd 5y ago
  It didn't help that rms was using it as a "hah hah that time I put one over on Steve Jobs" a decade later when I saw him speak. No idea if he still does.
  - emn13 5y ago
    I sure hope apple has a better reason for shipping unnecessarily impractical software than some pet peeve by a now-deceased CEO. That would be kind of insane.
- jaytaylor 5y ago
  > jordigh on March 6, 2015 > They're basically achieving their dream now with Swift, though. I don't expect them to ever release that source. I don't think there is any precedent for Apple releasing source code after the fact. I wonder, to what degree is this still the case today? Has Apple's position on Open Source changed in the past half+ decade?
  - fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
    I don’t think it’s changed about GPL: GPL3 made things even less friendly to what they want, so they’ve started doing things like switching to zsh instead of bash. LLVM/Swift are open-sourced, but not GPL
- filmgirlcw 5y ago
  And here we should note that LLVM (by its creator who already worked on it at Apple at this point) was offered to GNU and the FSF in 2005 but were ignored/chided [1] until a decade later when GCC/GNU/FSF realized what they had been offered ten years earlier and then had to grapple with what they had rejected, once LLVM had taken hold [2, 3], including proposals to try to refuse LLVM patches to emacs, out of some sense of petty NIH thing [the whole thread 2 and 3 are part of]. [1]: https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html [2]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00783.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00... [3]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00640.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...
  - emn13 5y ago
    Reading those threads makes those decisions seem pretty reasonable to me; this doesn't look like a petty vendetta at all. And while chris sounded optimisitic about including LLVM, he didn't offer to; he offered the glue code to allow the gcc frontend to talk to the separate LLVM backend - and doing so implied a raising a number of fundamental requirements, such as the C vs. C++ bootstrapping issue. Accepting major changes like that isn't trivial; and a certain amount of NIH is healthy here. I mean, that's kind of apples motto too right? This was a technical patch set with unclear upside (if any), and potentially relevant cost - why would they accept that?

Yeah, it’s a Steve Jobs thing. As far as I can tell, this is a significant factor in the rise of LLVM. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9158017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9158017

rodgerd 5y ago
It didn't help that rms was using it as a "hah hah that time I put one over on Steve Jobs" a decade later when I saw him speak. No idea if he still does.
- emn13 5y ago
  I sure hope apple has a better reason for shipping unnecessarily impractical software than some pet peeve by a now-deceased CEO. That would be kind of insane.
jaytaylor 5y ago
> jordigh on March 6, 2015 > They're basically achieving their dream now with Swift, though. I don't expect them to ever release that source. I don't think there is any precedent for Apple releasing source code after the fact. I wonder, to what degree is this still the case today? Has Apple's position on Open Source changed in the past half+ decade?
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
  I don’t think it’s changed about GPL: GPL3 made things even less friendly to what they want, so they’ve started doing things like switching to zsh instead of bash. LLVM/Swift are open-sourced, but not GPL
filmgirlcw 5y ago
And here we should note that LLVM (by its creator who already worked on it at Apple at this point) was offered to GNU and the FSF in 2005 but were ignored/chided [1] until a decade later when GCC/GNU/FSF realized what they had been offered ten years earlier and then had to grapple with what they had rejected, once LLVM had taken hold [2, 3], including proposals to try to refuse LLVM patches to emacs, out of some sense of petty NIH thing [the whole thread 2 and 3 are part of]. [1]: https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2005-11/msg00888.html [2]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00783.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00... [3]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00640.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-02/msg00...
- emn13 5y ago
  Reading those threads makes those decisions seem pretty reasonable to me; this doesn't look like a petty vendetta at all. And while chris sounded optimisitic about including LLVM, he didn't offer to; he offered the glue code to allow the gcc frontend to talk to the separate LLVM backend - and doing so implied a raising a number of fundamental requirements, such as the C vs. C++ bootstrapping issue. Accepting major changes like that isn't trivial; and a certain amount of NIH is healthy here. I mean, that's kind of apples motto too right? This was a technical patch set with unclear upside (if any), and potentially relevant cost - why would they accept that?