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They may have paid a few lip services to openness, but very seldom (apart from their legal obligations) openness of source. They did very broadly embrace intero

They may have paid a few lip services to openness, but very seldom (apart from their legal obligations) openness of source. They did very broadly embrace interoperability when it suited them, and it’s increasingly suited them except in a few key competitive areas. And they’ve quietly relented in areas where they were overly aggressive resisting for very little business purpose (eg AV codecs). I’d be surprised if, in a perfect universe of their imagining, Apple wouldn’t fully embrace open source… because they don’t see much value in software other than integration. Their resistance to standards and openness now is almost entirely about protecting trade secrets. Which definitely has flaws! But it’s a substantial difference from Apple in the early 2000s where they couldn’t coherently tell a story about what was public or why.

olliej 4y ago
Can you define "very seldom (apart from their legal obligations) openness of source"? There are major OSS projects that were started by Apple, and plenty that weren't started by, but definitely get the bulk of their engineering from Apple, in public repositories.
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  Apart from Swift I can’t think of an example of this. But I do think Swift is a great example of how Apple would embrace OSS if they had the right incentives.
  - gorbypark 4y ago
    Clang is another, iirc.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Nope, LLVM was started at Iilinois university, and clang only came into the picture because Apple wasn't going to get a ticket for GPL v3 GCC ride. Had it not been for the license change, clang would never had happened.
      - projektfu 4y ago
        Clang fits the second half, that Apple contributes a ton to it. CUPS is another, it was ok but not great until Apple took it in and made it work with a ton of devices, and also make vendors wake up and support it. Now Windows has a much worse printing environment, and would do well to just adopt CUPS.
        pjmlp 4y ago
        Nope, one of the reasons why clang is lagging behind everyone in C++20 support is that C++17 seems to be good enough for Apple purposes regarding their use of C++, and they withdraw resources from it. Also they don't contribute everything upstream, like the stable bitcode format used in watchOS, or the SafeC used in iBoot. Apple hired the CUPS developer, that is why, again not started by them and they had to obey the license. Windows a worse printing environment than CUPS? What a joke.
        projektfu 4y ago
        Well if Apple didn't contribute to Clang, it would have C++ 20 because it would be developed by all those developers that aren't Apple. How can Apple be responsible for its deficiencies and not its development?
        pjmlp 4y ago
        > Clang fits the second half, that Apple contributes a ton to it. So where is that ton to it?
        projektfu 4y ago
        I know you were around way back then so you probably should remember it took a bit to bring clang to feature parity with gcc. There was a lot of excitement that Apple was involved in the work, and it really did get there to the point where FreeBSD, among others, could switch to clang full time.
pjmlp 4y ago
In some sense, having a UNIX based OS, with stuff like OpenGL and PDF was that openess. You won't find any of it on the Mac OS System predecessors, nor on the Copland roadmap and early developer betas.

olliej 4y ago

Can you define "very seldom (apart from their legal obligations) openness of source"? There are major OSS projects that were started by Apple, and plenty that weren't started by, but definitely get the bulk of their engineering from Apple, in public repositories.

eyelidlessness 4y ago
Apart from Swift I can’t think of an example of this. But I do think Swift is a great example of how Apple would embrace OSS if they had the right incentives.
- gorbypark 4y ago
  Clang is another, iirc.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Nope, LLVM was started at Iilinois university, and clang only came into the picture because Apple wasn't going to get a ticket for GPL v3 GCC ride. Had it not been for the license change, clang would never had happened.
    - projektfu 4y ago
      Clang fits the second half, that Apple contributes a ton to it. CUPS is another, it was ok but not great until Apple took it in and made it work with a ton of devices, and also make vendors wake up and support it. Now Windows has a much worse printing environment, and would do well to just adopt CUPS.
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        Nope, one of the reasons why clang is lagging behind everyone in C++20 support is that C++17 seems to be good enough for Apple purposes regarding their use of C++, and they withdraw resources from it. Also they don't contribute everything upstream, like the stable bitcode format used in watchOS, or the SafeC used in iBoot. Apple hired the CUPS developer, that is why, again not started by them and they had to obey the license. Windows a worse printing environment than CUPS? What a joke.
        projektfu 4y ago
        Well if Apple didn't contribute to Clang, it would have C++ 20 because it would be developed by all those developers that aren't Apple. How can Apple be responsible for its deficiencies and not its development?
        pjmlp 4y ago
        > Clang fits the second half, that Apple contributes a ton to it. So where is that ton to it?
        projektfu 4y ago
        I know you were around way back then so you probably should remember it took a bit to bring clang to feature parity with gcc. There was a lot of excitement that Apple was involved in the work, and it really did get there to the point where FreeBSD, among others, could switch to clang full time.

pjmlp 4y ago

In some sense, having a UNIX based OS, with stuff like OpenGL and PDF was that openess. You won't find any of it on the Mac OS System predecessors, nor on the Copland roadmap and early developer betas.