5 ms·

Why does Microsoft get labeled like this while Apple, one of the most brutally closed off companies, is loved by developers? Microsoft is very responsive on Gi

by bmitc 4y ago

Why does Microsoft get labeled like this while Apple, one of the most brutally closed off companies, is loved by developers? Microsoft is very responsive on GitHub issues I have filed, and I have benefited a lot from their open source offerings, namely VS Code and F#.

ig-88ms 4y ago
Because people are still living in the 90s and even the best developers just love to gobble up Apple's propaganda bullshit.
- ozim 4y ago
  I don't think there is that much devs doing actual work in Apple ecosystem - they use Macbooks but not Swift or Objective-C and no one is using XCode for their day 2 day development. Just check StackOverflow 2021 survey - Swift is like 5%
- happymellon 4y ago
  Apple is absolutely awful. That doesn't make Microsoft's double-talk okay, Apple never pretended to :heart: opensource.
  - DeathArrow 4y ago
    >Apple never pretended to :heart: opensource. But they did. They claimed part of Mac OS, Darwin, is open source. Like Google like to brag about Android being Open Source even if you have to put a ton of proprietary software on top of the open source parts to make it usable.
    - happymellon 4y ago
      Claiming that part of Darwin is opensource, which it was, is not quite the same thing as claiming to love opensource, and yet slowly close it up once you have mindshare like with VSCode. Apple didn't take ownership and then start closing CUPS, but they have also never pretended to be a friend of OpenSouce. They haven't produced anything opensource since then. There have been a couple of projects, like their rebranding of KHTML that suited their purposes but they never donated time or money back, or even pretended to help upstream. If you look at the Asahi Linux on M processors, Apple don't hinder and may have arguably done things in a way to not block them but they certainly have not helped or even claimed that it was a good thing.
      - Someone 4y ago
        > Apple didn't take ownership and then start closing CUPS, but they have also never pretended to be a friend of OpenSouce. They haven't produced anything opensource since then. Two counter-examples: They open sourced Swift in 2015 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language)#H...), and Swift-DocC in 2021 (https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-docc/ https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-docc/) Apple bought CUPS in 2007 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS#History)
        happymellon 4y ago
        I'm not sure how they are counterpoints. Who would use a programming language that wasn't open? Except dot net devs. Which is the point. CUPS was critical infrastructure for Apple, so they bought it. Since it is GPL they couldn't close it, hence they abandoned it. Apple are not your friend, but they never claimed to be, you just might have an overlapping interest, Microsoft hold big "We Heart Linux" events.
        Someone 4y ago
        The claim was “They haven't produced anything opensource since then”. I think I clearly showed they have.
        oefrha 4y ago
        > Who would use a programming language that wasn't open? The vast majority of iOS developers. Swift 1.0 wasn’t open source, and IIRC when it was announced there wasn’t even a promise that it would be open source. I think Chris Lattner did signal they were willing to seriously consider it some time in the future; that was all. There is a lot of money to be made in iOS, so people will use whatever Apple forces them to use, whether it’s open source or not. If some would leave money on the table on ideological grounds, all the better for everyone else.
  - askvictor 4y ago
    They did kind of head that way in the early days of OSX, to try to bootstrap a development community by being close enough to Linux to make it easy enough to switch. I'd probably characterise them as having an abusive relationship with Open source.
    - danachow 4y ago
      This history doesn’t make sense - the early days of OSX predate widespread adoption of Linux. When OSX was released Linux 2.4 was just released and that was just the beginning of Linux becoming something interesting commercially in the data center (at the time Linux was more just slowly eroding incumbent commercial Unix - which is why Microsoft was concerned about it, since they had spent the 90s relying on commercial Unix vendors to fuck each other up) - there just wasn’t some huge commercial Linux community that Apple was trying to tap into - especially for a desktop operating system. The Darwin userland is BSD based after all. And while Apple made do with gcc, they’ve clearly never been too gung ho to get wrapped up with anything GPL related. If anything Apple offered Solaris, Irix refugees a viable desktop transition.
    - ratww 4y ago
      This part of the macOS developer community bootstrapped itself. Apple at the time was trying to sell Java WebObjects and Carbon/Cocoa in public. The proximity with Linux was an accident. NeXT is from the late 80s, pre Linux, and NeXT was the baggage OS X had to work with. They didn't strip out the Unix parts, but also didn't widely proclaim it was "close to Linux". It was mostly the developer community touting it as an advantage of macOS, with Apple later admitting "yeah yeah that's also cool" and later shipping Python and Ruby alongside Perl just for completion. Even when Apple clearly tried to help Homebrew by offering a Xcode-less toolchain there was not even a peep about the purpose of "Command Line Tools". It took them years to acknowledge it existed. Also, like the sibling response said, Linux only started being as widely used later than OS X.
      - askvictor 4y ago
        Interesting; I only had the perspective of being a Linux enthusiast at that time, and that's what it seemed like, but it's easy to forget that our numbers were quite small back then.
kadoban 4y ago
Apple is shit too, that's just a separate conversation.
egeozcan 4y ago
Apple is upfront with what's going on. You may not like it, but they are "honest" about it (with the disclaimer that corporations cannot be honest etc.). It, however, leaves a bad taste if you are running an open-source show, with the marketing to match but it becomes clear and clear that it's mostly for show. Perhaps one can make the same argument about Apple and privacy (that it's just for show) but Apple somehow could make it one of their value proposition, while IMHO Microsoft failed to do that with their open-source expansion. Always felt like a half-hearted attempt.
thejosh 4y ago
Loved by developers how? Because they own Macbooks?
- ozim 4y ago
  Basically yeah - you can show off that you are working in rich company (so by association you know who is making that sweet $$$$) because you have a new Macbook for dev work.
  - kelnos 4y ago
    That's not really love; that's just recognizing that a particular consumer product is a status symbol, and buying it to hold that status.
ozim 4y ago
While Swift might be open source - to effectively do something with it you still need to buy a Macbook or even iPhone, which as we know are expensive. To release any application in Apple ecosystem you have to pay for developer account each year. You might play around with stuff - but I don't believe anyone would be developing on their platform just for fun. Microsoft gives stuff away for free - loads of stuff - there is much more people who will play/try out/start some projects with free stuff. But then the more people the easier is to see ones that are not happy and would like more. Then this mass of people is active on multiple forums, not only on .NET dev subreddits.
- okamiueru 4y ago
  If only apple products were just expensive. For certain kinds of people, dev-tools/environment and OS are exceedingly frustrating to work with. I don't get why developers put up with it, well, other than the obvious market access.
  - ozim 4y ago
    I think it mostly boils down to that devs in Apple ecosystem get paid more and they can afford that stuff. Then as they see nice income stream - some inconvenience is written off as cost of doing business. Then it is just not that many of them.
kelnos 4y ago
I think Apple catches a lot of flak here for their practices, but they have a very strong, vocal fanboy community that MS has never had, and probably can never hope to have. Many Apple (especially iOS) developers seem to be just generally frustrated about the platform, but suck it up and deal with it because they have to if they want to be in the App Store. Additionally, I don't think Apple has been anywhere near as fervent as Microsoft about embracing open source. Sure, Darwin (a fairly tiny part of macOS/iOS) is open source, but Apple seems to only grudgingly embrace and use open source components when it suits their purposes. Consider how they've been shipping a super-old version of bash because they're paranoid about GPLv3, how they've been heavily involved in LLVM and clang (at least in part for licensing reasons), and how they barely mention anymore that WebKit is based on KHTML. And it's a safe bet that if KHTML hadn't been more permissively-licensed, Apple would have happily kept WebKit closed.

by bmitc 4y ago

ig-88ms 4y ago

Because people are still living in the 90s and even the best developers just love to gobble up Apple's propaganda bullshit.

ozim 4y ago
I don't think there is that much devs doing actual work in Apple ecosystem - they use Macbooks but not Swift or Objective-C and no one is using XCode for their day 2 day development. Just check StackOverflow 2021 survey - Swift is like 5%
happymellon 4y ago
Apple is absolutely awful. That doesn't make Microsoft's double-talk okay, Apple never pretended to :heart: opensource.
- DeathArrow 4y ago
  >Apple never pretended to :heart: opensource. But they did. They claimed part of Mac OS, Darwin, is open source. Like Google like to brag about Android being Open Source even if you have to put a ton of proprietary software on top of the open source parts to make it usable.
  - happymellon 4y ago
    Claiming that part of Darwin is opensource, which it was, is not quite the same thing as claiming to love opensource, and yet slowly close it up once you have mindshare like with VSCode. Apple didn't take ownership and then start closing CUPS, but they have also never pretended to be a friend of OpenSouce. They haven't produced anything opensource since then. There have been a couple of projects, like their rebranding of KHTML that suited their purposes but they never donated time or money back, or even pretended to help upstream. If you look at the Asahi Linux on M processors, Apple don't hinder and may have arguably done things in a way to not block them but they certainly have not helped or even claimed that it was a good thing.
    - Someone 4y ago
      > Apple didn't take ownership and then start closing CUPS, but they have also never pretended to be a friend of OpenSouce. They haven't produced anything opensource since then. Two counter-examples: They open sourced Swift in 2015 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language)#H...), and Swift-DocC in 2021 (https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-docc/ https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-docc/) Apple bought CUPS in 2007 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS#History)
      - happymellon 4y ago
        I'm not sure how they are counterpoints. Who would use a programming language that wasn't open? Except dot net devs. Which is the point. CUPS was critical infrastructure for Apple, so they bought it. Since it is GPL they couldn't close it, hence they abandoned it. Apple are not your friend, but they never claimed to be, you just might have an overlapping interest, Microsoft hold big "We Heart Linux" events.
        Someone 4y ago
        The claim was “They haven't produced anything opensource since then”. I think I clearly showed they have.
        oefrha 4y ago
        > Who would use a programming language that wasn't open? The vast majority of iOS developers. Swift 1.0 wasn’t open source, and IIRC when it was announced there wasn’t even a promise that it would be open source. I think Chris Lattner did signal they were willing to seriously consider it some time in the future; that was all. There is a lot of money to be made in iOS, so people will use whatever Apple forces them to use, whether it’s open source or not. If some would leave money on the table on ideological grounds, all the better for everyone else.
- askvictor 4y ago
  They did kind of head that way in the early days of OSX, to try to bootstrap a development community by being close enough to Linux to make it easy enough to switch. I'd probably characterise them as having an abusive relationship with Open source.
  - danachow 4y ago
    This history doesn’t make sense - the early days of OSX predate widespread adoption of Linux. When OSX was released Linux 2.4 was just released and that was just the beginning of Linux becoming something interesting commercially in the data center (at the time Linux was more just slowly eroding incumbent commercial Unix - which is why Microsoft was concerned about it, since they had spent the 90s relying on commercial Unix vendors to fuck each other up) - there just wasn’t some huge commercial Linux community that Apple was trying to tap into - especially for a desktop operating system. The Darwin userland is BSD based after all. And while Apple made do with gcc, they’ve clearly never been too gung ho to get wrapped up with anything GPL related. If anything Apple offered Solaris, Irix refugees a viable desktop transition.
  - ratww 4y ago
    This part of the macOS developer community bootstrapped itself. Apple at the time was trying to sell Java WebObjects and Carbon/Cocoa in public. The proximity with Linux was an accident. NeXT is from the late 80s, pre Linux, and NeXT was the baggage OS X had to work with. They didn't strip out the Unix parts, but also didn't widely proclaim it was "close to Linux". It was mostly the developer community touting it as an advantage of macOS, with Apple later admitting "yeah yeah that's also cool" and later shipping Python and Ruby alongside Perl just for completion. Even when Apple clearly tried to help Homebrew by offering a Xcode-less toolchain there was not even a peep about the purpose of "Command Line Tools". It took them years to acknowledge it existed. Also, like the sibling response said, Linux only started being as widely used later than OS X.
    - askvictor 4y ago
      Interesting; I only had the perspective of being a Linux enthusiast at that time, and that's what it seemed like, but it's easy to forget that our numbers were quite small back then.

kadoban 4y ago

Apple is shit too, that's just a separate conversation.

egeozcan 4y ago

Apple is upfront with what's going on. You may not like it, but they are "honest" about it (with the disclaimer that corporations cannot be honest etc.). It, however, leaves a bad taste if you are running an open-source show, with the marketing to match but it becomes clear and clear that it's mostly for show. Perhaps one can make the same argument about Apple and privacy (that it's just for show) but Apple somehow could make it one of their value proposition, while IMHO Microsoft failed to do that with their open-source expansion. Always felt like a half-hearted attempt.

thejosh 4y ago

Loved by developers how? Because they own Macbooks?

ozim 4y ago
Basically yeah - you can show off that you are working in rich company (so by association you know who is making that sweet $$$$) because you have a new Macbook for dev work.
- kelnos 4y ago
  That's not really love; that's just recognizing that a particular consumer product is a status symbol, and buying it to hold that status.

ozim 4y ago

While Swift might be open source - to effectively do something with it you still need to buy a Macbook or even iPhone, which as we know are expensive. To release any application in Apple ecosystem you have to pay for developer account each year. You might play around with stuff - but I don't believe anyone would be developing on their platform just for fun. Microsoft gives stuff away for free - loads of stuff - there is much more people who will play/try out/start some projects with free stuff. But then the more people the easier is to see ones that are not happy and would like more. Then this mass of people is active on multiple forums, not only on .NET dev subreddits.

okamiueru 4y ago
If only apple products were just expensive. For certain kinds of people, dev-tools/environment and OS are exceedingly frustrating to work with. I don't get why developers put up with it, well, other than the obvious market access.
- ozim 4y ago
  I think it mostly boils down to that devs in Apple ecosystem get paid more and they can afford that stuff. Then as they see nice income stream - some inconvenience is written off as cost of doing business. Then it is just not that many of them.

kelnos 4y ago

I think Apple catches a lot of flak here for their practices, but they have a very strong, vocal fanboy community that MS has never had, and probably can never hope to have. Many Apple (especially iOS) developers seem to be just generally frustrated about the platform, but suck it up and deal with it because they have to if they want to be in the App Store. Additionally, I don't think Apple has been anywhere near as fervent as Microsoft about embracing open source. Sure, Darwin (a fairly tiny part of macOS/iOS) is open source, but Apple seems to only grudgingly embrace and use open source components when it suits their purposes. Consider how they've been shipping a super-old version of bash because they're paranoid about GPLv3, how they've been heavily involved in LLVM and clang (at least in part for licensing reasons), and how they barely mention anymore that WebKit is based on KHTML. And it's a safe bet that if KHTML hadn't been more permissively-licensed, Apple would have happily kept WebKit closed.