4 ms·

I wonder if anyone at Apple is working on this secretly.

• tasty_freeze 4y ago
  I sure hope not, as it would compromise all the legitimate reverse engineering being done on it.
  • uoaei 4y ago
    "Compromise"? "Legitimate"?
    • soneil 4y ago
      "clean room" reverse engineering really benefits from the room being clean. I'm not sure how much this applies to Asahi's efforts, but if you're working on reactos or wine, having been exposed to microsoft's source makes you tainted. So to bulk out the grandparent's claim - I'd really like if there was an internal effort that was sanctioned on a "keep our name out of it" grounds.
      • uoaei 4y ago
        But why would that be a concern? Why isn't Apple's involvement welcomed for the expertise, rather than maligned for some arbitrary notion of "cleanliness" in the process?
        • MBCook 4y ago
          If Apple was open about it and willing to license stuff as necessary, it would be fine. But they’re not. We know that because they aren’t doing it. So if an Apple employee were to contribute anything it would be some sort of license violation and taint the kernel’s licensing and the (legal) safety of the project. To the degree Apple is involved in this, it can’t be more than “benevolent neglect” of allowing this to happen and setting things up in such a way that it’s possible in the first place. They are never going to answer questions or give any source code.
          • uoaei 4y ago
            Ah I see. I had understood the Apple employee participating surreptitiously as them doing so outside of their employment contract (outside of working hours, not on company property, etc.) so was confused about why such contributions would be banned.
            • saagarjha 4y ago
              At-will employment contracts typically do not have exemptions for "outside of working hours" or "not on company property". They apply 100% of the time, when legally permissible.
  • simondotau 4y ago
    There's an important distinction to be made between helping to make it work (e.g. explaining how the bootloader is implemented, or perhaps offering occasional code bug fixes) and directly revealing Apple intellectual property by supplying internal documentation or code written with the knowledge of internal documentation. I'm sure there are people at Apple itching to provide documentation for things like the GPU. But given the minefield which is GPU patents I honestly don't blame Apple for deciding there's insufficient upside to revealing anything they don't have to.
• rwalle 4y ago
  My understanding is that nobody dares to do that -- Apple is likely to immediately terminate their employment if they found out about it
  • iasay 4y ago
    Well the trick is not getting found out which isn’t particularly difficult.
    • MBCook 4y ago
      Given the incredibly specialized knowledge that Apple employee would have I think it would be pretty easy to find them fast. There are just very very few people in the world who know the full secrets of how this stuff works.