I think Rentzsch is being somewhere between helpful and sarcastic. Apple could provide newer libssl dylibs and programmers should link against specific version

I think Rentzsch is being somewhere between helpful and sarcastic. Apple could provide newer libssl dylibs and programmers should link against specific versions. You could argue the only mistake in this instance is the existence of the generic libssl.dylib symlink which will need to point to 0.9.8 in perpetuity. Exactly why Apple have given up on OpenSSL is anyone's guess (since Apple aren't saying -- hence Rentzsch's post). You could insert a conspiracy theory but my guess is that they can't be bothered curating and patching another OpenSSL library version since they themselves only ever use libcrypto. Apple could -- and do -- security patch libssl.0.9.8.dylib. So while you will never go from 0.9.8 to 1.0.1 automatically, you could automatically go from 0.9.8r to 0.9.8s automatically.