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Apple ResearchKit on GitHub

335 points by narfz 11y ago

xasos 11y ago
Here's a link to the current project's source if anyone is interested: https://github.com/researchkit https://github.com/researchkit Love that Apple is going open-source, and hopefully they do this for more of their code (pssssttt...Swift)
- baldfat 11y ago
  EDIT (To Clarify) Warning I am Strongly Anti-Apple Bias: Apple has a fairly decent Open Source history. http://www.opensource.apple.com http://www.opensource.apple.com There is things to complain about but there are more I am concerned with in regards to Open Source (Oracle). EDIT: I don't like Apple's products or the way the conduct business BUT I think they have done more good for Open Source than bad.
  - suyash 11y ago
    I can sense some Strong Anti-Oracle Bias here. Oracle is one of the major contributor to open source, see the lineup here, chances are you're using some of them: https://oss.oracle.com/ https://oss.oracle.com/ starts with Java
    - Joky 11y ago
      Java, is it the thing they used to sue on API copyright? Good demonstration of how to mess with "open-source" IMO. If you remove what they got from Sun, what reminds?
      - suyash 11y ago
        That is a different topic altogether. I'm referring to Open JDK. Ever heard of the fasted embedded database engine called Berkeley DB. Doesn't matter came from where, Sun or what ever is still being developed and contributed in the open source environment.
        Joky 11y ago
        I disagree, it matters because acquiring a technology that has an existing open-source community (that can fork your codebase...) is not the same things as releasing your internally developed technology as open-source and build a community around. Looking at OpenOffice or MySQL, it does not seem that Oracle had a great success with open-source communities. And the Java topic is not different altogether, it is disturbing to claim to be "open-source friendly" when you release an open-source implementation for the JVM but sue on the basis that the API is copyrighted. What is off-topic it talking about Oracle at all in this thread ;-)
        feld 11y ago
        I hope you're joking. BerkleyDB is a mess. From Wikipedia: ----- Oracle Corporation makes versions 2.0 and higher of Berkeley DB available under a dual license.[15] The sleepycat license license is a 2-clause BSD license with an additional copyleft clause similar to the GNU GPL version 2's Section 3, requiring source code of an application using Berkeley DB to be made available for a nominal fee. As of Berkeley DB release 6.0, the Oracle Corporation has relicensed Berkeley DB under the GNU AGPL v3.[16] As of July 2011, Oracle's list price for non-copyleft Berkeley DB licenses varies between 900 and 13,800 USD per processor. -----
        duskwuff 11y ago
        That's the AGPL, mind you. One of the most ridiculous and restrictive "open-source" licenses created; it's not really intended to be applied to libraries, and is incompatible with every other license in existence, including even the standard GPL. Applying it to a library makes the open-source version effectively unusable. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html
      - pjmlp 11y ago
        Sun would have sued Google if they had the money for the lawyers[0]. Initially I was partnering with Google, but now I side with Oracle's decision, as it is now proven how Google just pulled a Microsoft and fragmented the Java eco-system. Now we are stuck with partial Java 7 assuming 4.4 devices, good luck using try-with resources in lower versions and no plan for future versions as of the Android Developers Fireside at Google IO 2014. The Android team seems more interested in porting the whole Eclipse/Ant infrastructure, building more Google APIs or making Android run everywhere instead of improving the language support. [0] http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/my_attitude_on_oracle_v#comments http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/my_attitude_on_oracle...
        pyre 11y ago
        > Initially I was partnering with Google, but now I side with Oracle's decision, as it is now proven how Google just pulled a Microsoft and fragmented the Java eco-system. I'm not sure that's a good enough reason so say that it's "ok" to claim that an API is copyrightable. The idea that I might have to ask someone permission just to make API-compatible alternate implementation seems ridiculous.
        magicalist 11y ago
        > Sun would have sued Google if they had the money for the lawyers[0]. Actually: > Just because Sun didn't have patent suits in our genetic code doesn't mean we didn't feel wronged implies just the opposite. The rest of your post has nothing to do with whether APIs should be copyrightable or not.
        baldfat 11y ago
        Actually another post on Sun wouldn't have sued. Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz testified on behave of Google. He even blogged a congratulations to Google for releasing Android running Java. http://web.archive.org/web/20101023072550/http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/congratulations_google http://web.archive.org/web/20101023072550/http://blogs.sun.c... http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/26/2977858/former-sun-ceo-jonathan-schwartz-testifies-for-google-oracle-trial http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/26/2977858/former-sun-ceo-jon...
      - yellowapple 11y ago
        MySQL, which - as one of the worst victims of Oracle's sidaM Touch - ended up being forked into MariaDB, and is now effectively irrelevant outside of legacy deployments since anyone who knows what they're doing has switched to PostgreSQL and anyone who doesn't know what they're doing has switched to MongoDB. MySQL as packaged by Oracle is quite literally a corpse. MariaDB is a reanimated corpse. And such is the tale of an open-source product acquired by a multi-billion-dollar company who made those multiple billions of dollars entirely on selling a commercial product against which the open-source product competed. Competition-elimination-by-acquisition at its finest.
        SEJeff 11y ago
        "MariaDB is a reanimated corpse" - Citation Needed Looks like to me, like it is far from a corpse: https://github.com/MariaDB/server/commits/10.1 https://github.com/MariaDB/server/commits/10.1 I agree with you on both PostgreSQL and MongoDB, but saying MariaDB is a corpse is ignorant at best.
        yellowapple 11y ago
        That would be the "reanimated" part of "reanimated corpse"; I think you've significantly misinterpreted my point there. MariaDB is not dead; it's undead. A zombie. Or perhaps resurrected and now serving as a database messiah. Whatever the case, it's the end-result of something that's dead (MySQL) no longer being dead.
      - s73v3r 11y ago
        Open source doesn't mean you get to ignore the license.
        suyash 11y ago
        Exactly folks are confused between freeware and open source software.
    - jsmthrowaway 11y ago
      It doesn't take anti-Oracle bias to reflect upon OpenSolaris and other direct assaults on open source undertaken by the company. Defend them all you want, you're still on the wrong side. Trust them to do the right thing at your peril.
    - yellowapple 11y ago
      Hahahahahahahahaha. Fucking no. Effectively all of Oracle's "open source" things come from Sun Microsystems, upon which Oracle happily latched onto and sucked dry. Oracle has what's called the "sidaM Touch". It's like the Midas Touch, but instead of gold, everything Oracle touches turns to shit: Java -> shit (though maybe slightly less so now). Solaris -> shit. OpenSolaris -> shit, now dead (thank the Lord for illumos). OpenOffice -> shit. GridEngine -> shit. Lustre -> almost became shit and died; would have if it weren't for the Oracle-side devs jumping ship. NetBeans -> in the process of becoming shit. MySQL -> shit (though it pretty much already was; somehow, though, Oracle managed to make that worse and prompt the existence of MariaDB); I realize this wasn't Sun's, but it's still an open-source project that Oracle assaulted, robbed, and left to die on the cold streets by the dock where Larry Ellison's (admittedly pretty badass) sailboat is docked. OpenDS -> dead (though it was mercifully forked into OpenDJ). Project Wonderland -> now limping around as "Open Wonderland" after Oracle forcibly amputated its leg. By some miracle, the only things that haven't completely turned to shit or died (or both) yet are Virtualbox and SPARC (though OpenSPARC is effectively dead since Oracle didn't continue it).
      - pm 11y ago
        I call the opposite of the Midas touch the Romero touch myself.
      - rimantas 11y ago
        However, even before MySQL was acquired by Sun the most serious engine—InnoDB which got bought by Oracle in 2005 but still kept open source.
        yellowapple 11y ago
        MySQL wasn't acquired by Sun; that was a direct acquisition by Oracle in order to snuff out the most significant player in the realm of open-source SQL databases (and thus snuff out one of the most significant competitors to Oracle's flagship, Oracle DB). As a result, MySQL is effectively dead outside of legacy deployments that haven't migrated to PostgreSQL, MariaDB, or one of the NoSQL monstrosities like MongoDB. Even InnoDB was eventually forked; MariaDB and Percona both use XtraDB nowadays, probably because they didn't feel like being tied to something that - like every other open-source project Oracle has owned - would be fated to eventually wither and die.
    - baldfat 11y ago
      > Sense some Strong Anti-Oracle Bias here Use to be a System Librarian and had to run Oracle DB. Issues: 1. OpenOffice gave it to Apache Foundation and not LibreOffice 2. MySQL is abandoned by many major users but we have MariaDB 3. Java suite against Google to make API Copyright-able 4. Oracle's White Paper stating that Open Source cost more and is less reliable. 5. Oracle Linux (Just a rip off of Red Hat) 6. KSplice bought by Oracle none of us gets to use re-bootless kernel patches with that technology since it has no development after it was bought 3 years ago. EDIT (FALSER: Was going off the top of my head) It is available to people who purchase support convert to Oracle Linux and they are making updates to legacy customers (Which is good to know)) corrected bellow. I could go on about Oracle :) So yes a bias against Oracle's Open Source stances and activities.
      - fragmede 11y ago
        Just to clarify, legacy Ksplice customers are still supported under their original contracts, Ksplice is available to new customers with Oracle Premier Support, and finally, Ksplice updates are still being provided for free for all current Ubuntu and Fedora distros. Disclaimer: I'm on the Ksplice team.
    - jshevek 11y ago
      Publishing lots of code under an OS license does NOT make one a valued contributor to the open source world, especially when you have a history of anti-OS litigation.
  - nnutter 11y ago
    "Strongly Anti-Apple Bias here" was something you assumed that may or may not be correct.
    - Swizec 11y ago
      I think baldfat was talking about themselves. They've got a strong anti-Apple bias, but still think Apple's got a decent history of opensource.
      - nnutter 11y ago
        I'm laughing at the irony of my own comment.
  - frewsxcv 11y ago
    Complying with copyright is not a great example of "Open Source history"
    - jws 11y ago
      At least the first four in the OS X 10.10 tree are apple original software, not just source dumps of other people's OSS products. Ok, that's terrible statistics since the files are alphabetized and Apple comes early. But take a look through there at the copyright owners and you'll see lots of original software released as open source.
    - skrpwr 11y ago
      Complying with copyright is the entire premise of copyleft aka the GPL.
    - Argorak 11y ago
      Apple has funded clang and LLVM, maintains CUPS, funded MacRuby for a while and packaged a lot of OS Software for their system, promoting it. Not all is gold, but that's certainly more than "complying with copyright".
  - xasos 11y ago
    I think now that it's on GitHub, it's a lot more accessible and easier for developers to start pulling the source
  - criley2 11y ago
    "Apple has a fairly decent Open Source history." To me, this is like calling someone who occasionally eats a vegan diet a "Fairly decent Vegan". No, if you eat meat or cheese on a regular basis you're a terrible Vegan! Just because Apple releases the source code as read-only doesn't really make them fairly decent with open source. To me, if you're not willing to pull commits from outside your walled garden or allow external forks of your technologies, then you're terrible at open source. Sure, you technically checked off the very first checkbox ("make source available") but you stopped there. That's not a success, that's a stillborn effort... Heck, when I look at the wikipedia entry for Open Source, the first line is: "In production and development, open source as a development model promotes a universal access via a free license to a product's design or blueprint, and universal redistribution of that design or blueprint, including subsequent improvements to it by anyone." Which I don't think Apple is really engaging with any of the OSS spirit on any level. I mean is that what open source is now? As long as the source code is technically viewable, it's "open source software" now?
    - CHY872 11y ago
      The Wikipedia article does not mean that they have to reincorporate the changes of others into their code. Nevertheless, they are doing so. https://github.com/ResearchKit/ResearchKit/pull/20 https://github.com/ResearchKit/ResearchKit/pull/20
    - yellowapple 11y ago
      > To me, if you're not willing to pull commits from outside your walled garden or allow external forks of your technologies, then you're terrible at open source. Sure, you technically checked off the very first checkbox ("make source available") but you stopped there. That's not a success, that's a stillborn effort... That's still significantly better than what a lot of big "open-source" companies do. Not that I disagree with you. Just putting things into perspective.
    - jshevek 11y ago
      Why is this downvoted? His points are valid. Apple's business models are hostile towards open source software in most cases.
  - saurik 11y ago
    When Apple stops releasing things on that website for iOS and Xcode (and yes: they do still have some things that are at least LGPL in those distributions, and no: it is not sufficient to give me very-similar-but-slightly-different code from OS X) only when I get around to making a public statement (which I absolutely hate doing) over things they don't send me when I request them via email, maybe they will have some right to getting the praise you are deciding to lavish. (Speaking of which, I have given them months to respond to my most recent requests for a bunch of things; I have gotten so used to Apple giving open source the finger, and thereby have backup plans involving disassembles for most of the things I care about at this point, I had forgotten to even follow up on them failing to release anything :/.) (As for Oracle, I think Apple is much more harmful, as at least Oracle is upfront about where you stand, so the greater community knows to handle them with care and avoid putting them in the center of something they will later come to regret.)
  - jheriko 11y ago
    this is awesome, never knew it was there. i can never forget the freetype hinting death trap... that thing persisted for too long, and was unreasonable to start with. i think i can forgive now that i have seen this. :) EDIT: i take it back, i got the wrong end of the stick, it looks like they have open sourced important things, but actually its a list of nothing.
bthomas 11y ago
Is there anything about App Store guidelines? Curious if Apple is going to require any kind of IRB approval first.
- huxley 11y ago
  Just to help those that aren't familiar with the acronym: IRB = institutional review board, which commonly also includes ethics committees http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_review_board http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_review_board
- semi-extrinsic 11y ago
  The other big issue I see is: if you try to do any kind of population or cohort study with this, how on earth do you correct for the bias that comes from only sampling iPhone users? It's borderline facetious to claim that there is no sampling bias, and it will be a nightmare to control for.
  - Fomite 11y ago
    My guess is that some of this will make field collection with iOS devices easier, rather than relying on the user's device.
richerlariviere 11y ago
I hope they will open Swift, like Microsoft is doing with C#.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - apenguin 11y ago
    If I develop something and get it standardized, it's no longer my technology?
  - JimmaDaRustla 11y ago
    C# was fully designed and developed by Microsoft. > It was developed by Microsoft within its .NET initiative and later approved as a standard by Ecma (ECMA-334) and ISO (ISO/IEC 23270:2006). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_Sharp_%28programming_language%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_Sharp_%28programming_language...
  - richerlariviere 11y ago
    What about Dart language? It's a standard since Google released the first production-ready version
  - meragrin 11y ago
    I don't see anything about async/await, extension methods, or lambdas. C# has quite a few additions since 2006. I would hate to go back to C# 2. C# 5 is the current and C# 6 coming very soon.
    - noblethrasher 11y ago
      I often have to use C# 2.0 because that's the version that the SQL Server 2005 CLR understands. It turns out not to be so bad since you still have closures (in the form of anonymous delegates), generics, and user-defined operators. Generics and user-defined conversion operators are powerful enough to nicely simulate Haskell's type classes (or Scala's traits), which, in my opinion, is a bigger deal than higher-order functions and 3.0+'s version of “type inferencing”.
DannyBee 11y ago
While it's wonderful they did this, as a short rant: I hate when companies just feel the urge to add a random sentence or two to an existing license, particularly in cases like these: "3. Neither the name of the copyright holder(s) nor the names of any contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission. No license is granted to the trademarks of the copyright holders even if such marks are included in this software." The first sentence is BSD, they added the second sentence. The problem with this is a few-fold. Either this clause is needed for the entire world (since BSD is used for trademark'd software all the time), or it's not needed at all. It turns out, in fact, arguments over trademark inclusion due to OSS licensing has been made before, and nobody has ever won on this before[1] So other than some lawyer just "not being satisfied unless they added stuff to the license", all this does is make a gratuitously different license that A. can't be merged with other licenses (since it requires you reproduce this condition text, and this condition text is not the same anymore as the other ones) B. Isn't actually the BSD license, and was deliberately changed, so ends up worse in court since now the other side can reasonably argue that the same precedent should't apply. C. Makes analyzing compatibility with other licenses more difficult and annoying. [1] Since they are very clearly licenses about the software work, not trademarks, and you can't stop someone from saying "this uses apple's researchkit" regardless of what trademarks you have or what you write in this license, anyway.
- baddox 11y ago
  > Either this clause is needed for the entire world (since BSD is used for trademark'd software all the time), or it's not needed at all. I'm not sure I follow your argument. Obviously, different individuals/organizations desire different licenses for the software they produce. If that wasn't the case, one could argue that only one software license should exist. Also, as we all know, software licenses are a fairly tricky legal matter. Perhaps Apple's lawyers just decided that adding that sentence is safer.
  - hobarrera 11y ago
    The problem is this has different wording, not different legal consequences.
atmosx 11y ago
I wonder if I can use this along with a raspberry Pi & Arduino to offer automated customized services to my patients. E.g. build a system with RFID cards that uses sensors to automatically measure blood pressure, etc[1] and keep history. ps. Too many interesting possibilities out there and too little time to pursue them! [1] http://www.cooking-hacks.com/documentation/tutorials/ehealth-biometric-sensor-platform-arduino-raspberry-pi-medical http://www.cooking-hacks.com/documentation/tutorials/ehealth...
jordanbrown 11y ago
Would be great to see them merge the pull request for cocoa pod support.
- k-mcgrady 11y ago
  Looks like the devs jumped in on the comments on the PR and want to do it.
talles 11y ago
Is this the first thing of Apple on GitHub? (is the first one that I recall seeing)
- smackfu 11y ago
  They have WebKit on self-hosted git, but not GitHub.
orbitur 11y ago
Interesting that this framework isn't written in Swift.
- bpicolo 11y ago
  Not really. One, I bet they've been working on it for a long while, and two, I bet it's a lot easier for them to generate Swift bindings for objective c than vice versa.
TheSoftwareGuy 11y ago
GitHub says its 99.7% Objective-C, why didn't they use swift?
- billyhoffman 11y ago
  Swift was released to the public 7 months ago. The vast majority of Apple's own employee's didn't know it existed until it was publicly announced. Research Kit was announced 6 months after Swift. Seems like a bit of a stretch...
  - TheSoftwareGuy 11y ago
    Makes sense.
InverseSandwich 11y ago
Researchkit is a rather cool idea - it will be interesting to see if it integrates with wearables.
- ci5er 11y ago
  That's Healthkit land. It should.
qzervaas 11y ago
It's interesting to see how code is structured when it comes from Apple (or vendors they're working closely with). Surprising some of their best practices aren't followed, such as hard-coding English strings instead of using something like NSLocalizedString() (e.g. https://github.com/ResearchKit/GlucoSuccess/blob/master/Diabetes/TasksAndSteps/EnterWeight/APHEnterWeightTaskViewController.m https://github.com/ResearchKit/GlucoSuccess/blob/master/Diab...)
- jshevek 11y ago
  Surprising? After learning of apple's goto bug, I'm never surprised to read about apple's failure to follow best practices.
  - qzervaas 11y ago
    Sure, but that was an isolated mistake, whereas using NSLocalizedString() just becomes habit after a while. It's jarring when you see hard-coded English strings in any iOS code. Android does a much better job of pushing developers to localizing strings. One big thing I don't like about iOS is even if you have a base language, you need to duplicate all strings in any subsequent languages. (I often have a "US English" and "Australian English", so trivial changes require changes in two files). On Android, the language files extend the base file, so you can just override favourite/favorite labour/labor type strings without having to duplicate everything. (Obviously you can script / auto-generate language files, but that's not the default position).
    - jshevek 11y ago
      I agree with you what you are saying about string localization. Separately, I find that people tend to assume (for some reason?) that big successful companies that write lots of software will also write quality software. They have the money for it! But its often not the case. Look at Microsoft in the late 90s. Look at Apple these past few years. Maybe the people at the top sometimes feel they no longer _need_ to write quality software, because they are at the top? The goto fail bug is a singular mistake, but I'm not convinced it was an isolated mistake. I've worked with teams of amateurs that had code quality practices sufficient to prevent such a bug; and yet apple included this in a product, and left it there for a long time before it was fixed. It suggests, to me, organizational issues.
beshrkayali 11y ago
Sloppy scripting http://cl.ly/image/1L2G1V3C0A08 http://cl.ly/image/1L2G1V3C0A08 :P (Edit: added emoticon for joke emphasis)
- 8ig8 11y ago
  I think we've all done something along those lines. I'm not sure if this counts, but recently HN asked us to avoid gratuitous negativity... http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-hacker-news-guideline http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-hacker-news-guideline
  - beshrkayali 11y ago
    I just thought it's a bit funny, wasn't trying to be negative. Yes, we've all done something similar at some point.
- akoeplinger 11y ago
  I chuckled at this as well, so I filed an issue: https://github.com/ResearchKit/ResearchKit/issues/9 https://github.com/ResearchKit/ResearchKit/issues/9 Should be fixed by now :)
jebblue 11y ago
I'm not an Apple fan but this is very professionally done, it reminds me of the work an Orthopedic Sureon had me do for him years ago when I see the layout: http://researchkit.github.io/docs/docs/Overview/GuideOverview.html http://researchkit.github.io/docs/docs/Overview/GuideOvervie... The flow is consistent, step 1, step 2, etc. Something else that Apple makes I'm a fan of, CUPS Printing. It's also very professionally done. If we could only convince Apple to go Linux on everything!
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- stephenr 11y ago
  Why does the kernel matter so much to you?
  - yellowapple 11y ago
    He probably just doesn't like Mach. I don't blame 'im; L4 is far superior.
  - jebblue 11y ago
    I guess I was expressing that the stuff that Apple Open Sources seems genuine, legit, honest and I admire that. I guess as I get older I realize (sorry for all the I's) that maybe I should give Apple a second look, on all fronts.
    - stephenr 11y ago
      Sure, that makes sense, I just don't quite understand the "convince Apple to go Linux on everything" bit?? In terms of userland tools, OS X has pretty good compatibility with an average Linux distro (yes there are obvious differences between *BSD and GNU implementations of various tools). Personally I think you should give Apple a(nother) look in terms of a productive workstation machine, even if that's paired with/using services from/developing systems for Linux-based servers.
    - ndnichols 11y ago
pistle 11y ago
It's a start! There is big space for improvement in supporting the complexities of research studies, but this can definitely be a jumping-off and may well support broad consistencies in design and implementation. There would still be a massive effort to implement most of the requirements of a research study. But, at least the iOS UI implementation and some on-ramps via ActiveSteps would be eased.

335 points by narfz 11y ago

xasos 11y ago

Here's a link to the current project's source if anyone is interested: https://github.com/researchkit https://github.com/researchkit Love that Apple is going open-source, and hopefully they do this for more of their code (pssssttt...Swift)

baldfat 11y ago
EDIT (To Clarify) Warning I am Strongly Anti-Apple Bias: Apple has a fairly decent Open Source history. http://www.opensource.apple.com http://www.opensource.apple.com There is things to complain about but there are more I am concerned with in regards to Open Source (Oracle). EDIT: I don't like Apple's products or the way the conduct business BUT I think they have done more good for Open Source than bad.
- suyash 11y ago
  I can sense some Strong Anti-Oracle Bias here. Oracle is one of the major contributor to open source, see the lineup here, chances are you're using some of them: https://oss.oracle.com/ https://oss.oracle.com/ starts with Java
  - Joky 11y ago
    Java, is it the thing they used to sue on API copyright? Good demonstration of how to mess with "open-source" IMO. If you remove what they got from Sun, what reminds?
    - suyash 11y ago
      That is a different topic altogether. I'm referring to Open JDK. Ever heard of the fasted embedded database engine called Berkeley DB. Doesn't matter came from where, Sun or what ever is still being developed and contributed in the open source environment.
      - Joky 11y ago
        I disagree, it matters because acquiring a technology that has an existing open-source community (that can fork your codebase...) is not the same things as releasing your internally developed technology as open-source and build a community around. Looking at OpenOffice or MySQL, it does not seem that Oracle had a great success with open-source communities. And the Java topic is not different altogether, it is disturbing to claim to be "open-source friendly" when you release an open-source implementation for the JVM but sue on the basis that the API is copyrighted. What is off-topic it talking about Oracle at all in this thread ;-)
      - feld 11y ago
        I hope you're joking. BerkleyDB is a mess. From Wikipedia: ----- Oracle Corporation makes versions 2.0 and higher of Berkeley DB available under a dual license.[15] The sleepycat license license is a 2-clause BSD license with an additional copyleft clause similar to the GNU GPL version 2's Section 3, requiring source code of an application using Berkeley DB to be made available for a nominal fee. As of Berkeley DB release 6.0, the Oracle Corporation has relicensed Berkeley DB under the GNU AGPL v3.[16] As of July 2011, Oracle's list price for non-copyleft Berkeley DB licenses varies between 900 and 13,800 USD per processor. -----
        duskwuff 11y ago
        That's the AGPL, mind you. One of the most ridiculous and restrictive "open-source" licenses created; it's not really intended to be applied to libraries, and is incompatible with every other license in existence, including even the standard GPL. Applying it to a library makes the open-source version effectively unusable. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      Sun would have sued Google if they had the money for the lawyers[0]. Initially I was partnering with Google, but now I side with Oracle's decision, as it is now proven how Google just pulled a Microsoft and fragmented the Java eco-system. Now we are stuck with partial Java 7 assuming 4.4 devices, good luck using try-with resources in lower versions and no plan for future versions as of the Android Developers Fireside at Google IO 2014. The Android team seems more interested in porting the whole Eclipse/Ant infrastructure, building more Google APIs or making Android run everywhere instead of improving the language support. [0] http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/my_attitude_on_oracle_v#comments http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/my_attitude_on_oracle...
      - pyre 11y ago
        > Initially I was partnering with Google, but now I side with Oracle's decision, as it is now proven how Google just pulled a Microsoft and fragmented the Java eco-system. I'm not sure that's a good enough reason so say that it's "ok" to claim that an API is copyrightable. The idea that I might have to ask someone permission just to make API-compatible alternate implementation seems ridiculous.
      - magicalist 11y ago
        > Sun would have sued Google if they had the money for the lawyers[0]. Actually: > Just because Sun didn't have patent suits in our genetic code doesn't mean we didn't feel wronged implies just the opposite. The rest of your post has nothing to do with whether APIs should be copyrightable or not.
      - baldfat 11y ago
        Actually another post on Sun wouldn't have sued. Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz testified on behave of Google. He even blogged a congratulations to Google for releasing Android running Java. http://web.archive.org/web/20101023072550/http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/congratulations_google http://web.archive.org/web/20101023072550/http://blogs.sun.c... http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/26/2977858/former-sun-ceo-jonathan-schwartz-testifies-for-google-oracle-trial http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/26/2977858/former-sun-ceo-jon...
    - yellowapple 11y ago
      MySQL, which - as one of the worst victims of Oracle's sidaM Touch - ended up being forked into MariaDB, and is now effectively irrelevant outside of legacy deployments since anyone who knows what they're doing has switched to PostgreSQL and anyone who doesn't know what they're doing has switched to MongoDB. MySQL as packaged by Oracle is quite literally a corpse. MariaDB is a reanimated corpse. And such is the tale of an open-source product acquired by a multi-billion-dollar company who made those multiple billions of dollars entirely on selling a commercial product against which the open-source product competed. Competition-elimination-by-acquisition at its finest.
      - SEJeff 11y ago
        "MariaDB is a reanimated corpse" - Citation Needed Looks like to me, like it is far from a corpse: https://github.com/MariaDB/server/commits/10.1 https://github.com/MariaDB/server/commits/10.1 I agree with you on both PostgreSQL and MongoDB, but saying MariaDB is a corpse is ignorant at best.
        yellowapple 11y ago
        That would be the "reanimated" part of "reanimated corpse"; I think you've significantly misinterpreted my point there. MariaDB is not dead; it's undead. A zombie. Or perhaps resurrected and now serving as a database messiah. Whatever the case, it's the end-result of something that's dead (MySQL) no longer being dead.
    - s73v3r 11y ago
      Open source doesn't mean you get to ignore the license.
      - suyash 11y ago
        Exactly folks are confused between freeware and open source software.
  - jsmthrowaway 11y ago
    It doesn't take anti-Oracle bias to reflect upon OpenSolaris and other direct assaults on open source undertaken by the company. Defend them all you want, you're still on the wrong side. Trust them to do the right thing at your peril.
  - yellowapple 11y ago
    Hahahahahahahahaha. Fucking no. Effectively all of Oracle's "open source" things come from Sun Microsystems, upon which Oracle happily latched onto and sucked dry. Oracle has what's called the "sidaM Touch". It's like the Midas Touch, but instead of gold, everything Oracle touches turns to shit: Java -> shit (though maybe slightly less so now). Solaris -> shit. OpenSolaris -> shit, now dead (thank the Lord for illumos). OpenOffice -> shit. GridEngine -> shit. Lustre -> almost became shit and died; would have if it weren't for the Oracle-side devs jumping ship. NetBeans -> in the process of becoming shit. MySQL -> shit (though it pretty much already was; somehow, though, Oracle managed to make that worse and prompt the existence of MariaDB); I realize this wasn't Sun's, but it's still an open-source project that Oracle assaulted, robbed, and left to die on the cold streets by the dock where Larry Ellison's (admittedly pretty badass) sailboat is docked. OpenDS -> dead (though it was mercifully forked into OpenDJ). Project Wonderland -> now limping around as "Open Wonderland" after Oracle forcibly amputated its leg. By some miracle, the only things that haven't completely turned to shit or died (or both) yet are Virtualbox and SPARC (though OpenSPARC is effectively dead since Oracle didn't continue it).
    - pm 11y ago
      I call the opposite of the Midas touch the Romero touch myself.
    - rimantas 11y ago
      However, even before MySQL was acquired by Sun the most serious engine—InnoDB which got bought by Oracle in 2005 but still kept open source.
      - yellowapple 11y ago
        MySQL wasn't acquired by Sun; that was a direct acquisition by Oracle in order to snuff out the most significant player in the realm of open-source SQL databases (and thus snuff out one of the most significant competitors to Oracle's flagship, Oracle DB). As a result, MySQL is effectively dead outside of legacy deployments that haven't migrated to PostgreSQL, MariaDB, or one of the NoSQL monstrosities like MongoDB. Even InnoDB was eventually forked; MariaDB and Percona both use XtraDB nowadays, probably because they didn't feel like being tied to something that - like every other open-source project Oracle has owned - would be fated to eventually wither and die.
  - baldfat 11y ago
    > Sense some Strong Anti-Oracle Bias here Use to be a System Librarian and had to run Oracle DB. Issues: 1. OpenOffice gave it to Apache Foundation and not LibreOffice 2. MySQL is abandoned by many major users but we have MariaDB 3. Java suite against Google to make API Copyright-able 4. Oracle's White Paper stating that Open Source cost more and is less reliable. 5. Oracle Linux (Just a rip off of Red Hat) 6. KSplice bought by Oracle none of us gets to use re-bootless kernel patches with that technology since it has no development after it was bought 3 years ago. EDIT (FALSER: Was going off the top of my head) It is available to people who purchase support convert to Oracle Linux and they are making updates to legacy customers (Which is good to know)) corrected bellow. I could go on about Oracle :) So yes a bias against Oracle's Open Source stances and activities.
    - fragmede 11y ago
      Just to clarify, legacy Ksplice customers are still supported under their original contracts, Ksplice is available to new customers with Oracle Premier Support, and finally, Ksplice updates are still being provided for free for all current Ubuntu and Fedora distros. Disclaimer: I'm on the Ksplice team.
  - jshevek 11y ago
    Publishing lots of code under an OS license does NOT make one a valued contributor to the open source world, especially when you have a history of anti-OS litigation.
- nnutter 11y ago
  "Strongly Anti-Apple Bias here" was something you assumed that may or may not be correct.
  - Swizec 11y ago
    I think baldfat was talking about themselves. They've got a strong anti-Apple bias, but still think Apple's got a decent history of opensource.
    - nnutter 11y ago
      I'm laughing at the irony of my own comment.
- frewsxcv 11y ago
  Complying with copyright is not a great example of "Open Source history"
  - jws 11y ago
    At least the first four in the OS X 10.10 tree are apple original software, not just source dumps of other people's OSS products. Ok, that's terrible statistics since the files are alphabetized and Apple comes early. But take a look through there at the copyright owners and you'll see lots of original software released as open source.
  - skrpwr 11y ago
    Complying with copyright is the entire premise of copyleft aka the GPL.
  - Argorak 11y ago
    Apple has funded clang and LLVM, maintains CUPS, funded MacRuby for a while and packaged a lot of OS Software for their system, promoting it. Not all is gold, but that's certainly more than "complying with copyright".
- xasos 11y ago
  I think now that it's on GitHub, it's a lot more accessible and easier for developers to start pulling the source
- criley2 11y ago
  "Apple has a fairly decent Open Source history." To me, this is like calling someone who occasionally eats a vegan diet a "Fairly decent Vegan". No, if you eat meat or cheese on a regular basis you're a terrible Vegan! Just because Apple releases the source code as read-only doesn't really make them fairly decent with open source. To me, if you're not willing to pull commits from outside your walled garden or allow external forks of your technologies, then you're terrible at open source. Sure, you technically checked off the very first checkbox ("make source available") but you stopped there. That's not a success, that's a stillborn effort... Heck, when I look at the wikipedia entry for Open Source, the first line is: "In production and development, open source as a development model promotes a universal access via a free license to a product's design or blueprint, and universal redistribution of that design or blueprint, including subsequent improvements to it by anyone." Which I don't think Apple is really engaging with any of the OSS spirit on any level. I mean is that what open source is now? As long as the source code is technically viewable, it's "open source software" now?
  - CHY872 11y ago
    The Wikipedia article does not mean that they have to reincorporate the changes of others into their code. Nevertheless, they are doing so. https://github.com/ResearchKit/ResearchKit/pull/20 https://github.com/ResearchKit/ResearchKit/pull/20
  - yellowapple 11y ago
    > To me, if you're not willing to pull commits from outside your walled garden or allow external forks of your technologies, then you're terrible at open source. Sure, you technically checked off the very first checkbox ("make source available") but you stopped there. That's not a success, that's a stillborn effort... That's still significantly better than what a lot of big "open-source" companies do. Not that I disagree with you. Just putting things into perspective.
  - jshevek 11y ago
    Why is this downvoted? His points are valid. Apple's business models are hostile towards open source software in most cases.
- saurik 11y ago
  When Apple stops releasing things on that website for iOS and Xcode (and yes: they do still have some things that are at least LGPL in those distributions, and no: it is not sufficient to give me very-similar-but-slightly-different code from OS X) only when I get around to making a public statement (which I absolutely hate doing) over things they don't send me when I request them via email, maybe they will have some right to getting the praise you are deciding to lavish. (Speaking of which, I have given them months to respond to my most recent requests for a bunch of things; I have gotten so used to Apple giving open source the finger, and thereby have backup plans involving disassembles for most of the things I care about at this point, I had forgotten to even follow up on them failing to release anything :/.) (As for Oracle, I think Apple is much more harmful, as at least Oracle is upfront about where you stand, so the greater community knows to handle them with care and avoid putting them in the center of something they will later come to regret.)
- jheriko 11y ago
  this is awesome, never knew it was there. i can never forget the freetype hinting death trap... that thing persisted for too long, and was unreasonable to start with. i think i can forgive now that i have seen this. :) EDIT: i take it back, i got the wrong end of the stick, it looks like they have open sourced important things, but actually its a list of nothing.

bthomas 11y ago

Is there anything about App Store guidelines? Curious if Apple is going to require any kind of IRB approval first.

huxley 11y ago
Just to help those that aren't familiar with the acronym: IRB = institutional review board, which commonly also includes ethics committees http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_review_board http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_review_board
semi-extrinsic 11y ago
The other big issue I see is: if you try to do any kind of population or cohort study with this, how on earth do you correct for the bias that comes from only sampling iPhone users? It's borderline facetious to claim that there is no sampling bias, and it will be a nightmare to control for.
- Fomite 11y ago
  My guess is that some of this will make field collection with iOS devices easier, rather than relying on the user's device.

richerlariviere 11y ago

I hope they will open Swift, like Microsoft is doing with C#.

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- apenguin 11y ago
  If I develop something and get it standardized, it's no longer my technology?
- JimmaDaRustla 11y ago
  C# was fully designed and developed by Microsoft. > It was developed by Microsoft within its .NET initiative and later approved as a standard by Ecma (ECMA-334) and ISO (ISO/IEC 23270:2006). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_Sharp_%28programming_language%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_Sharp_%28programming_language...
- richerlariviere 11y ago
  What about Dart language? It's a standard since Google released the first production-ready version
- meragrin 11y ago
  I don't see anything about async/await, extension methods, or lambdas. C# has quite a few additions since 2006. I would hate to go back to C# 2. C# 5 is the current and C# 6 coming very soon.
  - noblethrasher 11y ago
    I often have to use C# 2.0 because that's the version that the SQL Server 2005 CLR understands. It turns out not to be so bad since you still have closures (in the form of anonymous delegates), generics, and user-defined operators. Generics and user-defined conversion operators are powerful enough to nicely simulate Haskell's type classes (or Scala's traits), which, in my opinion, is a bigger deal than higher-order functions and 3.0+'s version of “type inferencing”.

DannyBee 11y ago

While it's wonderful they did this, as a short rant: I hate when companies just feel the urge to add a random sentence or two to an existing license, particularly in cases like these: "3. Neither the name of the copyright holder(s) nor the names of any contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission. No license is granted to the trademarks of the copyright holders even if such marks are included in this software." The first sentence is BSD, they added the second sentence. The problem with this is a few-fold. Either this clause is needed for the entire world (since BSD is used for trademark'd software all the time), or it's not needed at all. It turns out, in fact, arguments over trademark inclusion due to OSS licensing has been made before, and nobody has ever won on this before[1] So other than some lawyer just "not being satisfied unless they added stuff to the license", all this does is make a gratuitously different license that A. can't be merged with other licenses (since it requires you reproduce this condition text, and this condition text is not the same anymore as the other ones) B. Isn't actually the BSD license, and was deliberately changed, so ends up worse in court since now the other side can reasonably argue that the same precedent should't apply. C. Makes analyzing compatibility with other licenses more difficult and annoying. [1] Since they are very clearly licenses about the software work, not trademarks, and you can't stop someone from saying "this uses apple's researchkit" regardless of what trademarks you have or what you write in this license, anyway.

baddox 11y ago
> Either this clause is needed for the entire world (since BSD is used for trademark'd software all the time), or it's not needed at all. I'm not sure I follow your argument. Obviously, different individuals/organizations desire different licenses for the software they produce. If that wasn't the case, one could argue that only one software license should exist. Also, as we all know, software licenses are a fairly tricky legal matter. Perhaps Apple's lawyers just decided that adding that sentence is safer.
- hobarrera 11y ago
  The problem is this has different wording, not different legal consequences.

atmosx 11y ago

I wonder if I can use this along with a raspberry Pi & Arduino to offer automated customized services to my patients. E.g. build a system with RFID cards that uses sensors to automatically measure blood pressure, etc[1] and keep history. ps. Too many interesting possibilities out there and too little time to pursue them! [1] http://www.cooking-hacks.com/documentation/tutorials/ehealth-biometric-sensor-platform-arduino-raspberry-pi-medical http://www.cooking-hacks.com/documentation/tutorials/ehealth...

jordanbrown 11y ago

Would be great to see them merge the pull request for cocoa pod support.

k-mcgrady 11y ago
Looks like the devs jumped in on the comments on the PR and want to do it.

talles 11y ago

Is this the first thing of Apple on GitHub? (is the first one that I recall seeing)

smackfu 11y ago
They have WebKit on self-hosted git, but not GitHub.

orbitur 11y ago

Interesting that this framework isn't written in Swift.

bpicolo 11y ago
Not really. One, I bet they've been working on it for a long while, and two, I bet it's a lot easier for them to generate Swift bindings for objective c than vice versa.

TheSoftwareGuy 11y ago

GitHub says its 99.7% Objective-C, why didn't they use swift?

billyhoffman 11y ago
Swift was released to the public 7 months ago. The vast majority of Apple's own employee's didn't know it existed until it was publicly announced. Research Kit was announced 6 months after Swift. Seems like a bit of a stretch...
- TheSoftwareGuy 11y ago
  Makes sense.

InverseSandwich 11y ago

Researchkit is a rather cool idea - it will be interesting to see if it integrates with wearables.

ci5er 11y ago
That's Healthkit land. It should.

qzervaas 11y ago

It's interesting to see how code is structured when it comes from Apple (or vendors they're working closely with). Surprising some of their best practices aren't followed, such as hard-coding English strings instead of using something like NSLocalizedString() (e.g. https://github.com/ResearchKit/GlucoSuccess/blob/master/Diabetes/TasksAndSteps/EnterWeight/APHEnterWeightTaskViewController.m https://github.com/ResearchKit/GlucoSuccess/blob/master/Diab...)

jshevek 11y ago
Surprising? After learning of apple's goto bug, I'm never surprised to read about apple's failure to follow best practices.
- qzervaas 11y ago
  Sure, but that was an isolated mistake, whereas using NSLocalizedString() just becomes habit after a while. It's jarring when you see hard-coded English strings in any iOS code. Android does a much better job of pushing developers to localizing strings. One big thing I don't like about iOS is even if you have a base language, you need to duplicate all strings in any subsequent languages. (I often have a "US English" and "Australian English", so trivial changes require changes in two files). On Android, the language files extend the base file, so you can just override favourite/favorite labour/labor type strings without having to duplicate everything. (Obviously you can script / auto-generate language files, but that's not the default position).
  - jshevek 11y ago
    I agree with you what you are saying about string localization. Separately, I find that people tend to assume (for some reason?) that big successful companies that write lots of software will also write quality software. They have the money for it! But its often not the case. Look at Microsoft in the late 90s. Look at Apple these past few years. Maybe the people at the top sometimes feel they no longer _need_ to write quality software, because they are at the top? The goto fail bug is a singular mistake, but I'm not convinced it was an isolated mistake. I've worked with teams of amateurs that had code quality practices sufficient to prevent such a bug; and yet apple included this in a product, and left it there for a long time before it was fixed. It suggests, to me, organizational issues.

beshrkayali 11y ago

Sloppy scripting http://cl.ly/image/1L2G1V3C0A08 http://cl.ly/image/1L2G1V3C0A08 :P (Edit: added emoticon for joke emphasis)

8ig8 11y ago
I think we've all done something along those lines. I'm not sure if this counts, but recently HN asked us to avoid gratuitous negativity... http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-hacker-news-guideline http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-hacker-news-guideline
- beshrkayali 11y ago
  I just thought it's a bit funny, wasn't trying to be negative. Yes, we've all done something similar at some point.
akoeplinger 11y ago
I chuckled at this as well, so I filed an issue: https://github.com/ResearchKit/ResearchKit/issues/9 https://github.com/ResearchKit/ResearchKit/issues/9 Should be fixed by now :)

jebblue 11y ago

I'm not an Apple fan but this is very professionally done, it reminds me of the work an Orthopedic Sureon had me do for him years ago when I see the layout: http://researchkit.github.io/docs/docs/Overview/GuideOverview.html http://researchkit.github.io/docs/docs/Overview/GuideOvervie... The flow is consistent, step 1, step 2, etc. Something else that Apple makes I'm a fan of, CUPS Printing. It's also very professionally done. If we could only convince Apple to go Linux on everything!

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stephenr 11y ago
Why does the kernel matter so much to you?
- yellowapple 11y ago
  He probably just doesn't like Mach. I don't blame 'im; L4 is far superior.
- jebblue 11y ago
  I guess I was expressing that the stuff that Apple Open Sources seems genuine, legit, honest and I admire that. I guess as I get older I realize (sorry for all the I's) that maybe I should give Apple a second look, on all fronts.
  - stephenr 11y ago
    Sure, that makes sense, I just don't quite understand the "convince Apple to go Linux on everything" bit?? In terms of userland tools, OS X has pretty good compatibility with an average Linux distro (yes there are obvious differences between *BSD and GNU implementations of various tools). Personally I think you should give Apple a(nother) look in terms of a productive workstation machine, even if that's paired with/using services from/developing systems for Linux-based servers.
  - ndnichols 11y ago

pistle 11y ago

It's a start! There is big space for improvement in supporting the complexities of research studies, but this can definitely be a jumping-off and may well support broad consistencies in design and implementation. There would still be a massive effort to implement most of the requirements of a research study. But, at least the iOS UI implementation and some on-ramps via ActiveSteps would be eased.