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"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

by criley2 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
Why is this downvoted? His points are valid. Apple's business models are hostile towards open source software in most cases.
icebraining 12y ago
To be fair, it's not just "technically viewable", it's also legally forkable and redistributable, along with any changes that might be made to it.
cozzyd 12y ago
Not to mention that their most popular platform is explicitly forbids copyleft code.

by criley2 12y ago

CHY872 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago

Why is this downvoted? His points are valid. Apple's business models are hostile towards open source software in most cases.

icebraining 12y ago

To be fair, it's not just "technically viewable", it's also legally forkable and redistributable, along with any changes that might be made to it.

cozzyd 12y ago

Not to mention that their most popular platform is explicitly forbids copyleft code.