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The purpose is to grudgingly comply with the licenses to all the FOSS software that they use in their projects.

• danieldk 11y ago
  That's nonsense. There are many BSD, MIT, and ISC-licensed packages on that site that they wouldn't have to release source code for. This page dates back to the early 2000s, when Apple was a relatively small company after years of decline, and OS X was gaining popularity among UNIX users. They hired some people from the FreeBSD project (most notably Jordan Hubbard, one of the founders of FreeBSD). This was also the time that everyone and their dog was going open source (a trend started by Netscape). The industry's open sourcing spree, their traction in the UNIX community, and the fact that they were importing a lot of new BSD code, probably moved them to make non-Aqua/Cocoa source open source. Suddenly removing source code now would probably be a small PR disaster. So, they basically let stuff rot: some new stuff is missing and they are slow in posting new code drops.
  • pervycreeper 11y ago
    Not every project is copylefted, true, but they are still trying to give back as little as they possibly can without raising too many hackles.
    • sudioStudio64 11y ago
      I'm not an apple fan, but I don't know if we know enough to say that this is their motivation.