Apple does a lot of things. They have a lot of servers. They have a lot of software engineers. It wouldn't surprise me to learn they're running FreeBSD somewhere. They also vendor a lot of BSD software in MacOS and friends. It wouldn't surprise me if this implementation of comm is included in MacOS.
This doesn't seem very interesting to me. I dislike the implication of the title, as if this somehow means something more.
From people I've known who've worked at Apple, it's an uphill battle to get approval to contribute to open source there. Somebody likely fought pretty hard to be able to do this
I've worked at places where it was an uphill battle for some folks but not others. I've worked at places where it was an uphill battle if you engaged legal, but if you just went ahead and did it nobody cared. I've worked at places where it was an uphill battle because they didn't want engineers just throwing it over the wall and impacting their reputation, and engineers were lazy and could not be trusted to be competent in contributing to open source projects.
"Contribute to open source" has a broad range of meaning. These are miniscule patches. Most IP attorneys I know at megacorps wouldn't even want to be informed of contributions of this scale.
I’m not making the argument they contribute nothing. I’m saying it’s comically low compared to Google or Microsoft as the other 2 big commercial OS vendors.
Relative to them they contribute almost nothing at all to the wider ecosystem.
I wouldn't call their contributions here insignificant. I'm not sure comparing them to Google or Microsoft is productive given how vertically integrated Apple is. What about Samsung? Sony?
It just seems uncharitable to imply they give back so little it's newsworthy when they do. It seems to me that they give back a fair bit, and that doesn't seem newsworthy to me, and I don't really understand why this is on the front page.
This might be a question of me holding it wrong but I don’t know how on earth I’m supposed to judge from that link as it doesn’t really contain any relevant information.
Just to pick a random example from the list of the 9 community projects they contribute(d?) to: containerd
How much did they contribute? It’s not their project in any sense, do they contribute regularly? Did they do it once? Was it meaningful? None of that was answered from your link unfortunately and when I take a look at who actually contributes in practice here: https://github.com/containerd/containerd/graphs/contributors
I didn’t really see anyone from Apple initially..
I haven’t done an in depth review or anything but we are now in a situation where they only have 9 community projects they claim to contribute to and I can’t actually find any examples of them doing so in a meaningful sense.
So my original point actually feels kind of validated here.
I'm not really sure what your point is, or what you're looking for. What projects have Googlers contributed to? Have they not contributed much because I don't have a log of individual contributions handy? Are we even able to identify them correctly from their GitHub username? Your position feels a disingenuous and to be honest lazy and insulting to all the Apple folks who do good work in open source.
Perhaps the reason that it appears to you that Apple contributes very little is actually that you are incapable and/or unwilling to actually look for evidence, examples or counter examples, and thus proving my original point: it's not my job to exhaustively prove you wrong. Your original statement is totally baseless. Baseless accusations aren't generally welcome.
I feel bad for any Apple employee that reads this thread. I find it insulting.
Android, Chromium, Angular, Dart, Linux, Kubernetes, AV1 ... that's off the top of my head. Googles contributions to open source are up there. The other mob that don't get near enough credit for their open source contributions IMO is Facebook.
The only one I know of from Apple is CUPS. They left it as most open source after they bought it. There are undoubtedly others, but compared to Google who open sources the bulk of products they ship (such as Chromium and Android), there is no comparison.
What are you talking about that it’s baseless… I’m actively trying to find proof of your claim here that maybe I’m wrong and Apple are bigger contributors in the open source ecosystem than originally I thought.
So far that hasn’t been going well in terms of the evidence though which is the opposite of baseless.
I don’t see how on earth this would be insulting somehow to Apple employees? Embarrassing perhaps but why they would feel like it’s a personal attack on them from anything I wrote I have no idea.
Why you personally find it insulting is even more bizarre and might have more to do with you than anything I said.
FreeBSD is compiled using Apple's open sourced Clang compiler.
> Apple developed Clang, a new compiler front end which supports C, Objective-C and C++. In July 2007, the project received the approval for becoming open-source.
I don't generally see front-page news about their huge contributions to the WebKit, LLVM or Swift projects (yes Swift is transitioning to being an Apple thing to its own separate project from what I understand). The only reason this contribution is news is that Apple doesn't typically contribute to FreeBSD, not that Apple doesn't typically contribute to open source.
Not that you're wrong, they're resting on a vast amount of free labour from the open source community. Though that's not exactly uncommon.
Reaching for WebKit and Swift as some kind of counterpoint really highlights exactly what I’m talking about here rather than rebuts anything I think.
I mean sure they are technically open source but they are very much Apple things. I’m talking about contributing to the wider ecosystem which I think they do very very little of.
in order to know how FreeBSD and Apple's OSes are related.
I still wonder what they "get out of" patching FreeBSD -- maybe there's more FreeBSD in the Apple OSes than we know. (I do not think it's possible a dev by accident used his/her @apple.com address).
The guy has been on the gnome board for 16 years, and at apple for 4 years. My occam's razor says he used his apple account but probably it is not an official apple project. If his boss is okay with this it is going to be alright.
This doesn't seem very interesting to me. I dislike the implication of the title, as if this somehow means something more.