[smitherfield]

Apple's made some pretty big genuine contributions to open-source: WebKit, LLVM[1]/clang, Swift, OpenCL.[2]

[1] Yes, technically "not Apple" in the sense that Node.js isn't Joyent.

[2] Admittedly partial credit at best since they've orphaned it in favor of their proprietary Metal API. I'd guess however that Metal will get open-sourced pretty soon.

[bemused]

webkit was based on khtml (LGPL) - not much of a choice for apple

[gsnedders]

For a long time, they just did source-code dumps whenever they made a binary release (i.e., did what is required by the LGPL). They actively chose to move it to being run as an open-source project, with public history, public bug tracking, and public contributions.

[smitherfield]

They could've written a rendering engine from scratch, or (in 2001-2002) acquired Netscape or Opera for a song.

[Fnoord]

Did Apple have a lot of cash in 2001/2? IIRC that is before the iPod hype.