[infinity0]

> But I'm very confused how you're twisting Apple's huge contribution toward LLVM and Webkit over the years into some evil act.

I'm not twisting anything into an evil act, read my words more closely.

Some of Apple's contributions to open source have been beneficial to the rest of us, because there are competitors to keep them in check in those areas they chose to do open source in.

You should have no doubt that, had those other competitors not existed, Apple's open source contributions would have been used to push a monopolistic advantage over other projects and organisations, and passed it off as "meeting their business needs".

They do not do open source out of any principle of generosity or co-operation with other projects, and much of their ecosystem is legally and technically hostile to supporting FOSS the "proper way". For example it is impossible to properly supply a GPL binary on an iPhone because in general you do not have the ability to install arbitrarily-modified versions of it, a very fundamental principle of the standard definition of Free Open Source Software.

Also I'm not sure why you cite Android vs iPhone since near-everything about an iPhone is proprietary.

[josephg]

What areas are there no competitors, in the space of things they opensource? LLVM has GCC. Webkit has (amongst others) blink. Darwin has Linux. FoundationDB has dozens of great competitors.

And even in the absence of competitors, how is new permissively licensed opensource software a bad thing? How, exactly do you weaponise opensourcing decent software which has no competitors? Can you give some examples?