Microsoft has come a long way lately when it comes to open source. Apple seems to be the only major company that is still not an enthusiastic participant.
Apple wrote and open sourced their C++ compiler (clang) and C++ standard library (libc++), both part of the LLVM project, years before Microsoft did. In fact it was more than a decade ago in 2007 that Apple open-sourced clang, and now widely adopted by the industry. Sure Apple's participation in open sourcing may not be "enthusiastic" with huge "️Heart Open Source" billboards but it gets real job done and has real positive impact.
Perhaps Apple's contributions aren't as visible, but just off the top of my head here's two major open source contributions from them: Swift[1] and FoundationDB[2]
Plus there's a page for all their OS components: https://opensource.apple.com. There's also WebKit and LLVM, which started at Apple and are still heavily driven by engineers at the company.
WebKit was certainly started at Apple. I just checked and the paper for LLVM was actually published before Lattner joined Apple, so I guess it's not quite true that it was "started" there (though, of course, most of its development has happened there).
This is an extremely disingenuous statement. WebKit was forked from KHTML and everybody knows this. It "certainly" sounds like you're trying to rewrite history (and you make a similar assertion elsewhere in this thread)..
That’s correct, but in the context of this source release, I think it’s not more incorrect to say “Apple created WebKit” than it is to say “Microsoft created this library” (it started life as a Dinkumware product)
Apparently it is gaining traction. For example, the Tensorflow project is working on building a next generation library with Swift - https://github.com/tensorflow/swift
Only because Lattner is part of the Tensorflow team, and they still don't have a solid story regarding OS support, in spite of several people pointing out how much better supporting Julia would have been.
Which incidentally also supports Windows out of the box.
Thank you, the second link you provided was an extremely interesting read. It seems to me that Swift has reached a level of maturity where the language and the ecosystem can now exist independently of Apple’s support.
Appart from siblings' mentions, I think they also opensourced networking libs/protocols, bonjour and cups. Cups should be mentioned especially, since that was a basis for network printing under linux. (I hope im right on this)
While Im not a fan of the corporation, its strategy and most of the policies, some dilligence is due here. They are known to release low level stuff.
CUPS was not originally written or open sourced by Apple. CUPS was released in the late 2000s as open source and soon after became the default print system for most Linux distros. Apple hired the original creator and purchased the source code in 2007.