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).
That's correct. LLVM was started at UIUC, Apple later hired Lattner with the intention of making LLVM production-ready (in part as a replacement for the GNU toolchain), and ultimately to replace the GCC frontend by a custom / dedicated one.
The Clang project is part of the LLVM ecosystem, but is a major effort in its own right, so I think it is right to give credit where credit is due, in the same way e.g. the Rust compiler uses Rust as a backend, but credit for it doesn't to to the LLVM project.
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)..
I say it is disingenous because it is completely counter to what can be found on something as mainstream as the wikipedia page.. one does not have to dig deep.
If you want to dig deeper, the mailing list archives are available for all, and I think given the contribution KHTML made to Webkit initially it is poor form to diminish its role.
"Blink started at Google". It's all context. As someone mentioned, it's technically correct but in the context of this discussion thread which is about open-source origins and contributions, saying Blink "started at Google" comes across as dishonest. Blink started at google with a fork of Webkit, which itself was not created in a vacuum at Apple.
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.