[Wowfunhappy]

While Correlium is a bit of a minefield for obvious reasons, I don't understand why Apple hasn't blessed Marcan's work. I wouldn't expect them to commit any development resources of their own, but I'd think it would be in their interest to (A) provide Marcan with some documentation and (B) make an engineer available to answer occasional questions.

Apple makes money selling hardware, and Linux support will sell more hardware. Perhaps not much more, but for a commensurately low amount of effort. What does Apple gain by forcing Marcan to reverse engineer everything?

[saagarjha]

I can't see why they would? Marcan is capable to be sure, but he's also a random guy with a Patreon. Why would Apple ever officially bless his work? I'd sooner seem them collaborating with Corellium, because that at least gives them a corporate entity to interact with. Plus, like, releasing documentation without giving away the stuff they want to keep to themselves, and without promising too much and having it break later, is work in and of itself that Apple is really not getting anything from. I mean, this is the company that still FairPlays apps, so…

[Wowfunhappy]

Hypothetical question: If Microsoft wanted to port Windows to the M1 (as Phil Schiller said was their choice), would you expect Microsoft to have to reverse engineer everything? Or would Apple share documentation and expertise, under the logic that Windows support will increase Mac hardware sales, if only a small amount?

I realize that Marcan isn't Microsoft—but he's not quite "a random guy with a Patreon" either. He's a professional freelancer, and I'm sure he has an LLC† and a set of professional references he can point to.

Put another way—on a scale between "Marcan" and "Microsoft", where is the threshold in which Apple would be helpful? I don't personally see a huge difference between a one-person LLC and a 100,000-person company in this regard. If anything, the 100,000 person company offers more opportunities for things to get leaked.

---

† Or something similar.

[floatboth]

It always comes down to "it doesn't benefit them" eh…

There are some interesting situations though. Like in the big GPU world it's very common to document the ISA. Even nvidia does. I suppose that's because it benefits the vendor when games and GPGPU compute programs optimize for their GPUs, down to the assembly level. It's sad that Apple's approach is "just use Metal" rather than fully enabling developers to get to the actual… well, "metal"