[eyelidlessness]

To be honest I’m amazed Apple even cares enough one way or another that they mentioned Linux virtualization in the M1 announcement. But it’s not a middle finger, this was more or less exactly how they handled multiboot on Intel: let the community figure out a solution, see if it gets uptake, support it with a first party solution if it does. That’s how we got Boot Camp, as there was a lot of interest in booting Windows at the time.

It’s a good sign that the latest betas (11.2 IIRC) officially support multiboot in the UI. That’s a good indication Apple sees the level of interest in Linux on M1 that they intend to at least let it happen.

I’d say it’s still up in the air whether they’ll go for full first party support with drivers or an open spec, but it’s definitely not out of the question. And they may even have direct interest in it, as I’m sure they’d like to get the benefits of their hardware in their data centers.

[varispeed]

So essentially Apple is exploiting its consumers and get free research and development without having to pay salaries and tax? Probably that's why they are worth so much. I am only amazed that there is so many people willing to do this job for Apple for free - it would be a different ball game is macOS was open source, but sacrificing your own time and resources to enhance a commercial product... people are weird.

[eyelidlessness]

That’s... an incredibly bold take, especially on a forum operated by VCs, who certainly are familiar with the concept of finding product-market fit. Apple is observing the interests of people who use their products to help prioritize product development decisions.

Maybe the people doing this for free are just interested in benefitting from the result? As many people who work for free on open source do.

As far as I’m aware, there is no free (as in beer) hardware that runs Linux. Someone has put the effort into running Linux on every single for-profit/for-pay platform it runs on.

Are you under the mistaken impression I was suggesting that Apple waits for a community solution to be developed then packages that as a product? As far as I’m aware they didn’t do that with Boot Camp, but instead offered in-house drivers and blessed boot loaders and proprietary UI/UX for accessing both.

[oblio]

Well, that's why all the big companies open source stuff.

They're hoping to get increased for themselves, increased adoption of their internal tools outside of the company (easier recruiting plus purely internal tools are notorious for rotting quickly) and... free labor.