[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.