But they did. They claimed part of Mac OS, Darwin, is open source.
Like Google like to brag about Android being Open Source even if you have to put a ton of proprietary software on top of the open source parts to make it usable.
Claiming that part of Darwin is opensource, which it was, is not quite the same thing as claiming to love opensource, and yet slowly close it up once you have mindshare like with VSCode.
Apple didn't take ownership and then start closing CUPS, but they have also never pretended to be a friend of OpenSouce. They haven't produced anything opensource since then.
There have been a couple of projects, like their rebranding of KHTML that suited their purposes but they never donated time or money back, or even pretended to help upstream.
If you look at the Asahi Linux on M processors, Apple don't hinder and may have arguably done things in a way to not block them but they certainly have not helped or even claimed that it was a good thing.
> Apple didn't take ownership and then start closing CUPS, but they have also never pretended to be a friend of OpenSouce. They haven't produced anything opensource since then.
> Who would use a programming language that wasn't open?
The vast majority of iOS developers. Swift 1.0 wasn’t open source, and IIRC when it was announced there wasn’t even a promise that it would be open source. I think Chris Lattner did signal they were willing to seriously consider it some time in the future; that was all.
There is a lot of money to be made in iOS, so people will use whatever Apple forces them to use, whether it’s open source or not. If some would leave money on the table on ideological grounds, all the better for everyone else.
They did kind of head that way in the early days of OSX, to try to bootstrap a development community by being close enough to Linux to make it easy enough to switch. I'd probably characterise them as having an abusive relationship with Open source.
This part of the macOS developer community bootstrapped itself. Apple at the time was trying to sell Java WebObjects and Carbon/Cocoa in public.
The proximity with Linux was an accident. NeXT is from the late 80s, pre Linux, and NeXT was the baggage OS X had to work with. They didn't strip out the Unix parts, but also didn't widely proclaim it was "close to Linux". It was mostly the developer community touting it as an advantage of macOS, with Apple later admitting "yeah yeah that's also cool" and later shipping Python and Ruby alongside Perl just for completion.
Even when Apple clearly tried to help Homebrew by offering a Xcode-less toolchain there was not even a peep about the purpose of "Command Line Tools". It took them years to acknowledge it existed.
Also, like the sibling response said, Linux only started being as widely used later than OS X.
Interesting; I only had the perspective of being a Linux enthusiast at that time, and that's what it seemed like, but it's easy to forget that our numbers were quite small back then.
This history doesn’t make sense - the early days of OSX predate widespread adoption of Linux. When OSX was released Linux 2.4 was just released and that was just the beginning of Linux becoming something interesting commercially in the data center (at the time Linux was more just slowly eroding incumbent commercial Unix - which is why Microsoft was concerned about it, since they had spent the 90s relying on commercial Unix vendors to fuck each other up) - there just wasn’t some huge commercial Linux community that Apple was trying to tap into - especially for a desktop operating system. The Darwin userland is BSD based after all. And while Apple made do with gcc, they’ve clearly never been too gung ho to get wrapped up with anything GPL related.
If anything Apple offered Solaris, Irix refugees a viable desktop transition.
I don't think there is that much devs doing actual work in Apple ecosystem - they use Macbooks but not Swift or Objective-C and no one is using XCode for their day 2 day development.
Just check StackOverflow 2021 survey - Swift is like 5%
That doesn't make Microsoft's double-talk okay, Apple never pretended to :heart: opensource.