Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by DeathArrow 1461 days ago
>Apple never pretended to :heart: opensource.

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.
1 comments
happymellon 1461 days ago
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.

link
Someone 1461 days ago
> 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.

Two counter-examples:

They open sourced Swift in 2015 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language)#H...), and Swift-DocC in 2021 (https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-docc/)

Apple bought CUPS in 2007 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUPS#History)

link
happymellon 1461 days ago
I'm not sure how they are counterpoints. Who would use a programming language that wasn't open?

Except dot net devs. Which is the point.

CUPS was critical infrastructure for Apple, so they bought it. Since it is GPL they couldn't close it, hence they abandoned it.

Apple are not your friend, but they never claimed to be, you just might have an overlapping interest, Microsoft hold big "We Heart Linux" events.

link
oefrha 1461 days ago
> 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.

link
Someone 1461 days ago
The claim was “They haven't produced anything opensource since then”.

I think I clearly showed they have.

link