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by 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)

1 comments

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.

> 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.

The claim was “They haven't produced anything opensource since then”.

I think I clearly showed they have.