From people I've known who've worked at Apple, it's an uphill battle to get approval to contribute to open source there. Somebody likely fought pretty hard to be able to do this
I've worked at places where it was an uphill battle for some folks but not others. I've worked at places where it was an uphill battle if you engaged legal, but if you just went ahead and did it nobody cared. I've worked at places where it was an uphill battle because they didn't want engineers just throwing it over the wall and impacting their reputation, and engineers were lazy and could not be trusted to be competent in contributing to open source projects.
"Contribute to open source" has a broad range of meaning. These are miniscule patches. Most IP attorneys I know at megacorps wouldn't even want to be informed of contributions of this scale.
"Contribute to open source" has a broad range of meaning. These are miniscule patches. Most IP attorneys I know at megacorps wouldn't even want to be informed of contributions of this scale.