[alive-or-not]

Same as Apple - when they were almost dead they had to use and contribute to open source projects and treat the customer fair. Nowadays they are making it clear all iThings out there belong to Apple and working hard to wall Mac OSX as well.

[X-Istence]

Apple still contributes to open source A LOT.

[kunai]

Barely. OpenDarwin is dead. WebKit was stolen from KHTML. CUPS has barely any development anymore. Apart from LLVM, what have they really contributed to OSS? Okay, it's more than Microsoft, but net contribution is still nothing compared to Google or Sun (when they were still alive).

[matthewmacleod]

KHTML was not stolen - it was used as the basis for Webkit in compliance with its licence, which is exactly how Open Source is supposed to work.

Have a look at http://www.apple.com/opensource/ - which outlines the Open Source components that Apple use and contribute to. You're right - it might not be as much as some other companies (though I don't know if it's practically less than Google or Sun) but they are consistently among the largest participants in Open Source among large tech companies.

[dylandrop]

I think my biggest beef with them is that they tend to make up for their small amount of OSS in a negative way by being such patent trolls. This is more true of their presence in the hardware world.

[awad]

Also note that Google's Blink project did the exact same

[mikeash]

WebKit is itself open source, so you can't discount that just because it was derived from another open source project.

Aside from LLVM/clang and WebKit (both of which are significant enough to deserve massive accolades all by themselves), you also have stuff like launchd (which didn't catch on outside Apple, but hardly their fault), libdispatch, and mDNS.

But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

[idupree]

Historical note: Launchd might have caught on if Apple had open-sourced it sooner.

The author of the Upstart init system, Scott James Remnant, wrote in 2006,

"How does [Upstart] differ from launchd?

launchd is the replacement init system used in MacOS X developed as an “Open Source” project by Apple. For much of its life so far, the licence has actually been entirely non-free and thus it has only become recently interesting with the licence change.

[...]

Had the licence been sufficiently free at the point we began development of our own system, we would probably have extended launchd rather than implement our own. At the point Apple changed the licence, our own system was already more suitable for our purposes."

http://netsplit.com/2006/08/26/upstart-in-universe/

[eonil]

So what's the contribution of Google, Sun and MS? It's you who should show example if you want to claim.

Do you have any access to Google Search API? Or BigTable source? How about Google Maps? Google Apps? What Google is releasing is "Chrome" which stole(as like your word) from WebKit, and Android. (which actually stolen from Sun, so still in lawsuit)

Well there's more. V8, Dart and Go. Maybe bunch of funny dead projects can be included. But I don't see much difference with LLVM/Clang case. Let's treat them just apart.

IMO, Google is worse than Facebook or Twitter in perspective of server-side software contribution.

[judk]

Google is a major committer to Linux and to Java Guava, the premier general purpose library (standard library extension/replacement). And they paid Guido to work on Python for years.

[phaus]

Wasn't it Google that made a huge donation to Kubuntu after Ubuntu pulled the plug on supporting them?

[gaadd33]

From Sun? You mean Java, Solaris, DTrace, ZFS, etc?

[rdtsc]

> Apple still contributes to open source A LOT.

Oh wow you capitalized "A LOT". I am sure you'll be able to list at least 30 large known open source projects actively maintained or contributed to by Apple.