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0 pointsrobin_reala5y ago0 comments

Apple have a FOSS kernel, one of the three remaining web renderers, CUPS, and a bunch more smaller things. They’re not the most religious of FOSS companies, but it’s a bit unfair to say they don’t play well in the places that they play.

If you take FOSS to mean only GPL, then yes, I get your point.

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doctor_eval5y ago

Yeah I think it’s more often that FOSS that doesn’t play well with Apple. It’s understandable - Apple keeps a lot of desirable software for itself - but perhaps unfortunate.

Federici has said in one of his interviews that Apple wants people to hack on the M1 machines so I’m hopeful that they will be more open than on IOS.

All of that said, I won’t hold my breath.

toyg5y ago

> Apple wants people to hack on the M1 machines

Of course they do. Like they wanted people to hack on OSX 20 years ago; and once they reached critical mass, they pulled up the drawbridges (dropping anything GNU, dropping Java, restricting access to the OS, pushing AppStore, etc etc).

Chances they're going to do exactly the same with M1 and its follow-ups are 99.99%... if anything because their management is largely drawn from the very same people who executed that strategy.

spacedcowboy5y ago

They dropped anything GNU because of the GPLv3, which was specifically designed to stop what the authors saw as exploitation of others' work.

I can see both sides here - the viral nature of GPLv3 is anathema to a company like Apple, so simply walking away was inevitable; and people were exploiting loopholes in the GPLv2 (I have no idea whether Apple was, but there are documented cases of others doing it).

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mondoshawan5y ago

XNU is not FOSS, and 99% of the foundation classes, Aqua, and drivers are all proprietary.

doctor_eval5y ago

Why is XNU not FOSS? Has something changed? Is Wikipedia wrong? It says that XNU is APSL which is approved by OSI and FSF.

While I agree that much of the good stuff is proprietary (but certainly not all, eg WebKit), that doesn’t mean that the free stuff isn’t free.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Public_Source_License

toyg5y ago

Webkit was likely "saved" by the original KHTML license being GPL. At the time, Apple were wise enough (or desperate enough) to figure that they could work with such a license, although they were eventually careful to chisel out anything they could into BSD-licensed modules. And still they had to be dragged into the light more or less kicking and screaming (e.g. they had no public VSC until KDE people kicked up a stink in the press, and were just throwing huge swaths of code "over the fence" like they still do with XNU).

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Someone5y ago

Indeed. Git repo at https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu.

Note that that is 2 years behind. You can get a newer source dump from https://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-6153.141.1/.

So, open source, but development isn’t done in the open. You can’t really expect you’ll be able to see recent commit messages or even just regular source dumps.

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doctor_eval5y ago

Yeah I think it’s more often that FOSS that doesn’t play well with Apple. It’s understandable - Apple keeps a lot of desirable software for itself - but perhaps unfortunate.

Federici has said in one of his interviews that Apple wants people to hack on the M1 machines so I’m hopeful that they will be more open than on IOS.

All of that said, I won’t hold my breath.

toyg5y ago

> Apple wants people to hack on the M1 machines

Chances they're going to do exactly the same with M1 and its follow-ups are 99.99%... if anything because their management is largely drawn from the very same people who executed that strategy.

spacedcowboy5y ago

They dropped anything GNU because of the GPLv3, which was specifically designed to stop what the authors saw as exploitation of others' work.

1 more reply

mondoshawan5y ago

XNU is not FOSS, and 99% of the foundation classes, Aqua, and drivers are all proprietary.

doctor_eval5y ago

Why is XNU not FOSS? Has something changed? Is Wikipedia wrong? It says that XNU is APSL which is approved by OSI and FSF.

While I agree that much of the good stuff is proprietary (but certainly not all, eg WebKit), that doesn’t mean that the free stuff isn’t free.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Public_Source_License

toyg5y ago

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Someone5y ago

Indeed. Git repo at https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu.

Note that that is 2 years behind. You can get a newer source dump from https://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-6153.141.1/.

So, open source, but development isn’t done in the open. You can’t really expect you’ll be able to see recent commit messages or even just regular source dumps.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse