This doesn't seem very interesting to me. I dislike the implication of the title, as if this somehow means something more.
"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.
I’m not making the argument they contribute nothing. I’m saying it’s comically low compared to Google or Microsoft as the other 2 big commercial OS vendors.
Relative to them they contribute almost nothing at all to the wider ecosystem.
> Apple developed Clang, a new compiler front end which supports C, Objective-C and C++. In July 2007, the project received the approval for becoming open-source.
Not that you're wrong, they're resting on a vast amount of free labour from the open source community. Though that's not exactly uncommon.
I mean sure they are technically open source but they are very much Apple things. I’m talking about contributing to the wider ecosystem which I think they do very very little of.
in order to know how FreeBSD and Apple's OSes are related.
I still wonder what they "get out of" patching FreeBSD -- maybe there's more FreeBSD in the Apple OSes than we know. (I do not think it's possible a dev by accident used his/her @apple.com address).
