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The only thing that has doubled down here is the marketing of the fact they are contributing to open source. They have both been large users and contributors to

The only thing that has doubled down here is the marketing of the fact they are contributing to open source. They have both been large users and contributors to open source since the switch to OS X (NeXT acquisition). Just off the top of my head, projects they have had a large hand in: WebKit & JavaScriptCore, Objective-C, CUPS, LLVM, Clang, Bonjour/Zeroconf, Darwin, launchd, libdispatch, CoreFoundation, dtrace. And more recently Apple Lossless Encoder, LZFSE compression, and of course Swift. And this is only a tiny fraction of what they are users of.

DashRattlesnake 10y ago
Didn't they also take quite a lot from FreeBSD when building OS X?
- xenadu02 10y ago
  NeXTSTEP was based on Mach/BSD from the early days so it isn't recent.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
    Yes, but Apple updated a lot of the OS X BSD with FreeBSD components. It's why many man pages say FreeBSD.
- shmerl 10y ago
  Question is, how much did they give back to it?
  - laxd 10y ago
    LLVM/Clang and Grand Central Dispatch comes to mind. The MAC framwork is also a shared effort, but I don't know who is doing the heavy lifting. It's something.
  - forgettableuser 10y ago
    All the ones I listed are the ones where they are significant contributors. The much larger set of where they are mostly users, like the BSD userland tools, curl, Python, Perl, Tcl, Ruby, and so forth, I omitted. There are just too many.
techdragon 10y ago
It would be nice if some of their contributions were less "throw it over the wall once or twice a year". It would be nicer still if they stopped thinking their browser only needs to get new features once per year. Safari is rapidly getting a reputation as the new IE6. Fully supporting ES6 means nothing when everything is being transpiled and minified anyway, and the (arguably) dominant mobile browser your (kinda) forced to target doesn't support features that shipped in every other browser years ago, heck many missing features have even stabilised in other browsers years ago. The dev builds on desktop are just a token gesture that further displays how far behind the times WebKit/Safari/MobileSafari are falling. Here are just a few things not supported in any Apple browser, Including the "Technology Preview" on desktop: CSS Motion Path; CSS Device Adaptation; Client Hints: DPR, Width, Viewport-Width; inputmode attribute; MediaRecorder API; Network Information API; Web Animations API; Pointer events; Web App Manifest; seamless attribute for iframes; Payment Request API; Credential Management API; Push API; FIDO U2F API; Permissions API; Screen Orientation; Object RTC (ORTC) API for WebRTC; Proximity API; Ambient Light API; Battery Status API; Vibration API; Web MIDI API; getUserMedia/Stream API; WebAssembly; 'SameSite' cookie attribute; Public Key Pinning; XHTML+SMIL animation;
- crazysim 10y ago
  Wasn't Battery Status API discovered to be harmful to privacy and on the way out in all browsers?
  - grzm 10y ago
    Sounds like Apple and Mozilla are planning to: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/07/apple_mozilla_kill_api_to_batter_battery_snitching/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/07/apple_mozilla_kill_a...
    - gsnedders 10y ago
      It was never enabled in any of the Apple-owned ports of WebKit, IIRC it was enabled in the GTK and Qt ports, but I could be wrong there. So Apple killing it isn't really true—they're just deleting code that was already gone at compile-time for them.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
raimue 10y ago
And which of these are actually developed with an open source model instead of merely throwing code over the wall months after the official binaries have been released?
- forgettableuser 10y ago
  I know from personal experience that at least LLVM, Clang, Swift, and WebKit/JavaScriptCore have daily activity and also include non-Apple commit reviewers.
  - forgettableuser 10y ago
    I also suspect CUPS remains pretty active. CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) started a long time ago and is used by pretty much all the Unix platforms. Apple bought the project in 2007. The license remains GPL2/LGPL2 and all the platforms still use it as far as I know.
  - ralfd 10y ago
    The open sourcing of Swift was very beneficial. The project moved extremely fast the last years with lots of outside input and interest. I think this shows when OS works best: When it is not done out of obligation (or ideology), but because it can be useful as a tool.

DashRattlesnake 10y ago

Didn't they also take quite a lot from FreeBSD when building OS X?

xenadu02 10y ago
NeXTSTEP was based on Mach/BSD from the early days so it isn't recent.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
  Yes, but Apple updated a lot of the OS X BSD with FreeBSD components. It's why many man pages say FreeBSD.
shmerl 10y ago
Question is, how much did they give back to it?
- laxd 10y ago
  LLVM/Clang and Grand Central Dispatch comes to mind. The MAC framwork is also a shared effort, but I don't know who is doing the heavy lifting. It's something.
- forgettableuser 10y ago
  All the ones I listed are the ones where they are significant contributors. The much larger set of where they are mostly users, like the BSD userland tools, curl, Python, Perl, Tcl, Ruby, and so forth, I omitted. There are just too many.

techdragon 10y ago

It would be nice if some of their contributions were less "throw it over the wall once or twice a year". It would be nicer still if they stopped thinking their browser only needs to get new features once per year. Safari is rapidly getting a reputation as the new IE6. Fully supporting ES6 means nothing when everything is being transpiled and minified anyway, and the (arguably) dominant mobile browser your (kinda) forced to target doesn't support features that shipped in every other browser years ago, heck many missing features have even stabilised in other browsers years ago. The dev builds on desktop are just a token gesture that further displays how far behind the times WebKit/Safari/MobileSafari are falling. Here are just a few things not supported in any Apple browser, Including the "Technology Preview" on desktop: CSS Motion Path; CSS Device Adaptation; Client Hints: DPR, Width, Viewport-Width; inputmode attribute; MediaRecorder API; Network Information API; Web Animations API; Pointer events; Web App Manifest; seamless attribute for iframes; Payment Request API; Credential Management API; Push API; FIDO U2F API; Permissions API; Screen Orientation; Object RTC (ORTC) API for WebRTC; Proximity API; Ambient Light API; Battery Status API; Vibration API; Web MIDI API; getUserMedia/Stream API; WebAssembly; 'SameSite' cookie attribute; Public Key Pinning; XHTML+SMIL animation;

crazysim 10y ago
Wasn't Battery Status API discovered to be harmful to privacy and on the way out in all browsers?
- grzm 10y ago
  Sounds like Apple and Mozilla are planning to: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/07/apple_mozilla_kill_api_to_batter_battery_snitching/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/07/apple_mozilla_kill_a...
  - gsnedders 10y ago
    It was never enabled in any of the Apple-owned ports of WebKit, IIRC it was enabled in the GTK and Qt ports, but I could be wrong there. So Apple killing it isn't really true—they're just deleting code that was already gone at compile-time for them.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

raimue 10y ago

And which of these are actually developed with an open source model instead of merely throwing code over the wall months after the official binaries have been released?

forgettableuser 10y ago
I know from personal experience that at least LLVM, Clang, Swift, and WebKit/JavaScriptCore have daily activity and also include non-Apple commit reviewers.
- forgettableuser 10y ago
  I also suspect CUPS remains pretty active. CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) started a long time ago and is used by pretty much all the Unix platforms. Apple bought the project in 2007. The license remains GPL2/LGPL2 and all the platforms still use it as far as I know.
- ralfd 10y ago
  The open sourcing of Swift was very beneficial. The project moved extremely fast the last years with lots of outside input and interest. I think this shows when OS works best: When it is not done out of obligation (or ideology), but because it can be useful as a tool.