Apple is doubling down on open source

http://www.techrepublic.com/google-amp/article/apple-is-doubling-down-on-open-source/

by happy-go-lucky • 10 years ago

109 88 10 years ago

kmf• 10 years ago

This is a Google AMP page, so it displays pretty strangely on desktop browsers (full-width paragraphs) -- here's the normal URL.

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/apple-is-doubling-down-o...

userbinator• 10 years ago

I actually prefer the AMP version even on a non-mobile browser. It does load noticeably faster.

cryptarch4• 10 years ago

But it sends requests to Google servers, always. It's cool that its lightweight, but not like this.

I flagged the post because it downloads a file of obscure, unstandardized format designed to send tracking information to Google.

It should at least have an [AMP] tag like other "non-HTML file format" posts do.

Edit: I'm sorry if my post comes across as needlessly hostile, any hostility is only directed at the AMP situation. AMP seems very much deliberately designed as an attractive way to get webdesigners to let Google to track more consumers. What the hell is with people excusing the fact that each and every AMP page makes requests to Google servers, as defined by the "standard"?

grawlinson• 10 years ago

Is Apple still reducing dependencies on GPL code?

http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/

fapjacks• 10 years ago

Thanks for posting. This is what I was coming here to say, also.

grzm4• 10 years ago

You might find the recent HN discussion on this topic useful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12894721

From what I gather (welcome to correction, as I haven't looked at this in depth), there are two main things going on here:

- replacing GPL code with BSD code

- staying with earlier versions of GPL code rather than update to GPLv3 versions

abritinthebay3• 10 years ago

Might want to be honest: not GPL, just GPLv3

Can't really blame them either. This was the exact result that most (outside of the GPL bubble) predicted when v3 was released.

Washuu• 10 years ago

If I even remotely sneeze near a piece of GPLv3 code at work a team of lawyers gets restless.

mwfunk• 10 years ago

Yeah, this should not be a surprise to anyone who's been paying attention for the last 10 years. GPLv3 was incredibly divisive, both inside and outside the open source community.

Admittedly, for some people this may have been part of its intent- to draw more lines in the sand, to force out those that the FSF deems as having insufficient ideological purity. The FSF doesn't shy away from calling out its enemies- to my eyes, over the decades it has been far more concerned with condemning what it perceives as being evil, rather than promotion of what it perceives as being good.

RRRA• 10 years ago

Yeah, like many, they pretend they're doing FOSS while dropping the (F)reedom part.

GPLv3 is about stopping TIVO-isation, but TIVO tactics is what Apple specializes in. Locking people in with other people's (F)ree software.

The sad part is that GPLv3 is just fine for all (F)OSS project. But to them, it's about making sure their project governance can never really be moved to a more neutral foundation if they ever feel the need to put all their energy behind one project and close it down again... The "freedom" to take away freedom from others isn't one.

A bit like how Android 3.x was code-dumped after the fact, when 4 came out... Open you say?

And yes, non-copyleft would work as well, and I have nothing against them a priori, but that's as long as the governance model is built around neutral foundations, proper community management, etc.

What the GPL does, is prevent the imbalance when a company decide it doesn't care about the community around a project because they have the bigger share and run with it.

I would understand more discussions around AGPLv3, but GPLv3 is just fine.

(On a side note, I'm always fascinated by the GPL bashing here... well... I guess it is expected considering money > freedom for some who can't think passed their project's legacy.)

blinkingled4• 10 years ago

They could start with making sure atleast major Linux distros work fine on Apple desktop and laptop hardware.

It would most likely be hw specific quirks and drivers given most of the hardware they use is standard and already supported by Linux. (With Intel building in their Wi-Fi chips even Broadcom wireless stuff won't be an issue.)

feld2• 10 years ago

This has nothing to do with their desire to use open source. In fact, it's blatantly against their goals.

blinkingled4• 10 years ago

Well most of Apple's servers and services run on Linux and there is clearly a demand for Linux laptops from developers. If Apple has to be friendly with OSS supporting Linux will take them a long way - good for developers including Apple's own services/infrastructure folk, broadens up the Workstation market again for Apple etc.

Doubling down on Open Source is not really doubling down if you just continue to dump code on github.

drivingmenuts• 10 years ago

Why is it Apple's responsibility to ensure Linux runs on it's hardware? Shouldn't the major responsibility fall on Linux user's shoulders?

blinkingled4• 10 years ago

Because only Apple knows best about their hardware and there's a market for that. Apple also support Windows via Boot Camp - without that Windows would not be any more functional than say Ubuntu. It isn't like we are talking about full Linux port to their hardware - Apple's hardware deviates from standards for example - Linux people don't really have a way of knowing that. Only Apple could provide the glue required to enable those type of things.

bluejekyll• 10 years ago

Does it have to be Linux? Could instead be something like this: http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

That project looks dead, but essentially, it would be XNU paired with GNU, operating similarly to Linux (Though you'd still end up with MACH-O binaries instead of ELF). Honestly though, I find the Unix inside Apple to be more than enough for my general needs, and VMs step in where it is not.

Also, iTerm2 is still better than anything I've used in Linux. I work in both Linux and macOS every day, Mac is still a better experience.

forgettableuser4• 10 years ago

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• 10 years ago

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

xenadu02• 10 years ago

NeXTSTEP was based on Mach/BSD from the early days so it isn't recent.

shmerl6• 10 years ago

Question is, how much did they give back to it?

techdragon2• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

Wasn't Battery Status API discovered to be harmful to privacy and on the way out in all browsers?

wux• 10 years ago

This looked like a pretty long list of unsupported APIs, so I decided to do some research:

- CSS motion path is not an official standard; it is implemented only in Blink (Chrome/Opera).

- CSS device adaptation is a W3C working draft. It is available prefixed in IE/Edge and Opera Mini, but is unprefixed in 0% of shipping browsers.

- Client Hints: DPR, Width, Viewport-Width is an IETF working draft implemented only in Blink (Chrome/Opera).

- inputmode is supported in 0% of shipping browsers.

- MediaRecorder API is a W3C working draft supported in Blink (Chrome/Opera) and Firefox but not IE/Edge or Safari.

- Network Information API is not an official standard; it is supported only in Chrome for Android.

(Source: caniuse.com)

I stopped going through the list at this point. At least from the top of your list, none of these features are "shipped in every other browser" and some are shipped in no browsers at all. I'm not sure how it shows that Safari is "far behind the times."

If anything, the list seems to show that Chrome implements many non-standard APIs not available elsewhere. Combined with its mindshare (if not marketshare), this suggests that Chrome--not Safari--is in some ways the new IE6.

adamlett• 10 years ago

It would be nice if some of their contributions were less "throw it over the wall once or twice a year".

Some of their contributions are. See Swift.

It would be nicer still if they stopped thinking their browser only needs to get new features once per year.

Safari Technology Preview ships every 2 weeks. I use it as my main browser. It is as solid as any other browser.

glenndebacker• 10 years ago

"Safari is rapidly getting a reputation as the new IE6."

And that is just a ridiculous comparison done by people who have never witnessed that period or are having a different agenda.

One of my first jobs (more then a decade ago) as a young developer was being a web developer for an American/Belgian e-commerce site. One of the things that was very important - because every customer counts - that the site displayed and worked perfectly in any browser (IE6, FF/Mozilla, Safari and Opera at the time)

That was a situation that wasn't a lot of fun because you had standard HTML that more or less worked in any browser with the exception of IE6. There where a lot of moments that I really hated my job because of the frustrations that IE6 often brought to the table. That is in no way comparable with Safari today.

And while I would like to have Apple more rapidly implementing new API's, with IE we could only dream of having an IE version that got new features every year. Years have we have witnessed the fallout of IE6, that will never be the case with Safari to this day.

IE6 was a vehicle to create an internet that only worked with Microsoft standards so that others couldn't be a valid alternative hence the IE6 markup vs the rest. You can't do that by dragging your feet when implementing API's, you only price yourself out of the market in that way.

jayflux• 10 years ago

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.

-----------------

To be fair, they had a 9.1 release this year, which included: Picture element support

Support for CSS variables

Etc https://developer.apple.com/library/content/releasenotes/Gen...

So if they do this again, we're looking more at 6 month cycles.

The whole safari is the new IE6 stuff is hyperbole which I don't actually hear that many developers saying.. IE6 was bad because it didn't follow any standards, not because it updated slower than the competition.

raimue• 10 years 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?

forgettableuser4• 10 years 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.

skissane2• 10 years ago

If they are "doubling down on open source", maybe they could get open source Darwin working again? From what I've heard, while they still release some of the source code, it is no longer in a form in which it can easily be compiled into a usable operating system – e.g. some of the components they release source for can't even be built because they rely on unreleased Apple private header files – basically, things have gone backwards on this front compared to earlier versions of OS X.

(From what I've heard, I don't know how true it is, Apple became less open with Darwin, around the time of the PPC-Intel transition, out of fear it was making life easier for people trying to use OS X on non-Apple hardware easier.)

eddieh• 10 years ago

Hmm, there is still at least one Darwin distribution. Darwin build is still available https://github.com/macosforge/darwinbuild

I'm not sure if the problem is Apple or a lack of interest and community.

I'd definitely be up to trying to build it sometime in the future. I'm a little busy at the moment. I'd expect it to take a few days at least based on my experience with Linux from scratch.

coldtea2• 10 years ago

If they are "doubling down on open source", maybe they could get open source Darwin working again?

Why? Without the UI and OS X GUI programs it's not something many would care to run as opposed to Linux or FreeBSD, and most haven't.

skissane2• 10 years ago

I can think of one use. Suppose I am developing something non-GUI (e.g. a database, an application server, a compiler or interpreter for some programming language, etc.) While macOS is unlikely to be the production deployment platform, getting it running on macOS will make some developers happier (yes, they can always use a VM or Docker to run the Linux version, but running a native macOS version has its advantages.)

So, now I have a non-GUI app for (among other platforms) macOS, I want a build machine for compilation and automated tests. Ideally just a VM somewhere (maybe even in the cloud). To legally run macOS in such a way, it needs to run on Apple hardware, which adds expense and complexity. However, I could run a Darwin VM legally on any hardware. Now of course, Darwin isn't quite macOS, but for a non-GUI app it might be close enough (depending on exactly which APIs it uses and whether those APIs fall into the open source Darwin subset).

Is that a particularly common use case? Probably not. But there probably are multiple open source projects and maybe even some proprietary software packages for which that use case would exist.

kccqzy• 10 years ago

It can be great for security research. Not all released source code are designed to be run.

paws• 10 years ago

Next week marks two months since Sierra's public release but there's been no commensurate release of any open source[1].

[1] https://opensource.apple.com/ 10.11.6 is latest macOS release at the time of writing.

comex• 10 years ago

10.12 is probably coming eventually… Apple always takes forever to update that site. Of course, this delay is itself a sign of deep neglect.

franciscop• 10 years ago

Remove google-amp/ from the article's url for a better experience

shmerl6• 10 years ago

Let them start supporting free codecs and stop patent aggression, as well as allow FOSS (including other browsers) in their application store. Then we'll see how much they are friends of open source or not.

Oh, and you can add to that support for Vulkan on their platforms.

icebraining3• 10 years ago

They allow FOSS in their iOS store, just not copyleft licenses.

shmerl6• 10 years ago

just not copyleft licenses.

That's already a problem and discriminates against a major part of FOSS projects.

steele• 10 years ago

"Apple has been getting religion on open source, but more than code the industry needs its voice."

what

olliej• 10 years ago

wut :D (and i know this is a useless comment - my immediate response to the sentence was that :D )

datashovel• 10 years ago

I think a lot of this is a result of probably not being able to recruit top talent as easily as companies who have "opened up".

1) Many people at top of the talent pool know that the internet makes it possible for them to not only make huge differences at companies they work for, but they can also (if allowed) make enormous differences to the entire world. If they don't have to compromise their free time in order to do that, it's an enormous benefit.

2) The people a company like Apple wants to hire are interviewing the company just as thoroughly as they are interviewing the candidate. If the candidate has not already seen a large portfolio of their work there's no real guarantee (even if you're Apple) that you can convince them that they'll be working on amazing teams with amazing engineers.

3) When you're at the top of the talent pool your goals and incentive structure are almost certainly not tied directly to compensation. Of course you want to be compensated fairly, but when it comes down to it you're passionate about what you do, and as a consequence you've become great at what you do. You generally don't become the best at something because you believe it will compensate you better.

SCdF• 10 years ago

Show me.

jjirsa• 10 years ago

ctrl-f, "cassandra", 0 of 0... what's context?

Apple is doubling down on open source

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