Apple is landing patches in FreeBSD

https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/?id=7dd39ef4e0d56b213445754a189d204b70a77a00

by 0mp • 2 years ago

27 18 2 years ago

cgit.freebsd.org

cies• 2 years ago

I just read this: https://www.reddit.com/r/unix/comments/u6r1xz/comment/i5ae0n...

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).

anotherhue• 2 years ago

I assumed they borrowed some of the userland.

yuan153• 2 years ago

The guy has been on the gnome board for 16 years, and at apple for 4 years. My occam's razor says he used his apple account but probably it is not an official apple project. If his boss is okay with this it is going to be alright.

mdhb5• 2 years ago

It’s actually wild to think how much Apple takes from the open source community and how little it gives back where this is somehow front page news.

xyzzy_plugh6• 2 years ago

Is it? Apple contributes significantly to the open source community, including to multiple projects within the Linux Foundation.

mdhb5• 2 years ago

Please give me some examples we can work with.

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.

mort96• 2 years ago

I don't generally see front-page news about their huge contributions to the WebKit, LLVM or Swift projects (yes Swift is transitioning to being an Apple thing to its own separate project from what I understand). The only reason this contribution is news is that Apple doesn't typically contribute to FreeBSD, not that Apple doesn't typically contribute to 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.

mdhb5• 2 years ago

Reaching for WebKit and Swift as some kind of counterpoint really highlights exactly what I’m talking about here rather than rebuts anything I think.

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.

GeekyBear• 2 years ago

FreeBSD is compiled using Apple's open sourced Clang compiler.

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.

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang

xyzzy_plugh6• 2 years ago

Apple does a lot of things. They have a lot of servers. They have a lot of software engineers. It wouldn't surprise me to learn they're running FreeBSD somewhere. They also vendor a lot of BSD software in MacOS and friends. It wouldn't surprise me if this implementation of comm is included in MacOS.

This doesn't seem very interesting to me. I dislike the implication of the title, as if this somehow means something more.

habitue• 2 years ago

From people I've known who've worked at Apple, it's an uphill battle to get approval to contribute to open source there. Somebody likely fought pretty hard to be able to do this

xyzzy_plugh6• 2 years ago

I've worked at places where it was an uphill battle for some folks but not others. I've worked at places where it was an uphill battle if you engaged legal, but if you just went ahead and did it nobody cared. I've worked at places where it was an uphill battle because they didn't want engineers just throwing it over the wall and impacting their reputation, and engineers were lazy and could not be trusted to be competent in contributing to open source projects.

"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.

Apple is landing patches in FreeBSD

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