Comment by coldtea
5 years ago
Interesting part:
> We had a lot of gratitude in the Open Source community — particular for our fixes to make bash pass the tests. You have absolutely no idea how much Apple contributed to the Open Source community, as part of this project, because it was a secret project — at least to people outside Apple — so we didn’t advertise the fact. But I expect we contributed about two million lines of code, to hundreds of Open Source projects, over the course of that year. A lot of gratitude — but it wasn’t collective, and so Apple was still faulted for “using Open Source code, but never contributing back”. We fixed at least 15 major gcc bugs, for example. You have no idea.
Apple chose the secrecy culture. It's also their problem if their contributions are so secretive that they have a PR problem about not enough OSS contributions.
I suspect this (Apple employees contributing individually) is still often the case. Apple is all over the place on their general attitude towards open source, but they’re notoriously extremely secretive. About almost everything that isn’t in a press release, curated announcement or publication, or required by law. Loudly proclaiming their investment in open source, without some corresponding PR goal, is essentially free tea leaves for people to speculate about What They’re Building In There.
I’m likewise sure there are some handshake agreements between many open source maintainers and Apple-paid contributors to just… not spill those beans.