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Comment by iLemming

6 days ago

> Swift never felt truly open source either.

Apple has been always 'transactional' when it comes to OSS - they open source things only when it serves a strategic purpose. They open-sourced Swift only because they needed the community to build an ecosystem around their platform.

Yeah, well, sure they've done some work around LLVM/Clang, WebKit, CUPS, but it's really not proportional to the size and the influence they still have.

Compare them to Google, with - TensorFlow, k8s, Android (nominally), Golang, Chrome, and a long tail of other shit. Or Meta - PyTorch and the Llama model series. Or even Microsoft, which has dramatically reversed course from its "open source is a cancer" era (yeah, they were openly saying that, can you believe it?) to becoming one of the largest contributors on GitHub.

Apple I've heard even have harshest restrictions about it - some teams are just not permitted to contribute to OSS in any way. Obsessively secretive and for what price? No wonder that Apple's software products are just horrendously bad, if not all the time - well, too often. And on their own hardware too.

I wouldn't mind if Swift dies, I'm glad Objective-C is no longer relevant. In fact, I can't wait for Swift to die sooner.

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iLemming

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ajross  6 days ago

> WebKit

Sort of an exception that proves the rule. Yes, it's great and was released for free. But at least partially that's not a strategic decision from Apple but just a requirement of the LGPLv2 license[1] under which they received it (as KHTML) originally.

And even then, it was Blink and not WebKit that ended up providing better value to the community.

[1] It does bear pointing out that lots of the new work is dual-licensed as 2-clause BSD also. Though no one is really trying to test a BSD-only WebKit derivative, as the resulting "Here's why this is not a derived work of the software's obvious ancestor" argument would be awfully dicey to try to defend. The Ship of Theseus is not a recognized legal principle, and clean rooms have historically been clean for a reason.

truncate  6 days ago

>> some teams are just not permitted to contribute to OSS in any way

My understanding is that by default you are not allowed to contribute to open-source even if its your own project. Exceptions are made for teams whose function is to work on those open-source project e.g. Swift/LLVM/etc...

  • WD-42  6 days ago

    I talked to an apple engineer at a bar years ago and he said they aren’t allowed to work on _anything_ including side projects without getting approval first. Seemed like a total wtf moment to me.

    • xmcp123  6 days ago

      I have never had a non wtf moment talking to an apple software engineer at a bar.

      I can recall one explaining to me in the mid 20 teens that the next iPhone would be literally impossible to jailbreak in any capacity with 100% confidence.

      I could not understand how someone that capable(he was truly bright) could be that certain. That is pure 90s security arrogance. The only secure computer is one powered off in a vault, and even then I am not convinced.

      Multiple exploits were eventually found anyway.

      We never exchanged names. That’s the only way to interact with engineers like that and talk in real terms.