Apple's Open Source Stance

The cluster debates Apple's commitment to open source software, with criticisms of their hostility, limited original contributions, and closed practices contrasted by defenses highlighting releases like Darwin, WebKit, and opensource.apple.com.

➡️ Stable 0.5x Open Source
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Keywords

MS ARM OSS apple.com KHTML MEMBERS IDE XNU Angular.js GOOD apple open source source open swift software source software license darwin ios

Sample Comments

FR6 Feb 26, 2014 View on HN

Apple does not want to contribute to the open source community?

ufo Jan 31, 2017 View on HN

Apple is hostile to open source. The Apple store terms of service are incompatible with GPL. And to develop applications you need to be using macOS on apple hardware and you need to purchase a developer license as well.

mhomde Mar 9, 2015 View on HN

Open Source, wow that was unexpected from Apple

lscotte Oct 15, 2020 View on HN

Of course it has, now that Apple owns it. Open source is not consistent with Apple's culture.

smashing Jul 28, 2012 View on HN

You are an idiot. Apple releases the source code to much of their technology: http://opensource.apple.com/ and http://www.macosforge.org/ and https://www.apple.com/opensource/

naringas Jun 24, 2020 View on HN

at least apple never pretended like iOS was open source

raimue Sep 14, 2017 View on HN

As Apple is not developing this software in the public, it would not make sense to put it on GitHub or any other code hosting site. The usual approach is that Apple throws bits over the wall where you can pick them up months after the end-user release. And even these code drops will be thoroughly cleaned before, so that for example kernel sources do not contain any trace of support for ARM or anything else related to the iPhone – all of that is strictly closed source.Software they take in fro

mariusmg Mar 22, 2012 View on HN

If it's open source, it's not developed by apple......

stephenr Aug 19, 2019 View on HN

Very little original software from apple is open source.Things that they’ve adopted/forked/bought are but there’s not much they’ve started from scratch and released as OSS.There is almost no expectation of it from people who know Apple.Promising something unexpected and not delivering is undoubtedly more damaging than saying nothing.

fred_is_fred Mar 23, 2016 View on HN

But isn't Apple an Open Source company? ;)