Apple: Open Source
developer.apple.com
developer.apple.com
Well, I guess that's arguable.
"WebKit — the open source rendering engine introduced by Apple"
Yeah, "forked from KHTML" wouldn't sound as nice as "introduced by Apple".
"OS X combines a proven UNIX foundation with the easy-to-use Mac interface to bring multicore technology and 48-bit power to the mass market."
Wait, what?
From the Intel programmer's manual:
> In 64-bit mode, an address is considered to be in canonical form if address bits 63 through to the most-significant implemented bit by the microarchitecture are set to either all ones or all zeros.
> Intel 64 architecture defines a 64-bit linear address. Implementations can support less. The first implementation of IA-32 processors with Intel 64 architecture supports a 48-bit linear address. This means a canonical address must have bits 63 through 48 set to zeros or ones (depending on whether bit 47 is a zero or one).
This is a confusingly obscure and pedantic point to make on a marketing page, though. Most kernel hackers on 64-bit platforms barely think about this.
It would've made sense in the 32-bit era to market as a 48-bit operating system, since it's bigger than 32.
Wait what? Am I missing something here
Those are all major strategic investments into open-source, at a time where companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon were not making any comparable investments that I can think of. For example, in 2005 Android was freshly acquired by Google, Chrome was still 3 years away. Go was introduced in 2009.
One exception I can think of is IBM which invested heavily in Linux around the same time Apple was open-sourcing Darwin.
Overall, their claim is arguable but certainly not without merit.
EDIT: remember when IBM covered the streets of San Francisco in Linux graffiti, and were threatened with a huge fine when the paint didn't wash off as planned? http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2001-04-25-ibm-linu...
It's funny how IBM was able to hijack the term.
Parts of it had to be open source. Apple could have made a lot of WebKit closed if they had wanted to since KHTML is LGPL, not GPL, and much of Apple's additions could have been kept as separate modules.
On the other hand it didn't have to be a fork. They could have gone for the NIH way, and make their own totally controller rendering engine.
Especially given that Apple's WebKit additions totally dwarfed KHTML.
Also: WebKit, Objective-C. (debatable since the GPL forced their hand)
Also LLVM. Apple heavily funded work on it, and it's now used by everybody who's anybody in the industry, from Google to MS.
Apple just doesn't care to go into much community development by committee (bazaar) because they have their own (cathedral-like) agenda to follow.
"first major computer company"
Interesting phrasing.
They said we use "tons of open source software" but we don't contribute back because it's going to "impact company's picture".
They sent project Titan people to a battery conference with a fake company name which they actually registered and made people believe it's a real company. It has a Crunchbase profile and all that. They published zero papers from their battery research. That's the Apple you should know.
Another thing they indirectly showed off was a reactjs playground which was very similar to swift playgrounds. I say indirectly, because the person that was presenting was showing revis using it. There's some public playground components that are around (e.g. component-playground [0]), but it's the type of thing where I think there's still room to experiment and innovate. Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle video [1] comes to mind.
I don't know how big the web presence at Apple has been in the last few years, but I'm hopeful that this is a sign that it's growing and that it'll push more resources to the Safari team so it'll keep up better with other browser vendors. Although they have a history of open source, I don't think they've open sourced much JavaScript? From googling around all I could find was that they were one of the biggest contributors to SproutCore [2], which looks fairly dated by today's standards.
[0] http://projects.formidablelabs.com/component-playground/
Though usually I try to avoid thinking of conspiracy; the more I work with their platform, the more reasonable this theory sounds.
I have been solicited to work on WebKit for Apple, but given how isolated Apple employees seem from the world, I don't think I could do it. I'm not willing to sign away my personality or existence for cash-on-hand. I suspect they're having trouble hiring people to work on WebKit, because although I think I'm a pretty good developer, I'm not the top of the barrel when it comes to WebKit developer candidates.
Classic cooky conspiracy theory.
In fact the Android browser is in many ways worse than Mobile Safari.
So there goes the whole theory...
48-bit power?…
> The AMD64 architecture defines a 64-bit virtual address format, of which the low-order 48 bits are used in current implementations.
It's actually pretty factual. They open sourced Darwin/WebKit/LLVM/Clang, and legitimized BSD and Unix as a consumer product via OS X... in 2001/2005/2005. The only "big" company that I can think of that made a move that big was Mozilla, which arguably doesn't even compare to a company as huge as Apple. Plus Mozilla open sourced itself out of pure desparation from pressure via Internet Explorer (which, I might remind you, was one of the worst proprietary pieces of shit to scorch this earth, by none other than Microsoft).
It's only been a recent thing where companies like Google/Microsoft have been embracing open source. Companies like Gitlab/Docker weren't even concievable back then.
That ARM64 stuff is pretty messed up though.
"Open source software is at the heart of Apple platforms and developer tools, and Apple continues to contribute and release significant quantities of open source code."
Sounds true assuming Apple thinks of itself as "the only major computer company"
Not sure that's what most people mean when they say "introduce".
Like for example, if I were operating a public water supply: I could say that I introduced the practice of chlorinating water, but obviously the practice has been demonstrated with other water supplies. Have I introduced it, or just adopted it?
It would be more accurate to say that Apple adopted KHTML as WebKit, then made major contributions to it.