Yeah, a page with a list of downloadable tarballs can hardly be called Open Source.
BTW, how useful is this code? Obviously you can't build anything with this. It's useful for auditing, maybe?
BTW, how useful is this code? Obviously you can't build anything with this. It's useful for auditing, maybe?
It's there to meet the liabilities that they have through the licenses for the used open source software. These licenses often say that if you use the software you also need to allow the public to retrieve it. Even more so if you make modifications to it.
I'm not sure what you think "open source" is or needs to be. We were passing around tarballs over ftp for almost all of our open source software in the past.
The idea is for Apple to release the source for components that are included in macOS, and the license requires publication. There is no obligation (or, I would argue, expectation) to do anything more.
For example, Android is not Open Source to me because the code is dropped after the fact.
But fair enough. I'll take the downvotes.
Unfortunately, CF is always released pretty late (it's "coming soon" for months), and it would be nice if much more was Open Source.
But I'm happy about every bit of code that's public!