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Comment by codemac | Hacker News Reader

> 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

No, the reason they don't put it on GitHub is that they have no intention of participating in the community that made the software they are using.

All of these tools already have sites, communities, repositiories, etc. Apple could easily participate as many other companies do who also have proprietary patches. Apple actively chooses this over being a member of the software community it takes so much from.

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Because Github is not equal to open source. It is a company out for profits like any other, why should Apple host what they choose to make open on that specific platform?

GitHub is not the issue here, Apple choses not to upstream anything, it doesn't matter where the upstream project hosts their code, bugtracker, etc.

Apple also doesn't fulfill all of its GPL obligations (eg components used in iOS, example: libstdc++) and their OSS releases lag a month or more behind software releases.

I'm surprised to see you downvoted here. As a maintainer of an open source project, libgit2, which is GPL licensed and used by Apple, I am rather frustrated by Apple's behavior.

The source for libgit2 itself is not present on their opensource site, though they use it in Xcode. (Git itself is present, but is sometimes out of date compared to what they're actually shipping.)

I've emailed them about this and they offered to provide me the source they used. This feels like they're trying to do the bare minimum of compliance - and making even that nonobvious (since they have an obvious distribution mechanism.)

This complaint is not a claim that they're violating our license, but it's definitely not an ideal situation, and I'm sympathetic to your frustration.

libgit2 has a linking exception in addition to the GPLv2, which exactly allows what they are doing. This exception allows to link libgit2 without modifications in a program with absolutely zero obligations. It may not have been what you intended, but you cannot claim anything from Apple as you gave them permission to do that.

> In addition to the permissions in the GNU General Public License, the authors give you unlimited permission to link the compiled version of this library into combinations with other programs, and to distribute those combinations without any restriction coming from the use of this file. [...]

https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2/blob/master/COPYING

Yes, I'm very aware of our license.

It allows people to link it in their non-free, proprietary software without any vitality on that proprietary software. It still requires them to make the source for the version of libgit2 that they are using available upon request.

What kind of obligations do you think of?

Are you even sure Apple is using libstdc++ at all and not libc++ as on macOS?

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