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Comment by general_failure | Hacker News Reader

As expected no Apple. I have always been fascinated how Apple gets a lot of developer love and yet is completely absent in most (all?) conference/event sponsorship, initiatives etc.

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Apple uses a lot of different technology than Linux does, though. Even down to their fileutils, cp, find, mv, chmod, etc. are all BSD-variants and not GNU; they ship with cURL and not wget; and they use/prefer LLVM/Clang over GCC, and so on.

They also ship software like OpenSSL, but they actively discourage its use in Mac software in favour of SecureTransport.

Don't get me wrong, they should give back (and they do), but it's kind of surprising how much of the standard Linux stack they don't actually ship.

You mean GNU stack :). They use plenty of FreeBSD code.

What for? Apple discourages the use of OpenSSL[1] and instead use their own open source library[2] which also has an API present inside of Cocoa and iOS.

1: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/securi...

2: http://opensource.apple.com/source/Security/Security-55471/

No Apple fan here, but to be fair they give some apps back (eg: cups)

He has a point though, Apple and other deep-pockets should in someway contribute and/or endorse software they use since ages and donate some $$ to Open/Net/Free BSDs.

They hired the main developer of CUPS to adapt it for OS X. The license of CUPS ensures they continue to share it - the GPL and LGPL - they even had to explicitly add a licensing exception for Apple's (and other company's) binary printer drivers. I would bet money if Apple had CUPS under a BSD license they would not be sharing their improvements so leisurely.

Really? Because they did that with WebKit. They made huge modifications to KHTML and KJS, released them back (admittedly in kind of an amateurish way at the start), and also open-sourced their proprietary component, WebKit, which wraps WebCore and JSCore up in a nice, manageable interface. They didn't have to, but they did.

They also have a lot of contributions to LLVM/Clang, as well as several other open-source projects.

Of course they had to share webkit, KHTML and KJS were under the LGPL so they had to. What they didn't have to share was the apps based on top of webkit such as Safari and they didn't share Safari.

KHTML/KJS was LGPL, so they had to release it. LLVM and Clang is a better argument, until you realize that Apple hired on the guy from the project after their GCC grand plans collapsed - the only visible reason they shifted strategies was to keep from having to open source components of their proprietary IDE XCode.

It's very well established that Apple is allergic to the GPL, and is willing to pay good money to avoid dealing with it whenever possible.

They have their own Unix.

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