Do you really need more evidence of apples sociopathic behavior?
“Apple hasn’t explained why” Its because they stopped updating bash when the bash people asked apple to upstream their changes… they basically ignored them, then bash went gpl v3
… which would force apples hand.
In general,
Apple is unwilling to publish the source code of proprietary non-Darwin applications and libraries in their OS.
… even when they didn’t do their own homework.
So there’s webkit. If it hadn’t started life as an open source project with a non-bsd license (I’m not even complaining about everything co-opted from BSD! But I should ) the internet would be a very different place. Look at this very basic thing:
Safari JS and webgl performance is degraded to force app developers to develop an app instead of the web. This is extremely anti-consumer because it has been shown time and time again that apps are simply not as restrictively sandboxed as websites are… and this is a problem.
Apologists often point to webkit as some good open source apple has done… but apples actions have been to undermine anyone who is using it. If apple knew then what they know now RE webkit I can assure you they would have started from scratch. And, ironically, few execs in apple realize this openness of webkit is precisely why it is in the position it is in today. They want webkit to be good… but not tooooo good.
If you look up the KHTML project apple was especially shitty to them before doing the webkit thing… no bug reports and, arguably, tried to sabotage the whole project by initial non-compliance with the damn license.
They did something similar with Samba… fixed juuuuust enough of it but without really working with devs so they wouldn’t have to fix their own shit.
They very nearly rolled in ZFS to OSX but they were legit afraid of Oracle. The fact ZFS was licensed less restrictively than khtml or cups AND apple wasn’t willing to mess with oracle? That tells me they knew exactly what they’re doing and had planned to play these same type of games with ZFS, but feared oracle.
Apple maximizes as much benefit as the possibly can from others’ hard work and then not just merely do as little as possible so others can benefit from their work – that’s not the sin – they actively stifle anyone trying to learn from what they did or make things better whether that’s with webkit and the internet community at large – forcing chrome on ios to use their html rendering engine – degrading js and webgrl performance in web apps – that’s the real crime here.
Also, there is a special place in hell for a company that releases a product but doesn’t give programmers any documentation. (M1) Think about the level of unnecessary human suffering the ashai linux people have gone through to try to support something more open on apple hardware.
And yes, the fact OSX is based on BSD. The BSD license is open but I would say that if you are in a position such as apple, it hurts you so little to just “do the right thing” with BSD-licensed stuff. Did you do something awesome to improve bash? Can that really be proprietary special apple flavor? The license doesn’t force you to give up your changes, but you should do the right thing. You aren’t required to do the right thing by the license, but you aren’t required to be reprehensible with code stewardship either.
There are countless examples of this kind of thing from Apple. Maybe it’s especially egregious to me because in the early days apple was actually really good about providing decent to good documentation about rom routines, operating system functions, etc.
Corporations are never your friend, but on a bell curve this is more than 3 standard deviations away from the norm.
