Apple’s research secrecy hurts industry and academic research

Re:Apple’s research secrecy hurts industry and academic rese... by zepto on Wednesday June 15, 2016 @05:26PM (#11912260)

Firstly, the research is paid for and is public domain - that's the whole point - so that people can use it without paying.

Secondly, the author betrays himself by dismissing Apple's open source efforts. Their contribution to WebKit is the only reason there is competition in the browser space, and saying Swift and LLVM are 'proprietary' and dismissing their impact is either ignorant or dishonest. As far as I can see LLVM is the backbone of a huge amount of academic programming language research.

Thirdly, Apple's photos 'AI' seems like a pretty modest application. Hardly groundbreaking stuff that they are keeping 'secret'. If they owe taxes for this, then all corporations owe taxes for ideas they've incorporated.

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Re:Apple’s research secrecy hurts industry and academic rese... by dragonwriter on Wednesday June 15, 2016 @05:35PM (#11912331)

> Their contribution to WebKit is the only reason there is competition in the browser space

There have been competing closed-source browsers, plus Mozilla, that weren't dependent on WebKit. Without Apple's open-source work on WebKit, maybe Google wouldn't have done Chrome (or maybe Google would have forked Firefox as its starting point, instead), but there'd still be browser competition.

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