Re:Darwin-xnu: The Darwin Kernel
by smitherfield on Saturday September 30, 2017 @02:49PM
(#15374408)
Apple's made some pretty big genuine contributions to open-source: WebKit, LLVM[1]/clang, Swift, OpenCL.[2]
[1] Yes, technically "not Apple" in the sense that Node.js isn't Joyent.
[2] Admittedly partial credit at best since they've orphaned it in favor of their proprietary Metal API. I'd guess however that Metal will get open-sourced pretty soon.
webkit was based on khtml (LGPL) - not much of a choice for apple
For a long time, they just did source-code dumps whenever they made a binary release (i.e., did what is required by the LGPL). They actively chose to move it to being run as an open-source project, with public history, public bug tracking, and public contributions.
Re:Darwin-xnu: The Darwin Kernel
by smitherfield on Saturday September 30, 2017 @04:46PM
(#15374903)
They could've written a rendering engine from scratch, or (in 2001-2002) acquired Netscape or Opera for a song.
I'm not saying it's useless, but it's certainly much less useful than a proper version-history, and very much a declaration that it is in no way intended to be a collaborative project.
But I guess that shouldn't surprise anyone either. It's Apple, after all.