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A comment on Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?. Parent comment

Re:Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon? by robin_reala on Sunday November 29, 2020 @05:14PM (#25248585)
Apple have a FOSS kernel, one of the three remaining web renderers, CUPS, and a bunch more smaller things. They’re not the most religious of FOSS companies, but it’s a bit unfair to say they don’t play well in the places that they play.

If you take FOSS to mean only GPL, then yes, I get your point.

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Re:Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon? by doctor_eval on Sunday November 29, 2020 @05:26PM (#25248664)
Yeah I think it’s more often that FOSS that doesn’t play well with Apple. It’s understandable - Apple keeps a lot of desirable software for itself - but perhaps unfortunate.

Federici has said in one of his interviews that Apple wants people to hack on the M1 machines so I’m hopeful that they will be more open than on IOS.

All of that said, I won’t hold my breath.

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Re:Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon? by toyg on Sunday November 29, 2020 @07:08PM (#25249372)
> Apple wants people to hack on the M1 machines

Of course they do. Like they wanted people to hack on OSX 20 years ago; and once they reached critical mass, they pulled up the drawbridges (dropping anything GNU, dropping Java, restricting access to the OS, pushing AppStore, etc etc).

Chances they're going to do exactly the same with M1 and its follow-ups are 99.99%... if anything because their management is largely drawn from the very same people who executed that strategy.

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Re:Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon? by spacedcowboy on Sunday November 29, 2020 @10:08PM (#25250381)
They dropped anything GNU because of the GPLv3, which was specifically designed to stop what the authors saw as exploitation of others' work.

I can see both sides here - the viral nature of GPLv3 is anathema to a company like Apple, so simply walking away was inevitable; and people were exploiting loopholes in the GPLv2 (I have no idea whether Apple was, but there are documented cases of others doing it).

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Re:Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon? by toyg on Sunday November 29, 2020 @10:42PM (#25250512)
It's just one datapoint - there are plenty more. Simply speaking, when they are the underdog and have to attract developers, they open up; and when they don't need it, they close doors. That's just what they do, it's a perfectly rational strategy (if cynical). They are hardly the only ones at this game, Microsoft does it too. I am just pointing out that promises of openness with Apple typically come with an expiry date.
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Re:Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon? by doctor_eval on Monday November 30, 2020 @01:50AM (#25251301)
Apple and Microsoft have never pretended to be “open” and their behaviour is quite predictable - Apple most of all. You might not like their behaviour but they haven’t tried to trick anyone.

Contrast with Google and the infamous tweet about Android:

https://mobile.twitter.com/Arubin/status/27808662429

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Re:Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon? by mondoshawan on Sunday November 29, 2020 @05:22PM (#25248646)
XNU is not FOSS, and 99% of the foundation classes, Aqua, and drivers are all proprietary.
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Re:Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon? by doctor_eval on Sunday November 29, 2020 @05:34PM (#25248723)
Why is XNU not FOSS? Has something changed? Is Wikipedia wrong? It says that XNU is APSL which is approved by OSI and FSF.

While I agree that much of the good stuff is proprietary (but certainly not all, eg WebKit), that doesn’t mean that the free stuff isn’t free.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Public_Source_License

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Re:Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon? by toyg on Sunday November 29, 2020 @07:16PM (#25249429)
Webkit was likely "saved" by the original KHTML license being GPL. At the time, Apple were wise enough (or desperate enough) to figure that they could work with such a license, although they were eventually careful to chisel out anything they could into BSD-licensed modules. And still they had to be dragged into the light more or less kicking and screaming (e.g. they had no public VSC until KDE people kicked up a stink in the press, and were just throwing huge swaths of code "over the fence" like they still do with XNU).
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Re:Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon? by saagarjha on Sunday November 29, 2020 @10:38PM (#25250499)
KHTML is LGPL, isn’t it?
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Re:Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon? by toyg on Monday November 30, 2020 @02:44AM (#25251547)
If i remember correctly KDE used to be GPL when webkit started, and was later relicensed. The difference is relatively irrelevant anyway, the way they used KHTML they would have had to release sources even under LGPL. Had KDE used BSD, MIT, or Apache, back then, we likely wouldn't have had webkit.
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Re:Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon? by robin_reala on Monday November 30, 2020 @03:48AM (#25251918)
I’m trying to find a specific commit to disprove this, but that’s not my recollection. Certainly this blog post from 2005 indicates LGPL: https://web.archive.org/web/20050428230122/http://www.kdedev...
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Re:Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon? by toyg on Monday November 30, 2020 @04:15AM (#25252061)
You might be right. Still, it shows the Apple attitude at the time, and how the license helped changing their ways. Note how the post complains they are simply using OSX apis... without the modification-release clauses, webkit as a reusable library would never have happened.
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Re:Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon? by Someone on Sunday November 29, 2020 @06:38PM (#25249180)
Indeed. Git repo at https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu.

Note that that is 2 years behind. You can get a newer source dump from https://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-6153.141.1/.

So, open source, but development isn’t done in the open. You can’t really expect you’ll be able to see recent commit messages or even just regular source dumps.

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Re:Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon? by spacedcowboy on Sunday November 29, 2020 @10:09PM (#25250392)
The development methodology has nothing to do with whether something is FOSS or not.

If you're complaining that you want to see daily updates, that's a completely different thing than claiming it's not FOSS (as OP did).

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Re:Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon? by lmm on Monday November 30, 2020 @05:03AM (#25252300)
FOSS means being able to develop it the same way they do. That ought to mean being able to see to VCS history, bug trackers and so on - their own developers would use those things when developing.
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Re:Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon? by robin_reala on Monday November 30, 2020 @05:47AM (#25252492)
It really doesn’t mean that. Neither Stallman’s four freedoms[1] nor Peren’s Open Source Definition[2] have anything to say about code history, bug trackers, development standards etc etc, and they’re the only commonly accepted definitions for what free and open source software is.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en

[2] https://opensource.org/docs/osd

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Re:Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon? by lmm on Monday November 30, 2020 @08:02PM (#25261053)
> The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

> In order for freedoms 1 and 3 (the freedom to make changes and the freedom to publish the changed versions) to be meaningful, you need to have access to the source code of the program. Therefore, accessibility of source code is a necessary condition for free software. Obfuscated “source code” is not real source code and does not count as source code.

IMO exactly the same logic applies to code history and bug trackers: you need access to those things to be able to study how the program works. A code dump is much the same thing as obfuscated source code: you can build the program from it, but you can't understand the program from it.

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Re:Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon? by spacedcowboy on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @01:06AM (#25262829)
Right, but, like, that’s just your opinion man.

FOSS means you get the source code, everything else is gravy.

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Re:Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon? by lmm on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @05:45AM (#25264118)
Source "in the preferred form for making modifications". IMO that means a VCS checkout rather than a code dump.
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Re:Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon? by spacedcowboy on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @09:50AM (#25265629)
A code dump is nothing remotely like obfuscated source code. They run competitions for obfuscated source code, take a look and compare.

Seriously, at this point I think you have to be just defending a position that you know is wrong but since you originally stated it, you’re not backing down. If not then let’s just agree to disagree...

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