Apple should have a vested interest in developers on their platform and thus ports of popular F/OSS; but obviously, developers, graphic artists, music and other content producers aren't as significant a customer group relative to consumers as they used to be. I wonder how the decline of the Mac platform for professional work hits Apple's baseline assuming the historical draw of content creators to the platform also brought consumers and has been used by Apple in advertising, but I guess Apple knows better and simply makes so much more money with iDevices.
The first patches for Apple silicon came from Apple engineers, FWIW.
Lets not forget that pretty much everything that's part of the Darwin layer (a.k.a. Unix) is already running natively on M1 Macs, including Ruby, Python, Perl, Vim, Emacs, etc. Straight from Apple.
I wonder how the decline of the Mac platform for professional work hits Apple's baseline assuming…
Apple's Mac revenue hit an all-time high just last quarter and that was before M1 Macs shipped. Yes, a product line that's about to be 37 years old in January 2021 hit $9 billion in revenue during a global pandemic [1] and jumped 39% [2]. I doubt there's a decline in professional usage of the Mac; even if there were, entry level M1 Macs that outperform professional Intel-based machines from Apple and others will address that.
but I guess Apple knows better and simply makes so much more money with iDevices.
The iPhone is brings in the most money but the Mac ($9 billion) made more than the iPad ($6.7 billion) and the Apple Watch + HomePod ($7.8 billion).
[1]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/10/apple-reports-fourth-...
[2]: https://fortune.com/2010/05/17/u-s-mac-sales-up-39-in-april/
And, don’t forget about MacPorts, which is more “core Apple philosophy” than Homebrew.
They could donate something, but why should they? It’s community project not run by Apple. We, users, who actively use it to make professional work, should be responsible for supporting community projects like that. :)