Don't Apple have a policy that their developers aren't supposed to contribute to Open Source without explicit permission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22935263)? I imagine this is the result of that policy - if Apple wants to contribute to something as a business there isn't really anyone who would be able to use their individual account to do it without lots of people questioning why that person can when others can't.

Most companies have this policy it’s actually quite important to protect both the company and the project, it wouldn’t surprise me if big projects even mandate it on their side too.

It usually comes in two flavors - individual contribution as you doing something on your own time and equipment and official contributions when the company itself contributes to a project.

This looks to be the latter rather than the former so it would make sense it would come from an Apple account.

> It usually comes in two flavors - individual contribution as you doing something on your own time and equipment and official contributions when the company itself contributes to a project.

My understanding is that Apple's policy is highly unusual in that "individual contribution as you doing something on your own time and equipment" are pretty much not allowed at all.

It’s more complicated than that. Apple’s blanket policy towards such contributions is that anything you do in your own time needs SVP approval, because it might potentially compete with Apple’s business interests. And as a general policy it likes to deny such requests. Other companies have various policies: Google, for example, is for the most part “we’ll let you do whatever but we own the code, and if you want to own it we will make it about as difficult as Apple does”. The whole “you compete with us if you do anything” is a big tech thing, by the way, because they work on so many things that they can scare their engineers with competition threats on any grounds in California. The best that smaller companies can do is restrict you from working on the limited thing they work on, such as developer tooling or a social network.

Meanwhile Microsoft lets their employees do whatever they want after hours, so long as no company provided resources are used.

I know of developers who made quite a bit of $$$ being first out the door with applications utilizing SDKs that they wrote. MS is perfectly happy with their own developers showing off shiny new features.

Because that’s the law in Washington state.

I am not talking about non-competes, I am talking about moonlighting.

On the day of employee orientation, they specifically talk about moonlighting and HOW to do it.

"Do not use any hardware we provide for you, and do not use any software you installed from the corporate network, buy your own copy of development tools and licenses, you can use the free Azure credits we give you but not the ones linked to your employee login, make sure you use the credits on your personal account."

They do require you not write software that directly competes with existing Microsoft software, for obvious reasons, but other than that it is fair game.

But this doesn't even cover the whole of it. At multiple times, Microsoft has actively encouraged their employees to write software as a side hustle! They've launched internal competitions "We have a cool new SDK, write some software and put it on the MS Store! Best rated software wins some prize!"

The entire "developers first" culture there extends to how they treat their own employees.

Heck MS has a long tradition of employees leaving to start a new company and MS buying that company up a few years later. I suspect that during the 90s/early 2000s it was seen as a good way to innovate, similar to incubator labs within companies now days.

Which law are you referring to? Noncompetes are enforceable in Washington but not in California, for example, and Microsoft has enforced noncompetes for upper management in several high profile cases, but I am not aware of any enforcement against engineers.

And not in california? Its interesting that Apple is seen as hip and cool yet operates a tight leash obviously because it can, legally. Microsoft is... other things... yet is operating a looser leash, albeit also in compliance with law.

Interesting but not surprising I guess.

Microsoft is also "older" on the software side of things, and is probably the source of why that law came into being in Washington state.

> My understanding is that Apple's policy is highly unusual in that "individual contribution as you doing something on your own time and equipment" are pretty much not allowed at all.

I am not sure exactly but I suspect this is employee-specific and may be only for those working on sensitive projects.

I worked at Apple years ago and it was never in my contract or mentioned to me. And there are plenty of more recent developers e.g. Holden Karau who were contributing to open source projects in their spare time whilst working at Apple.

Nope, rather, Apple engineers having side projects is employed-specific and usually requires some sort of special case for them to let you continue working on your thing. This has been a standard part of the contract for a while, and it’s nothing like a decade or two ago where you might have a DTS engineer make a side app or two for fun or give their own, unofficial opinions of the SDK on their personal blog without approval.

I can confirm that. It was a reason why close acquaintances refused to join.

At Microsoft at least at my site we are encouraged to contribute to open source and it even brings perks/recognition so really not sure about “most companies” here

It's company wide, so yes, Microsoft has a pretty sane policy regarding that (as well as clear guidelines for dealing with OSS code)

We (FAANG) have a list of open source projects that we are not allowed to contribute to without prior permission. Anything else is fair game from what I can tell.

Could be related to the decision to remove individual names from the product about boxes back when Jobs came back to better control leaking of internal information and cut down on poaching. I would think that Apple does not want anyone to know who is working on the screen capture APIs as this PR would probably come from one member of that group

"When Steve came back, one of his company-wide edicts was that the names of individuals must be removed from about boxes."

https://bitsplitting.org/2014/01/24/cant-take-that-away/

> when Jobs came back to better control leaking of internal information and cut down on poaching

He also went further than that by illegally colluding with competitors to lower wages for employees. [0] [1]. What a great man.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/emails-eric-schmidt-sergey-b...

[1] https://9to5google.com/2012/01/27/court-filings-show-steve-j...

It's a valid point, however shall we at least celebrate a bit the fact that a Big Tech is actually contributing in the project?

Is that rare? I would have thought many FAAG employees contribute to open source projects relevant to them as part of their work. After all that seems like the easiest way to influence the projects.

And contributing changes back to an active project is much less effort than maintaining a fork in perpetuity.

Facebook.. Yes... Amazon... Yes Apple... Not so much. Netflix.. A little Google... Yes...

There's a good post on HN about what it cos Apple to make OS X a certified UNIX. Due to the secrecy of the project they had to use non-corporate accounts for committing bug fixes. The amount of changes was pretty big, but nobody excepts the authors can say it came from Apple.

Of course they will commit to open source projects if it suits their needs (if they use those projects). But people have different opinion on what Apple's needs are.

You probably mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29984016

Amazon...it depends

There's a pretty big distinction between FAANG employees contributing on their own time to things tangentially related too their job, and FAANG employees contributing on behalf of the company (i.e. being paid to do so as an official part of their day job).

Judging by the Engineering account being used to submit this patch, this is likely to be an example of the latter.

_as part of their work_ means during their billed work time.

In that case, no, almost no FAANG employees do that. I would have had to file paperwork and receive legal signoff for each individual patch to any open-source projects that weren't owned by the company.

What does exist is specially "blessed" FAANG teams who are cleared to contribute to specific open-source projects that are critical to the business. Amazon has a team who contributes to the linux kernel for hypervisor support, for example.

TBF I don’t know how much “we want $popular project to take advantage of our platform” is to be celebrated.

It’s better than bitching about bad support without doing anything. But at the most fundamental of levels it’s really the company working for their customers, through a third party’s project.

I think situations where literally all parties involved are better off than they were before should be celebrated, even if the intentions behind it aren't just philanthropic.

So you celebrate every time somebody makes a purchase of something they needed and had the means for?

If those goods were produced by people paid fair wages and using materials sourced sustainably/ethically, sure.

So in practice, not very often

Is a company working for its customers to have a good experience with an open source package something we should discourage instead?

I’m perfectly happy to celebrate win-win outcomes.

> Is a company working for its customers to have a good experience with an open source package something we should discourage instead?

You are aware that there are more than two options?

Of course. Apple has many options and their choice to contribute to OBS allows me many options as to how to react; I choose applause.

I don’t know, this feels to me like applauding a car driver who uses their turn signals correctly.

“Hooray, you did the thing you’re supposed to do. Good job you”.

Why would Apple be supposed to do this? Without any other argument on the table, taking that statement to its logical conclusion, it would imply Apple is supposed to help make every single project run well on their hardware.

Even when restricting that to “open source projects that (cl)aim to run on latest MacOS”, I think that’s not something a vendor is “supposed to do”.

So, if Apple only “is supposed to” support some projects, what objective criteria should it use to pick them?

I think it’s completely fine if Apple wouldn’t support any open source. I also think it’s completely fine if developers would choose not to write software for their OS because of that.

HP tried to do something similar when working with openstack. It was done for very bureaucratic reasons / company visibility. (Author was preserved, commit was by something like [email protected]) A slightly misguided idea by people who don't normally work with big open source. It was reverted since it messed with project statistics.

From experience in a big company (not Apple) likely direct manager then senior manager then legal department. The justification and hoop jumping would take much more effort than the coding.

Well done to who ever it was.

Contributing to a new open source project requires Senior Vice President approval at Apple.

Not accurate. There's multiple levels of contribution approval depending on the frequency, size and extent of the contributions.

I am aware of several projects that Apple has existing relationships with that have streamlined processes, but to my understanding the “ask a SVP” remains the standard policy for getting permission to contribute to an open source project.

It is not. You only need the SVP permission if you are doing larger contributions and frequently. Smaller contributions or one offs don't go up the chain as far, and can just require manager+legal approval

Jesus

Well, given the amount of publicity this PR is getting it probably makes sense to not just let a random software engineer post whatever they feel like.

For those of you who have contributed to a Github (or similar) project in your capacity as an employee, do you use a work account separate from your own?

Depends on the company, usually. Currently, I make my contributions with a personal account.

yes.

It’s very team dependent - look at llvm and webkit for instance.

It could also be that someone would rather not be out in public, which is also understandable.