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.