AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem

When the license legally compels them to, and sometimes not even then.

Look up Swift

Unsurprisingly, you cannot assign a single intent to 166k+ people.

Just like Microsoft there are parts of the company who are hostile to open source, and there parts of the company whose success is attributable to open source.

You mean the language that approximately nobody uses outside XCode, which requires you to register an Apple developer account to function? The same language that only switched to an OSS license after they realized nobody wanted to contribute to a proprietary language?

Swift is OSS, but it's not a great example to illustrate your point.

Swift went open source the day it was released. I don’t think Apple needs outside contributors. I think it has enough resources that it would be okay

Darwin’s underlying code was BSD license and didn’t require releasing source code.

"[Swift] was initially a proprietary language, but version 2.2 was made open-source software under the Apache License 2.0 on December 3, 2015"

Darwin is also a bad example:

"On July 25, 2006, the OpenDarwin team announced that the project was shutting down, as they felt OpenDarwin had "become a mere hosting facility for Mac OS X related projects", and that the efforts to create a standalone Darwin operating system had failed.[40] They also state: "Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources, and a lack of interest from the community have all contributed to this."[41]"

"PureDarwin is a project to create a bootable operating system image from Apple's released source code for Darwin.[43] Since the halt of OpenDarwin and the release of bootable images since Darwin 8.x, it has been increasingly difficult to create a full operating system as many components became closed source."

An incomplete list here but most aren’t a license that compels them to contribute anything.

https://opensource.apple.com/projects/

Just because the license doesn't require it doesn't mean they aren't a leech.

True, but you can compare them to, say, Google, which maintains thriving OSS projects like Chromium and AOSP and generally does a way better job at publishing code and research.

I think it's fair to say Apple's cross platform work is a couple of Android and PC apps, the Mac boot loader, and Swift. Even on this page, Apple seems more like a user of the community projects than a contributor and the Apple projects seem to be for internal use or for Apple platforms. Kind of misses the point in being cross platform the way librepod is aiming to be.

That’s not what this particular thread is about, you’re referencing the parent topic but not the current thread.

This is about whether they contribute to open source or not.

I wouldn’t mention as positive example. I wouldn’t even mention them as example.

Apple cooperates within WebKit well with WebKitGtk. They supported LLVM when it is in their interest.

Chrome is used as proprietary web-engine to vendor lock-in the web. While often used by others, I’m not aware of a broad cooperation. Android is a shadow of Linux, merely using the Linux-Kernel, not GNU. Plus a lot of closed-source code (PlayServices, App Signatures, Google Cloud, Google Apps).

Googles open-source projects seem often exclusive Google only projects? Google works together with others! But especially Chrome and AOSP are…causing worries.

What does OpenDarwin or PureDarwin, independent projects, have to do with the fact that Darwin, Apple’s OS kernel, is open source?

Because they show that Darwin may be technically open source, but Apple are horrible stewards of it. It's impossible to actually build a usable operating system from it, which is probably their intent.

You can absolutely assign intent to a company, it's not an arbitrary grouping of 166k people.

They are a leech exactly because they didn't release stuff when given the option. If you're forced to release stuff, that doesn't tell me anything about whether you're a leech or not. Only what you do of your own volition does.

AOSP is the foundation of GrapheneOS, LineageOS and dozens of other patently non-Google systems. Chromium is the foundation for Edge, Brave, Opera, and every single AI browser being churned out by the dozen. Many of the Chromium forks are specifically designed to block Google ads.

There's a reason most of these projects picked AOSP over iOS, or even Chromium over WebKit. Google just engages with the community better than Apple. It's silly to pretend like they're on the same level.

Contributing to open source isn't a substitute for having cross platform products, features and support.

Again, I repeat, not what this thread is about.