Last week Apple’s open sourcing of Swift naturally saw the spotlight thrown over Apple’s open source pages. This included a paragraph that claimed Apple was “the first major computer company to make Open Source a key part of its strategy”. Unsurprisingly, this riled some members of the developer community as being disingenuous and untrue.
So Apple has since changed the text to retract the rather outlandish statement with something a bit more muted. Although this statement is technically qualitative and open to many interpretations, Apple isn’t exactly known for its open source contributions. The page now reads as follows:
‘Open source software is at the heart of Apple platforms and developer tools, and Apple continues to contribute and release significant quantities of open source code’.
The claim has been posted on Apple’s site for some time, but received fresh attention last week following the Swift release.
Whether Apple was right or wrong in what is said is actually hard to ascertain. It is true that Apple has maintained open source releases of UNIX all the way back to OS X 10.0 and now manages a host of open source projects including Bonjour, ResearchKit and perhaps most famously WebKit. However, Apple is not the best open source citizen in any of these cases. Apple is slow to release source code in many instances and often holds back code for a big ‘dump’ once the software has shipped, often weeks or months later. Case in point: Apple has not yet released the open-source elements for OS X 10.11 which was released in September.
These kind of ‘code bombs’ are frowned upon as being bad practice for open source, which is part of the reason people rejected Apple’s ‘open source first’ messaging so strongly. Open source advocates want public codebases to be more community oriented, with daily commits being published as the project progresses.
This is exactly how Swift is governed; WebKit is now on this path too although it wasn’t initially. Nowadays, LLVM, WebKit and (looking ahead) Swift mean that Apple is spearheading open source development in a big way. The written claim mentioned Apple’s historic approach to open source however, where the record is not as concrete.
Regardless of subject matter, claims about being the ‘first’ of anything are going to be controversial without sufficient evidence. The open source scene is so widespread and distributed that Apple’s best option was to change the phrasing, even if they believed it to be true themselves, to quell the criticism.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
They may have been one of the first, just not the best at it.
I really like Apple but sometimes the wording used to describe things goes beyond marketing….
It reminds me when Federighi introduced the way thhat the crack marketing team found a solutoin to the Big Cat name crisis with Mavericks… yeah.. they were certainly on a trip of some kind. Just like when they worded the Open Source statement.
Next thing you’ll know is that they’ll say that they invented the Internet… wait… that’s Al Gore…. Isn’t he on the Apple board?
*snickers*
So, which was the first major computer company to embrace open source as their main pillars?
Same question. I am not doubting the claim they were not but I was coming to read which major company was because I honestly do not know.
Apple. No one, including people that complained the loudest, will be able to name one other large player that did it first – because one doesn’t exist.
IBM released their mainframe OS ACP with source in 1967, a decade before Apple was even formed. They continue to be a major contributor to open source, including Linux.
Again, your stupidity knows no limits Bruno. Keep it up.
Quite simple:
Google has its Android, Go (language), Chromium (yes Apple made it popular, but has since lost its leading position in contributing to webkit to google), AngularJS, and many more.
Dell and IBM/Lenovo sold laptops and servers with Linux preinstalled.
Facebook with its HHVM.
Many more.
You can go nitpicking and says “most of them are not ‘computer companys'” but let’s be honest, these days, neither is apple.
And while apple indeed “embraced open source as their main pillars” with OS X/unix, it was long time (and still is) more of a use and build on, rather than committing and contributing.
Red Hat was early, founded in 1993, they’re kind of a big deal. Mac OS didn’t adopt Unix-like code until 1996. Red Hat’s contributions benefit other Open Source projects. while most of what Apple does with Mac OS X stays in-house
Sun Microsystems. Went open source with everything including their crown jewels (the Solaris operating system) in 2005. Wikipedia says “A 2006 report prepared for the EU by UNU-MERIT stated that Sun was the largest corporate contributor to open source movements in the world. According to this report, Sun’s open source contributions exceed the combined total of the next five largest commercial contributors.”
Not updated everywhere.
http://www.apple.com/opensource/
“As the first major computer company to make Open Source development a key part of its ongoing software strategy, Apple remains committed to the Open Source development model.”
Good lord… who cares… I’m sure if Steve was around he wouldn’t care… it is a matter of opinion and it depends on how you look at open source and what you consider “major” …
If Apple were to write things to be as clear as possible, as to not offend anyone, it would end up being very long and too much to read…
I think some people need to go get real jobs instead.
Can we be serious for one moment? This is Apple boasting and over exaggerating as usual. Their main pillars is highly integrated products that lock out third party manufacturers or modifications to their software unless expressly permitted by Apple. This is about as opposite of the spirit of open source as you can get.
Does anyone really care? The fact of Apple being #1 won’t be affected by this little “story”.