Apple today launched a redesigned version of its Apple Open Source website, on which the company provides access to open source data. The new website highlights not only Apple’s open source projects, but also those of third parties.
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’.
Darwin forms the core set of components upon which OS X and iOS are based. It is mostly POSIX compatible, but has never, by itself, been certified as being compatible with any version of POSIX. (OS X, since Leopard, has been certified as compatible with the Single UNIX Specification version 3 (SUSv3).