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Apple's Spotty Record of Giving Back To the Tech Industry

chicksdaddy (814965) writes "Given Apple's status as the world's most valuable company and its enormous cash hoard, the refusal to offer even meager support to open source and industry groups is puzzling. From the article: 'Apple bundles software from the Apache Software Foundation with its OS X operating system, but does not financially support the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) in any way. That is in contrast to Google and Microsoft, Apple's two chief competitors, which are both Platinum sponsors of ASF — signifying a contribution of $100,000 annually to the Foundation. Sponsorships range as low as $5,000 a year (Bronze), said Sally Khudairi, ASF's Director of Marketing and Public Relations. The ASF is vendor-neutral and all code contributions to the Foundation are done on an individual basis. Apple employees are frequent, individual contributors to Apache. However, their employer is not, Khudairi noted. The company has been a sponsor of ApacheCon, a for-profit conference that runs separately from the Foundation — but not in the last 10 years. "We were told they didn't have the budget," she said of efforts to get Apple's support for ApacheCon in 2004, a year in which the company reported net income of $276 million on revenue of $8.28 billion.'"

2 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Steve Jobs' culture by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's my understanding he wasn't big on giving money away.

    Well your understanding is wrong. He donated anonymously.

  2. Re:$1b corps by Desler · · Score: 5, Informative

    What replacement?

    CommonCrypto.

    It was my understanding that when they depreciated OpenSSL they just asked software vendors and users to bundle/get the latest version themselves. Which means that a lot of OSX servers _are_ vulnerable while Apple can claim OSX is not.

    Nope, they said to use CommonCrypto.