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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.'"
Google doesn't contribute to (insert some random pet project of mine) but apple does.
Microsoft ONLY does it to gain control, the fact that you mention them hurts your point more than helps it.
You have selection bias, there isn't actually anything to see here, Apple contributes to just about every OSS project they themselves use themselves in the form of code contributions.
Just because they aren't buying favors doesn't mean they don't contribute.
This post will be followed by many people throwing out long lists of Apple products that are OSS and the contributions back to those projects from other posts so I feel no need to bother reposting the various pages that show their contributions but ... LLVM would be a really good place for you to start.
Selection bias doesn't make your point valid.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Does this article exist for any purpose other than fanning the flame?
Yes, Apple should probably throw some cash at the Apache foundation, but that's not why this was posted to Slashdot.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
So Apache is now is equal to the entire tech industry? Nice title there.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
I imagine this is due to the influence Jobs had on Apple's culture. It's my understanding he wasn't big on giving money away.
I think in time we'll see Apple more prone to contributions.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
Parent has a certain point. Apple has no real obligation to pay. If one really wants a return, they should either charge for it, or maybe use a license that includes a return, e.g. GPLv2 with return of code. Unfortunately GPLv3 scared most serious users, Apple included.
Why would I contribute to open source, when Apple - and Google - use it to build walled gardens and make millions - billions - of dollars I'll never see a penny of? The exploitation of open source by companies that use it to build products that are the opposite of the open source philosophy - I mean walled gardens - is getting hard to take. You can say that they're free to do whatever they want with open source as long as they comply with the licenses, but that's not my point. What could possibly motivate me to donate my time and skills to making Apple and Google more money? The walled garden is going to destroy open source. The funny thing is no one seems to care. People are abandoning GNU's forced openness and going to licenses that basically let big companies exploit the software any way they want to. I guess the days of principled opposition to what Apple and Google are doing are over.
They all need to be contributing to OpenSSL or a fork.
https://groups.google.com/foru...
Security theater is sometimes more like security exhaustion.
Okay, you're stunned that a company as culturally blinkered and rapacious as APPLE isn't turning over some of their huge cash hoard to fund Open Source projects that are outside of their control and might sabotage their patent warchest?
Why not just walk up to Smaug, kick him in the eyeball and demand the Arkenstone "OR ELSE" there Bilbo!
As long as you are witholding something Apple wants, they're either charming as fuck or litigious as hell in an effort to acquire it.
Once they have what they want out of you, you're a one-night-stand, it's the next morning and they can't be rid of you fast enough.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Darwin.... take take take...kill.
Apache Foundation this days is mostly Java(TM)(R) Foundation.
Why would the Apple want to subsidize the Oracle?
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
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
Read that more carefully.
A big cash hoard is a bad thing. It represents money which could be re-invested in R&D, given to investors as dividends, used to increase salaries/benefits to make it a more attractive employer, given to charity to increase PR, or any number of things.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Innovation is always built on the back of others. Nothing pops out of the blue. It is only the lack of education that makes on believes otherwise. The entire affordable microcomputer industry is based on Compaq's reverse engineering(stealing) of the IBM OS. The free browser for everyone is due to MS conning a profitable firm, then giving away the browser and forcing that firm into bankruptcy. Innovation has never been about pulling a product out of you ass. A knife was not suddenly one day made. We had to figure out how to mine the melt, smelt it, and then how to make it a knife that is not brittle.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Apple doesn't have a "spotty record", they have a dismal record. Most of OS X is modified open source software. When Apple has released stuff as open source software, it has either been because they were forced to by the license, or because it was for software that primarily runs on OS X. Steve Jobs even tried to weasel out of the GPL with gcc.
Apple treats FOSS as a zero-sum game, when the intent of FOSS is positive-sum: by growing the pie, everybody should win. FOSS developers should treat Apple like Apple treats everybody else: as a competitor to be destroyed.
"The company lists dozens of open source projects and components that it contributes code to: from the Apache web server"
And that, my friends, is what open source is all about. You use, you give code back.
The article title should really be "Apple's Spotty Record of Giving Monetarily To The Apache Foundation." To agree with that Apple should be giving them money is the moral equivalent of saying that users should have to pay to use Apache.
But Apple's contribution to FOSS has been to provide an operating system that is Unix-based. Open a 'terminal window' on any of its computers and you have the real Unix command line to play with. Not locked-down Windows or flavor-of-the-week Linux, but the same consistent Unix on every machine.
I remember being part of the OSX community and feeling awesome when they 'released' the source to the 10.4.8 kernel.
Come 10.4.9, they didn't release the source, but our COMMPAGE modifications mysteriously made their way into Darwin.
Why anyone holds these people up as innovators of industry is beyond me, they did not invent portable distributed music, or the GUI, or even 'tech as cool'. They just found the people that did and bought them out.
I absolutely despise the phrase "giving back" when referring to charity, because it implies they took something.
Apple has already given back, every dollar they got was in exchange for either an app, iphone, ipad, laptop or something else that the customer got. They have already given something back for every penny they made. This goes for every single company selling products or services (Except when governments are involved)
I donate quite a bit every year for worthy causes without asking for anything in return, and I hate it when my efforts are diminished by calling them "giving back".
Charity is not "giving back", charity is charity, it is a company or individual willingly giving up profit in order to help someone. Ideally, the company benefits from the charity by getting good PR, so it becomes a win-win; it becomes an investment instead of charity, which makes it more sustainable and will hopefully cause it to repeat in the future.
As far as open source code goes, Apple does invest significantly in projects like llvm and webkit and the world is a better place because of it.
The idea that apple somehow owes me and you or the apache foundation is just entitlement mentality.
If you bought apple's products, it is because you think their product is worth more than the money you paid for it, otherwise you would not have gotten it. In that case, Apple owes you nothing.
If you did not buy apple's product, then what they do does not affect you. In this case, Apple owes you nothing.
If you want to encourage Apple to donate code or money, then highlight, applaud and buy products from companies that behave the way you want them to. If enough people vote with their money and show that charity pays off, then either apple will do it, or the companies you support will do it more thanks to your support.
That there are still fanbois for this duplicitous corp is amazing, look at their record and how could you support them?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
More importantly it represents money raiders can use to buy your company out from under your feet.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Have you ever used/looked at PARC Star? It bears about as much resemblance to what actually released as Mac OS as a Model T does to a Ferrari: The parts are recognizable, but someone has obviously put a lot of time and work into making someone _want_ the second.
You bought an iPad... so serious question here...
Why should Apple care what you think or what names you call them? Your view that they "lack humanity" is of course your opinion and you're welcome to it, but what reason can you think of that Apple should share in that opinion?
It was my understanding that when they depreciated OpenSSL they just asked software vendors and users to bundle/get the latest version themselves.
No, developers use the Apple provided cryptography libraries where most people would import openSSL.
Which means that a lot of OSX servers _are_ vulnerable while Apple can claim OSX is not./em?
Now that may be so, if you're running an OSX server you probably have a number of open source programs running that were brought over by MacPorts or the like, and they would probably include a more recent verso of SSL.
Also, I don't know if Apache that ships with OSX uses the Apple crypto library or not... that could be an issue.
But honestly how many public facing OSX servers are there likely to be? And most home users do not run Apache. Most of the software consumers will be running on OSX is safe.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Isn't the "example" the fact that there is even one open source consortium outside Apache...
So, NCSA mean anything to you?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Apple funds the majority of WebKit which is open source. So they are funding open source to the tune of millions of dollars a year. I'm guessing they have between 50 and 200 programmers on WebKit. I'm guessing they have a few other open source projects as well.
But still, somehow, you know
We know because people researched the hell out of Jobs, for both good and bad reasons. There are very few things someone as heavily analyzed as Jobs can hide.
I don't care about Jobs personally, but he seems to have drawn the utter fascination of many - ironically including yourself, or you would not bring him up. How does it feel to have someone you hate controlling your head from beyond the grave anyway? Just curious.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
it has either been because they were forced to by the license, or because it was for software that primarily runs on OS X.
What nonsense is this? Pretty much all open source software Apple uses is under BSD style licenses, they don't have to give back anything.
And yet they have for EVERYTHING they use. There is no "force of license". They do this because it is STUPID not to. It costs WAY more money to re-merge your internal mustache-twirling changes to a library with every new release, than it does simply to contribute back and be able to upgrade with everyone else.
As for the OSX thing, just what are you referring to? Just about all of the open source software Apple makes use of (like BSD) is also in IOS,
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Urban Legend. Apple had 2 billion in liquid assets at the time and weren't close to "shuttering their doors". Even if they hadn't managed a turn around when they did, they had enough customers, real estate and patents to hang around into the 00's at least.
Steve Jobs was a brilliant CEO. A brilliant product manager. Also, a tyrannical, narcissistic douchebag, if the press accounts are true.
I'm guessing something like this is just a continuation of that. Corporate culture is set at the top level and it permeates the company.
Here are a list of platinum level (100K USD and above) donors to the Apache Software Foundation. List of sponsorship levels here
People are talking about providing code to open source, and certainly that's the core of it. But big projects need cash for organizational and administrative purposes.
Sorry this was supposed to be on Gnome thread. Don't know how it ended up here.
Actually Apple was avoiding GPL stuff before 3.
Well, they did actually buy cups, then hired the guy who they purchased it from to maintain it...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Apple's main interface to the opensource world is through the FreeBSD project, which is how they also drew in PF, the OpenBSD packet filter and most likely shipped more copies of that code than any other consumer. However, they made some changes that they contributed back to the world #ifdef'ed with their own incompatible license. I wrote about that a couple of years back for Call for Testing magazine, see http://callfortesting.org/macp...
-- That grumpy BSD guy - http://bsdly.blogspot.com/
But where does the BSD license say, "If you use our code and make over $1 billion in sales, you must donate some money to our foundation?" It doesn't, so Apple pays nada. Why all the hate and jealousy? If you throw thousands of dollars on the street, don't expect the money to multiply and return to your pocket.
Actually, for the *users* GPL is the most liberal one.
For the *distributors* that would be BSD. Or Apache
Can we stop this meme already? To each her/his own, etc.
You have to read the whole article - ASF is not the only example cited. It is the only example cited within the first three paragraphs of the story, however.
On slashdot, it's exactly the opposite. You seem to have forgotten that Apple is the new evil around here.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
... and taxes.
net is after tax isn't it?
Wouldn't Apple do everything in their power to lower their tax obligations?
I think thats down to Xerox Parc, not Apple
Umm, other than spouting a cliché, have you ever seen what PARC designed? No such thing as direct object manipulation (you clicked on an icon and then got a menu; you couldn't do anything with that icon. Couldn't drag it, move it, double-click it.). No hierarchal space, nothing analogous to QuickDraw, etc. I could go on...
Just because a buggy also had 4 wheels doesn't mean your BMW is much of a derivative.
Funny, because a guy that worked at both PARC and Apple says you're wrong.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
LOL @ the car analogy also.
Apple has enough fanboys that it doesn't need to.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
No worries, obviously speaking for myself I do donate to KDE and Kubuntu :)
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Clang wouldn't exist if it wasn't for GCC's license.
Apple contributed heavily to GCC for a while. The license was obviously fine.
But Apple felt GCC architecturally just wasn't able to do what they wanted, so they decided that a long-term solution was that old technical fallback, the re-write. So they promoted and gradually switched over to Clang/LLVM.
The license had nothing to do with anything.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
IOW the GPL is the superior license over the BSD type licenses.
No, there is no requirement in the GPL that would force Apple to pay for it if they used it. You seem to be confused about what the requirements of the GPL license are, it is about code contribution, not about monetary contribution.
Why would I contribute to open source, when Apple - and Google - use it to build walled gardens and make millions - billions - of dollars I'll never see a penny of?
The difference between nothing and 100k a year is pretty negligible overall when you are talking billions.
Yet lots of people work, even though the things they work on make the companies they work for billions...
Perhaps you are in software for the wrong reason if you worry about who is making money. The reason you contribute to open source is to make life better for everyone, and also to give you freedom to keep using tools and software you like as you move between companies.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Shouldn't the government do everything in its power to withhold services for companies who refuses to pay for them? Apple sure likes the US courts time....
Only if the company is overseas where the cash hoard is. If apple takes the money back to the US (repatriation) they have to pay taxes on it.
They have tried to have special "one time only" repatriation adjustments to taxes in the past without luck.
They just converted KHTML to Webkit and never looked back.
And no project in the history of open source has ever been forked because someone wanting to do a lot of work did not want to deal with the maintainers...
Is it open source or not? If you don't support the right to fork totally and let the previous guys worry about carrying back changes, you don't support open source.
Webkit probably remains OSS only because the KHTML foundation requires it.
That is bullshit and you know it. Apple keeps lots of other projects open they do not have to. And they benefit from other people's work on Webkit so it's no mystery why they would keep that open, you don't have to believe there's an altruistic motive at work.
Apple understands what few other companies seem to, that if an open source project is strongly backed you'll find other work and ideas from outside the company help improve it beyond what you as a single company could ever hope to do. That is why they make such extensive use of open source work, and why they open source most Apple-originated projects.
It's also why Apple can spend so little on R&D and yet stay ahed of most other companies technologically.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The government should not withhold anything for people or companies who follow the law.
If there are holes in the tax laws, who's job is it to plug them?
The lobbyists?
Oh wait, the people? They don't have a lobby group and so don't matter that much.
and if they kept working on GCC instead and integrated it in their IDE they'd need to open-source Xcode.
GCC was integrated into XCode for years. The reason they didn't need to open-source XCode is that they used it only as a standalone executable. They use Clang the same way, they just base things on intermediate output from the compiler (as they did with GCC).
They also had GDB debugging integrated in XCode, as they do with LLDB - again no issue because they just use the standalone intermediate executable.
If you read about how GCC is built, it sucks technically to integrate into an IDE. Clang was built to do a much better job of that, and it has... again, nothing to do with license.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nothing in the GPL prevents you from charging money for GPL licensed software. You appear to be confused on this point. Based on a large sample set of previous discussions on the effects and merits of various licensing schemes, I suspect you are also confused on the definition of the word "freedom." In case you're not confused, but offering a goalpost moving teaser into a discussion on the latter point, I'll preemptively note that neither you nor Stallman get to redefine words to fit any particular ideology. I choose to license most of my software under derivatives of BSD style and Artistic licenses, and I do so for what I believe are good reasons. While I absolutely encourage you to engage in persuasive public discourse on the merits of your favorite licensing schemes, I also absolutely insist on honesty while doing so.
Write failed: Broken pipe
Did you read this line at the bottom? "I'm sure some things I remember as having originated at Apple were independently developed elsewhere. But the Mac brought them to the world."
Jobs did the same with the mobile phone, he partnered up with motorola to get iTunes up and running, he takes ideas from others and expands/improves them
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Regardless, his point still stands--open source is about sharing code. Open source groups share with Apple, Apple shares back, even when they don't necessarily have to. That, to me, is a great record. While it would be nice for Apple to give some money, I don't believe Apple should be shamed for not doing so. So many people champion open source for being free (as in beer) for their own benefit, but suddenly it's bad for Apple to use things for free even though they contribute back and sometimes create new projects that are open, too? Isn't that what open source is supposed to be all about?
Scorta futuere amo!
Well, they did actually buy cups, then hired the guy who they purchased it from to maintain it...
That almost sounds like "giving money to an open source project".
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Anything that isn't GPL and Linux is evil around here.
Sure, plenty of people don't feel that way, but the majority of slashdot does.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Apple is a greedy self-serving little shit that caters to skxawng*. So, what's the news here. NOW, Apple actually making a benevolent contribution to the people/devs that they exploit would be news. *https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%27vi_language
Dear Microlimp: I give you 2 valid product keys for win7 and you reject both of them. Piss off you wankers!!!