Advanced

Apple's Relationship to Open Source

Posted by Scott_Ruecker on · 3 comments
OStatic; By Jon Buys 		Mail this story
Print this story

Despite being one of the most tightly controlled technology companies on the market, Apple has a surprisingly complicated relationship with open source. Both of Apple’s flagship operating systems, OS X and iOS are based on Darwin, which is in turn based on FreeBSD. Apple has also contributed a large amount of code back to the open source community, most notably WebKit, which is used as the browsing engine in nearly every mobile platform. Considering the recent popularity of Apple’s systems, and since there was a big Apple event happening today, their involvement in open source is worth a look.

Full Story

  Nav
» Read more about: Story Type: News Story; Groups: Community

» Get new stories by e-mail: nightly or as they are published

« Return to the newswire homepage

Comments (3)

olefowdie ·
This is probably the first article that is neither completely bashing nor completely supporting Apple, but rather just stating how things are. Two thumbs up.
Alcibiades ·
"OS X is an open platform in that anyone can develop an application to run on the Mac and put it out there on a website to download, and some of the best software for OS X is open source."

Right, its as open as Windows, then.

And why not mention where webkit came from? Ever heard of KDE? It is not generosity to give it back, its obligation.
moopst ·
I went to the webkit link in the article and they say "WebKit's HTML and JavaScript code began as a branch of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE." They also say in very small print "WebKit is open source software with portions licensed under the LGPL and BSD licenses. Complete license and copyright information can be found within the code. " Wana bet the LGPL stuff is the original KDE code and the BSD stuff is Apple's additional stuff? My point is their generosity is limited at best. Limited by their opportunism.

As to the Mac platform being open, I guess it's a lot more open than the iPhone. There you have to ask permission to put your code in the magic iPhone Store or whatever they call it. I'd call it a pretty jail.

Post a comment

A free account is needed to post. Write your comment here first: your text is kept in this browser while you sign up or log in, and is waiting for you when you come back.

Your message:
|||||
10
Markdown: **bold**, *italic*, [text](https://link), - lists, > quotes, $x^2$ for math. Formatting help

Sign up and post (it is free)  or  Log in and post