i'd say "much" is exaggerated.
More like "in a few places where they couldn't rip off MIT/BSD licensed code". It's a shame that Apples success i based on a lot open source code but they give so little back to the community.
libdispatch was something purely in-house. They're giving it away. Same for launchd, although other groups inexplicably feel a need to recreate it from scratch. They're employing major contributors to LLVM/clang and having them work fulltime on those projects. CalendarServer is a fantastic CalDav server, which they're giving away.
Don't say they give "so little" back to the community. While I may really hate what's going on with ZFS right now, your statement wasn't really fair to them.
Probably harsh, but nevertheless my point of view.
When i look at http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=microsoft+vs.+apple+vs+... and compare apples size in terms of employees, revenue... it's a _huge_ company with lots of money. Now i look at what it does in the open source world...
From my perspective a lot of what i see on macs today has it's origins in the open source world and apple wouldn't be where it is today with open source (webkit came from khtml, mac os x kernel partly from freebsd, calendar server is based on twisted, afaik). Now you tell me that the company that tries to lock it's customers in their ecosystem with a lot of proprietary software&hardware (hello quicktime, hello itunes), that it's particularly open source friendly? It sure as hell is not. I could nearly bet that MS does more open source then apple. If it's not already the case, apple is heading in that direction.
Probably harsh, but nevertheless my point of view.
Your view seems to be informed by ignorance. For instance, your claim that they've only given back where they couldn't "rip off" BSD/MIT-licensed code is pretty specious when Apple's largest contributions are to BSD-licensed projects that they use. Who exactly is getting ripped off?
it's a _huge_ company with lots of money.
What differences does that make? Your prior criticism was that they took much from open source and gave back little.
When you bring money into it, you're making it sound like their contributions should be based on what they have, not what they have taken. That doesn't seem very fair given how many of their employees and how much of their revenue has very little at all to do with things taken from open source.
A more reasonable perspective is that they should give back in proportion to what they took, rather than that they should give back in proportion to how much money they have. The former is fairness, the latter is entitlement.
webkit came from khtml
That was seven years ago. Longer than KHTML even existed before Apple's fork. A lot has changed in that time. Today, much of the development on KTHML is backported from WebKit, which is itself a vastly more active and widespread open source project than KHTML ever was. Half a dozen projects and millions of users have benefited from Apple's development efforts. I don't see how this can be interpreted as anything less than an open source success story.
(hello quicktime, hello itunes)
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Both of those products use standard non-proprietary formats by default.
I could nearly bet that MS does more open source then apple.
If it's not already the case, apple is heading in that direction.
Could you cite examples of Microsoft's open source contributions for comparison? Or explain how Apple is "heading in that direction"?
