Bonum Certa Men Certa

Joke of the Day: “Open Source Developers Should Thank Apple”

"Apple is fighting against powerful and fundamental economic forces. In the short term, Apple’s technological and industrial design prowess can help to prop up dying business models."

--Timothy Lee



Summary: Responses to the mythology of Apple as a defender of open source ideals

IN MANY WIKI indexes (see Apple Deception; Apple's Dark Side; Apple Versus Partners; Apple on Software Patents; Apple vs HTC; hypePad Watch; Apple Helping Microsoft) we have gathered bits of news and analysis about Apple's harms and attacks on software freedom. It's hard to deny it when the evidence is right there at one's fingertips.

DJ Walker-Morgan, who is usually a great writer, has just written a bizarre piece that first seemed like it was comical but it's not. Luckily for us, a lot of people have already responded to it and highlighted the flaws in the argument. Here is the best rebuttal we have found so far. It compares Apple to the mafia (Apple does support racketeering through MPEG-LA for example, not to mention Hollywood).

Blogger DJ Walker-Morgan says open source developers should thank Apple for raising the competitive bar. Rubbish! That's like the police thanking the Mafia for making them more work

[...]

Walker-Morgan's fuzzy logic has it that Microsoft had lowered the bar so low (I love it, another Apple fan boy bashing Microsoft. Maybe they can do a commercial on that or something) that open source developers were "doing just enough" to beat Microsoft. It wasn't until Steve Jobs took all of his open source based know how and technology and fused it into Apple, that the open source community had to really try its best in order to do one better than Apple.

Utter nonsense! First of all, if Apple is using all of that open source technology, how is it that none of what they push down to us is open source? In my mind that makes Apple a parasite of open source. They have used the technology, are notmaking the resulting products open source and are contributing zero back to the community. Why is that any different with that and what the Mafia does? They both are just taking, not giving back and living off of the work of others.

[...]

Mr. Walker-Morgan saying that Apple makes open source better is like saying the Mafia made the police better. It would be better if they didn't have to!


Alan Shimel later needed to defend his position in the face of Apple apologists. Apple's propaganda says: "Apple believes that using Open Source methodology makes Mac OS X a more robust, secure operating system"

"Great," says Shimel, "explain to me why that is not a parasitic?"

“I'd like to see Apple speak honestly and openly about what projects they have made actual contributions to and explicitly list those contributions which have been ACCEPTED by the original projects.”
      --Bill Salak
Further down in the comments Bill Salak writes: "It's a list of open source projects Apple is using. A list of projects with links to the source code of those projects does not constitute a contribution to the project itself.

"I'd like to see Apple speak honestly and openly about what projects they have made actual contributions to and explicitly list those contributions which have been ACCEPTED by the original projects." Yes, Apple does this just for PR most of the time. It also breeds some pro-proprietary software bullies who are pretending to be "open source" people (who only agitate and harass those who really are).

Days ago we explained why the Free software/Open Source community does not love Apple, having shown just shortly beforehand that Apple spits on software freedom and merely exploits/hijacks "Open Source" projects, then claims credit for them. How about KHTML? Apple takes it, then renames the thing, calls WebKit its own work and pretends that Google owes Apple for its so-called 'innovation' (no word about KDE). Let's remember that WebKit is "Open Source" because it has to be. There was actually a dispute. Apple contributes the very least that it's required to give. For all other purposes, Apple shields the proprietary code which is an imitation with multiple layers of DRM. Has Apple neither shame nor humility?

“Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?”

--Steve Jobs



Apple headquarters



Recent Techrights' Posts

The Register Bill
The Register MS - putting the "MS" in your centre of the universe
Analogies for "Memory Safety" in Rust
Don't worry, it's Rust! It can do anything!
 
Links 06/09/2025: "Covid Incidence on the Rise" and Many Attacks on the Press Worldwide
Links for the day
Nobody Denies That SecureBoot Will Cause Problems After September 11
Not even Microsoft
Gemini Links 06/09/2025: Infinite Scrolling and Posting from Emacs
Links for the day
Links 06/09/2025: GitHub Meltdown Over Slop, "U.S. Jury Says Google Should Pay $425 Million in Privacy Lawsuit"
Links for the day
Despite Its Severe Financial Problems Gnome Foundation Inc Paid Rosanna Yuen Over 100,000 Dollars Last Year
maybe relocation should be considered
The "Left" and the Right"
It poisons everything
Mozilla and Rust Are Not Leftists
they're part of the mass consumerism machine
Disposable to Microsoft
There is an extensive set of people who got used by Microsoft, only to be thrown away a month later or a year later or a decade later
The UEFI 9/11 - Part VII - This Coming Week Many PCs Will Refuse to Boot "Linux" (Because of Microsoft's Expired Certificate)
The real solution is, disable "secure boot" or "SecureBoot" while it's still possible. [...] Just like submarine patents, a lot of this problem was "hibernating" for a while
The Thing Nobody in Red Hat Wants to Talk About Openly
There is a real sentiment or worry among Red Hatters, Europeans and Americans in particulars (because of higher salary expectations)
Slopwatch: Small Parade of Fake News About "Linux" and Scams Borrowing the Name (or Word) "Linux"
In practice, LLMs are a risk
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, September 05, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, September 05, 2025
Genini Links 05/09/2025: Community, ROOPHLOCH, and PITkit
Links for the day
Links 05/09/2025: Vaccine Sceptics Poison the Well, Two Exploited Vulnerabilities Patched in Android
Links for the day
Gemini Links 05/09/2025: Logitech Lift and DIY Gemini Servers
Links for the day
Links 05/09/2025: Sainsbury's Caught Spying on In-Store Shoppers and Microsoft "OpenAI is Using Legal Threats to Harass its Critics"
Links for the day
BASIC Predates Microsoft by Over a Decade, Microsoft-Controlled Sites Like The Register MS Don't Want You to Know This
The state of the media is really bad when it relies a lot on oligarchs' money and is appointing editors who are working for oligarchs
Brian Kernighan, "Only Third to Dennis Richie and Ken Thompson" (UNIX), Agreed With Someone Who Said Rust Was Just Hype, Should Not Replace C
17 hours ago
Reminder: Microsoft's "Secure Boot" Certificate for "Linux" Will be Expired in One Week
Many PCs won't manage to 'rotate' to another certificate
"Many of the Red Hat Employees Are Still Looking for Work"
Shame on IBM's CEO
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, September 04, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, September 04, 2025
Microsoft Started With Code Literally From The Trash, Nothing Has Improved Since
The reality is, there are systems and code that are reliable. But they're not Microsoft's.
Hypothesis That New McKinsey/Microsoft Executive Inside Red Hat Will Outsource Research and Development Operations to India (Like They Do in IBM)
IBM is floundering
Slopwatch: Scams, Fake Articles About "Linux", Plagiarism, and Worse
Perhaps some time soon the LLMs or the "Big LLMs" will run out of money (to borrow) and go offline, leaving those slopfarms in a tough place
Gemini Links 04/09/2025: Means of Production and Rusting Out
Links for the day
Links 04/09/2025: Science, Hardware, and Eyes on China
Links for the day
Gemini Links 04/09/2025: Digital Minimalism and Social Control Media
Links for the day
IBM's GNU/Linux Divestment, Based on Hard But Anecdotal Evidence (IBM Fails to Recognise How Much Money It Made and Can Still Make From "Linux")
Love us or hate us, a lot of what we've been saying about Red Hat under IBM turns out to be rather accurate
Links 04/09/2025: Massive Microsoft Staff Cuts (Barely Reported), "Strange Conspiracy Theory Is Reportedly Spreading Inside OpenAI"
Links for the day
Activists Can Win, But Keep an Eye on the Ball and on the Trophy
GitHub is dying, it was a loss-making trap, not free hosting
Gemini Links 04/09/2025: Katrina Remembered, Distracted Driving, and Virtual Economics
Links for the day
At This Point It's No Longer Matthew Garrett But People Who Fund Matthew Garrett (or Companies That Fund His SLAPPs Against My Wife and I)
The only thing worse than misogynists are misogynists who fail to respect other people's right to go on holiday
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, September 03, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, September 03, 2025
The UEFI 9/11 - Part VI - This Serious Harm Was Planned for Over a Decade, Not an Accident or Merely Some Misfortune
The term "Serious Harm" is legally meaningful here
GNOME Unfit for Diversity and Inclusion
GNOME's leadership is using "bad words"
Brodie Robertson Addressing the Recently-Discovered Comments
Most people probably knew nothing about this until he wrote a response
Red Hat QA Team "Had Shrunk by Half Over the Past Year." (After IBM Divestment)
If Red Hat's workforce is being moved to the East, then RHEL can become a national security problem
Slopwatch: "Open Source" and "Linux" News Faked, Made by Bots and Entered Into Google News
Spam combined with slop about "Linux" has entered Google News