Apple is landing patches in FreeBSD

I still wonder what they "get out of" patching FreeBSD -- maybe there's more FreeBSD in the Apple OSes than we know. (I do not think it's possible a dev by accident used his/her @apple.com address).

Re: Apple is landing patches in FreeBSD

#5

Post by anotherhue » Wed, Jun 19, 2024, 2:25 PM UTC

cies wrote: post #4

I just read this: https://www.reddit.com/r/unix/comments/u6r1xz/comment/i5ae0n... in order to know how FreeBSD and Apple's OSes are related. I still wonder what they "get out of" patching FreeBSD -- maybe there's more FreeBSD in the Apple OSes than we know. (I do not think it's possible a dev by accident used his/her @apple.com address).

I assumed they borrowed some of the userland.

Re: Apple is landing patches in FreeBSD

#6

Post by mdhb » Wed, Jun 19, 2024, 2:28 PM UTC

It’s actually wild to think how much Apple takes from the open source community and how little it gives back where this is somehow front page news.

Re: Apple is landing patches in FreeBSD

#7

Post by xyzzy_plugh » Wed, Jun 19, 2024, 2:29 PM UTC

Apple does a lot of things. They have a lot of servers. They have a lot of software engineers. It wouldn't surprise me to learn they're running FreeBSD somewhere. They also vendor a lot of BSD software in MacOS and friends. It wouldn't surprise me if this implementation of comm is included in MacOS.

This doesn't seem very interesting to me. I dislike the implication of the title, as if this somehow means something more.

Re: Apple is landing patches in FreeBSD

#8

Post by habitue » Wed, Jun 19, 2024, 2:33 PM UTC

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #7

Apple does a lot of things. They have a lot of servers. They have a lot of software engineers. It wouldn't surprise me to learn they're running FreeBSD somewhere. They also vendor a lot of BSD software in MacOS and friends. It wouldn't surprise me if this implementation of comm is included in MacOS. This doesn't seem very interesting to me. I dislike the implication of the title, as if this somehow means something mo…

From people I've known who've worked at Apple, it's an uphill battle to get approval to contribute to open source there. Somebody likely fought pretty hard to be able to do this

Re: Apple is landing patches in FreeBSD

#9

Post by xyzzy_plugh » Wed, Jun 19, 2024, 2:34 PM UTC

mdhb wrote: post #6

It’s actually wild to think how much Apple takes from the open source community and how little it gives back where this is somehow front page news.

Is it? Apple contributes significantly to the open source community, including to multiple projects within the Linux Foundation.

Re: Apple is landing patches in FreeBSD

#10

Post by mort96 » Wed, Jun 19, 2024, 2:35 PM UTC

mdhb wrote: post #6

It’s actually wild to think how much Apple takes from the open source community and how little it gives back where this is somehow front page news.

I don't generally see front-page news about their huge contributions to the WebKit, LLVM or Swift projects (yes Swift is transitioning to being an Apple thing to its own separate project from what I understand). The only reason this contribution is news is that Apple doesn't typically contribute to FreeBSD, not that Apple doesn't typically contribute to open source.

Not that you're wrong, they're resting on a vast amount of free labour from the open source community. Though that's not exactly uncommon.