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Apple is landing patches in FreeBSD

27 points| 0mp | 1 year ago |cgit.freebsd.org

18 comments

order

xyzzy_plugh|1 year ago

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.

habitue|1 year ago

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

mdhb|1 year ago

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.

xyzzy_plugh|1 year ago

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

GeekyBear|1 year ago

FreeBSD is compiled using Apple's open sourced Clang compiler.

> Apple developed Clang, a new compiler front end which supports C, Objective-C and C++. In July 2007, the project received the approval for becoming open-source.

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang

mort96|1 year ago

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.

cies|1 year ago

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).

yuan153|1 year ago

The guy has been on the gnome board for 16 years, and at apple for 4 years. My occam's razor says he used his apple account but probably it is not an official apple project. If his boss is okay with this it is going to be alright.

anotherhue|1 year ago

I assumed they borrowed some of the userland.