[dzogchen]

I'm curious why you think Apple would support any effort that does not benefit their bottom line?

[justin66]

There's a case for it when it comes to FreeBSD specifically, since macOS uses some code from FreeBSD.

[stackghost]

There's zero business case because they want to sell you a laptop and subscription to iCloud.

Improving FreeBSD will make it easier to run BSD on non-apple hardware which will eat into their bottom line.

The number of people who will buy a Mac to run BSD is a rounding error, and those people won't buy iCloud subscriptions anyway.

[reactordev]

NeXTSTEP did but that was in the 90s. When Apple bought NeXTSTEP (and Jobs returned to the helm of Apple), they used that OS as the basis for macOS X.

Due to GPL, they release the sources to the BSD code they use. Everything else is proprietary.

Likewise Sony used BSD for PlayStation OS. They publish the sources to the changes to BSD they made, the rest is proprietary.

[themafia]

I'm curious why you think Apple making their hardware work with more operating systems does not benefit their bottom line.

Aside from that the answer is "Corporate Goodwill." That actually is a bottom line number that gets reported.

[user_7832]

> I'm curious why you think Apple making their hardware work with more operating systems does not benefit their bottom line.

Because they sell and advertise MacOS. Not "compatible with a wide range of OSes" (like say raspberry pis).

People buying a laptop due to goodwill and openness does happen (I bought my framework 13 due to that), but that's not a game Apple has played since Woz left - and for the worse, I think.