this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
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Apple is one of the largest contributors to open source software in the world and they've been a major contributor to open source since the early 1980's. Yes, they have closed source software too... but it's all built on an open foundation and they give a lot back to the open source community.
LLVM for example, was a small project nobody had ever heard of in 2005, when Apple hired the university student who created it, gave him an essentially unlimited budget to hire a team of more people, and fast forward almost two decades it's by far the best compiler in the world used by both modern languages (Rust/Swift/etc) and old languages (C, JavaScript, Fortran...) and it's still not controlled in any way by Apple. The uni student they hired was Chris Lattner, he is still president of LLVM now even though he's moved on (currently CEO of an AI startup called Modular AI).
Well, look at the annual contribution that Apple makes to the BSD team and see that Apple uses several open source software in its products but with minimal financial contribution. Even more so for a company of this size. Apple only "donates" when it is in its interest that such software is ready for it to use.