How great Apple Inc. is, I believe I don't need to go into details. However, the greatness here refers to the revolutionary subversion of the industry with products and ideas, not for open source .
Instead, in a way, Apple is pretty much the opposite of open source. This kind of "closure" in the bones was decided from the moment Apple was born.
When the two founders, both named Steve, (Jobs and Wozniak), started Apple in a garage in 1976, they probably didn't think they would be so far apart. Wozniak is a typical engineer. When he showed the circuit board later called Apple I to Jobs, when Jobs used his amazing business talent to push Apple II into a "popular model", it was destined that Wozniak's engineer characteristics can only be It fell short of Jobs' talent.
The two founders of Apple hold Apple I in their hands, with Jobs on the right and Wozniak on the left
In the earliest days, Apple only sold hardware. In order to prevent other companies' software from "wasting" its own hardware, Apple quickly developed its own system; in order to prevent users from destroying and modifying, Apple products cannot be disassembled without authorization, computers cannot be inserted into expansion cards, and iPhone batteries cannot be replaced. Special screws "anti-theft". So far, Apple has managed the entire industry chain, from electronic components to sales outlets, all of which are its business scope. Whether hardware, software, or content, are under its control.
In addition to the unique fully closed ecological business model, Apple also has a strict "confidentiality system", and employees who leak their secrets mean being fired or even facing lawsuits.
Jobs, played by French Shark in the movie "Steve Jobs", is expounding his "closed" concept
Is Apple really only closed? of course not. Apple has actually participated in and contributed to open source. On December 9, 2021, Apple launched a redesigned website for its open source projects , including six independent open source projects: Swift, WebKit, FoundationDB, ResearchKit, CareKit, and Password Manager Resources, and other projects contributed by Apple are also listed. on top.
Yes, even in an era when open source was called a "cancerous tumor" by Microsoft, Apple didn't oppose open source so aggressively, it just handled its relationship with open source silently and with a cunning and shrewd attitude .
Simply put, open source is more like a tool and means for Apple to use and achieve its goals . Open source is trying to use its own values to build an open and collaborative technical environment, but when capital begins to "flexibly" recruit, integrate and incorporate open source by means of absorption, extraction, utilization, and transformation, "alienation" Inevitably. And Apple is the representative of such capital.
In essence, open source is more of a culture and belief , using the power of the community to build a completely open technology ecosystem. And Apple's open source does not involve this deep "ideal", but has been "tooling" open source. Is this open source really what we want?
Previous: Jobs' Revenge Derivative Darwin
"Do you want to sell sugar water for a lifetime, or change the world with us?"
When Jobs invited then-Pepsi CEO John Sculley to join Apple, he certainly did not expect that Sculley would kick him out of the company he had brought up.
On September 16, 1985, while Jobs resigned from Apple, he filed company registration documents for NeXT. Jobs exchanged the stock in his hand for $70 million, leaving only 1 share in order to participate in Apple's shareholders meeting. The money also became a start-up fund for NeXT Computer and Pixar Animation. Among them, what NeXT has done has become a weight for Jobs to return to Apple.
In 1988, NeXT Corporation introduced the NeXT computer, using NeXTStep as the operating system. At the time, NeXTStep was a fairly advanced system, based on the Mach kernel and Unix (BSD), using PostScript to provide a high-quality graphical user interface, and a complete object-oriented environment in Objective-C.
In addition, the NeXTStep operating system proposes the concept of a dock (Dock or Taskbar) and a series of concepts on modern GUI interfaces, such as real-time scrolling when dragging windows, colorful icon concepts, and a prompt function when files are modified. The advent of modern GUI editors has had a profound impact on the entire computing world.
And the foundation on which NeXTStep is based - Mach and BSD are both open source.
But NeXT did not make any money for Jobs. Instead, together with Pixar Animation, Jobs lost the $70 million in exchange for selling Apple shares. When Jobs couldn’t hold it anymore, fortunately, the “Toy Story” launched by Pixar Animation was able to recover blood; and NeXT Company began to authorize other hardware manufacturers to use NeXTStep as early as 1992 because of poor hardware sales. system, and stopped the loss-making hardware business in 1993 and began to concentrate on software market development.
The founding team of NeXT, with Jobs in the C position
On December 20, 1996, Apple began to acquire NeXT, which included all intellectual property, technology, and software developers. On February 7, 1997, the acquisition was completed at a price of $429 million and Jobs received 1.5 million shares of Apple stock, and Jobs replaced then CEO Amelio, returning the king.
These 11 years are not only the dormant period of Jobs, but also Apple's. When Apple decided to acquire NeXT in 1996, Apple was already in a dilemma in terms of operation and management. Its computer market share fell from 16% at its peak to 4%, and its stock also slumped.
On the surface, Apple is buying an operating system that can replace the old Mac OS; but in fact, Apple is recalling Jobs. After Jobs returned, he immediately stopped the Newton project led by Sculley and continued to promote his "Think Different" concept. In hindsight, we'll look at it again, and it's tantamount to a Steve Jobs revenge story .
The operating system developed by NeXT is the most powerful weapon in this revenge.
After acquiring NeXT, Apple began developing a Mach-based successor to MacOS, upgrading the Mach kernel from 2.5 to 3, extending it using concepts and components from the FreeBSD kernel to form a kernel called XNU . On this basis, Apple took out Darwin, the first open source project in the company's history , which has a very pure open source lineage (mainly FreeBSD) of BSD. It is a completely open source operating system, and Apple's own commercial system homology.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2000/04/05Apple-Releases-Darwin-1-0-Open-Source/
To this end, Apple also specially hired Jordan Hubbard, one of the founders of FreeBSD, to take charge of the BSD technical team (in fact, at the beginning, Apple was looking at Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, but was rejected by Linus). Subsequently, Hubbard became the director of Apple's Unix technology department, and spent 12 years of his youth for Apple .
In addition, Apple has specially designed an open source license called APSL (Apple Public Source License) for Darwin , which is not only recognized by OSI (Open Source Initiative), but also by FSF (Free Software Foundation). ) is recognized as a "Free Software License".
Comparison of APSL and several mainstream open source licenses
what happened? Did Apple change sex? Not closed? Of course not, this is precisely the first step in Apple's use of open source. As Bradley Kuhn, then FSF Vice President, previously commented:
They clearly have some interest in helping certain Free Software projects (such as GCC and GDB), but I don't think they are really dedicated to the goal of software freedom. For them, it's likely only a pragmatic necessity that leads them to support some Free Software projects.
They (Apple) obviously have some interest in helping some free software projects (eg GCC and GDB), but I don't think they are really committed to the goal of software freedom. For them, supporting some free software projects is simply a practical necessity.
At the time, Bradley Kuhn was very welcome to see Apple, which has always been known as "closed", begin to allow internal employees to participate in open source. But as he puts it, Apple is not doing all this for "free software."
First of all, Darwin's open source has not disrupted Apple's existing business model and market advantages. Apple doesn't sell software or services, it sells machines. The open source of an operating system Kernel is not a big deal. After all, the open source is not the Aqua GUI that Apple has always valued, and for the core advantage of GUI, if you imitate Apple, you can sue you for bankruptcy.
Second, the reason why Apple incorporated free software is because free software is really easy to use. For example, the foundations of the revolutionary Mac OS X were the BSD versions of NetBSD and FreeBSD, which brought multitasking to the Mac and allowed a large number of Unix and BSD applications to be ported to them. As a result, Mac computers began to move away from being a tool for creative artists and become a more general-purpose system used by more and more homes and small businesses.
In addition to this, Apple (actually NeXT) uses the GCC compiler developed by Richard Matthew Stallman (founder of the free software movement).
Some people think that Apple's introduction of the open source BSD subsystem (mainly including FreeBSD, and a small number of OpenBSD and NetBSD) can be said to be the essence of Mac OS X: on the one hand, it provides compatibility with various industry standards, on the other hand Ensure system security.
However, Apple did not take good care of Darwin, which was derived from this open source.
As a standalone product, Darwin didn't gain much popularity. In April 2002, Apple established OpenDarwin.org (a community to assist in the development of collaborative Darwin), a community that creates and distributes its own Darwin operating system, and provides resources for open source developers to interact and interact with Apple's Mac OS X. product. But soon, the OpenDarwin project was shut down on July 25, 2006, as Apple tightened control over OS X components.
In announcing the closure of the project, the OpenDarwin team said that OpenDarwin had "become a managed tool only for Mac OS X related projects". They tried to create an independent Darwinian operating system, but failed.
Availability of fewer sources, poor interactions with Apple representatives, difficulty establishing and tracking sources, and a lack of interest in the community are all to blame.
Today, on the official website of Apple's open source, we can no longer find the trace of Darwin, replaced by a project called UNIX, which is listed in the corner of the open source project webpage.
https://developer.apple.com/opensource/
Once again, Apple's open source action brought limited benefits to the open source community, but it also squeezed out a lot of resources. On the one hand, Apple continues to borrow and innovate from the BSD world in the name of open source; on the other hand, from 2001 to 2013, Jordan Hubbard, a pivotal figure in the FreeBSD community, was working for Apple, and it was difficult to take into account FreeBSD. More or less detrimental to the development of FreeBSD. ( For details, please refer to: "FreeBSD Big Failure" )
Finally, Apple's feedback on open source upstream is also insufficient. According to FreeBSD Foundation records , Apple donates between $1,000 and $4,999 to the foundation in 2021. Of course, adhering to the noble character, the core contributors of FreeBSD did not blame Apple for this when they were asked about the lack of enthusiasm for Apple's contribution to the upstream.
In addition, there was an interesting incident last year, which is enough to show Apple's use and contempt for open source projects.
In November 2021, Daniel Stenberg, the founder and chief developer of curl, published a blog complaining about Apple, because when a user asked Apple for help, Apple directly replied to the user and asked him to contact curl on his own.
Imagine a trillion-dollar company applying various open source components to its products, making billions of dollars in profits every year. When a user of the company asked for help with its product, the company pushed the user to open source projects. This open source project is run and maintained by volunteers, and the company has never sponsored a penny.
There is no doubt that Daniel is quite dissatisfied with Apple's approach, because it does not contribute anything to the project, but throws problems on himself when others ask for help, and is undoubtedly regarded as a free tool .
After the closure of the OpenDarwin project, PureDarwin emerged as its unofficial successor. This community is committed to making Darwin more usable, but in reality, it has no official relationship with OpenDarwin. This project rescued by the community has nothing to do with Apple.
After Darwin's failure, Apple did not stop its actions on open source, but brought its utilization, control and inclusion of open source to a new level. Stay tuned for the next issue: "Apple has open source, but so what? (Middle)" WebKit (click to view)