this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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Apple have a surprising amount of open-source software. The OS that MacOS and iOS are built on top of (Darwin) is open-source, as is its kernel (XNU). The engine used by Safari (Webkit, forked from KDE's KHTML) is open-source too.
It's not really traditional open-source, though. It does use an OSS license, but they don't really accept public contributions, nor do they track bugs publicly or have a public roadmap.
Is that functionally different from Android being Linux and chromium being open source?
You can't easily run Darwin OS these days, unfortunately. Apple used to release an ISO you could install on a PC or Mac, but they stopped doing that a long time ago. These days, Apple release the bare minimum amount of code as required by its license, and it's just a pile of code without the build scripts required to actually build it.
That is interesting actually, but compared to other companies I'd not say that's significant. Specially because I suspect they switched to WebKit because they had no other choice 🤷♂️
Apple forked WebKit from KDE back in 2001. For all intents and purposes, they didn’t switch to it; they developed it.
Let's not forget CUPS which is how everything that isn't windows prints.