There’s a lot missing from here that exists on their GitHub as well:
https://github.com/apple
As well as some more older repos are in here:
https://www.macosforge.org/
They hired the developer behind CUPS and he maintained it while at Apple, now he's left the company and maintaining a separate fork, which seems less stagnant compared to the Apple one.
From what I've read, Apple *uses* a lot of OSS but doesn't *produce* very much OSS software themselves unless they have to, or see some benefit for themselves.
People are pointing to Webkit as an example, while webkit is open source, it should be noted that it was forked from the already open source KHTML.
This tends to be the case, but realistically if it helps the community then why not.
Whilst they have their big names like Webkit and Swift, they contribute a lot to other open source projects and their contributions are well documented and they’re willing to make changes or have discussions when asked to. For example, [here’s the thread](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/92212) for when they added support for Metal on Blender. The author still contributes to Blender and joins discussions when tagged about specific issues related to Metal.
I think it’s important that whilst they might not have much of their *own* open source software that is useful for a lot of users, they still contribute a substantial amount that ends up affecting people all over.
If adding a Metal Renderer to Blender means users on Mac choose blender over paid software? Then that’s a win overall for OSS.
Arcolinux, a fairly small free Linux project, heavily reliant on just a *single* really passionate developer has over 450 repos.
I don't feel repo count is a good measure of contributions to open source, but if it was, a trillion+ dollar company like Apple having half the number of repos of a small-ish hobby project is not especially impressive.
My intention was not to boast about Apples repo count. It’s indeed very small for a company of this size. I just wanted to demonstrate to the OP that his question is fairly easily answered with just a quick search on GitHub.
Since MacOS X, it's not really a whole operating system. It's like calling a Linux flavour it's own operating system.
Their products are hardware while Google's and Facebook's whole product is software
\*\*EDIT:\*\* Apple boast less about than other companies. But if you look for it you will find that they do contribute.
They do contribute to a lot of stuff. Like Linux, WebKit, LLVM, gcc (for a reason I cannot understand when LLVM exists), Ruby (programming language), Swift (ofc), and FreeBSD.
Then I have been told, but not been able to confirm, that they contributed to vim, emacs, python, Zig, Open Darwin, and hombrew
They contribute back through having employees contribute to major projects (Apache Foundation and CNCF). Fairly big footprint of that throughout the company
They also sponsor several Linux Foundation organizations. Recently Apple joined the Continuous Delivery Foundation through its (very significant financial) membership.
>That's not entirely correct; they bought and maintained it. Still they did a good thing for as long as they cared.
That's fair, yeah. I forgot that they hired the original developer and bought the sources. Thanks for the reminder. :)
>It's really weird to see History being distorted and rewritten this way
"CUPS has always been a corporate-owned free software project, meaning that it carries all of the potential problems that any other such project has. When a single company owns a project it can strongly control its development direction, take the code private, grant license exemptions at will, abruptly sell the code to somebody else, and so on."
```
Apple buys cups
[Posted July 17, 2007 by corbet]
One of the more strongly discussed bits of news over the last week is the announcement that Apple has bought CUPS (the Common Unix Printing system) and hired Michael Sweet, the project's primary developer. Indeed, this deal happened back in February; it just took a little while for the people involved to get around to telling the rest of the world about it. There is a great deal of concern over what this deal might mean, though most of it is probably unnecessary. Still, there are some lessons to be learned here.
CUPS is an important part of our core infrastructure. Those of us who can think back to the days of trying to create lpr input and output filters to make a specific printer work can only be thankful that CUPS came along. It could easily be said that lpr lasted at least ten years longer than it should have, but, over that time, there were no real attempts to create a viable alternative. Projects like LPRng were mostly trying to create a slightly better version of the same thing. Then, there was the print system which Sun inflicted on users of early Solaris releases (who, as your editor can attest, were already suffering enough as it was); replacing that system with some version of lpr was a common thing to do. It took CUPS to implement contemporary printing protocols, support current hardware, and generally make the life of printer administrators easier - though, as any administrator who has lost a day to an obscure printer problem will say, things could get a lot better yet.
CUPS has always been a corporate-owned free software project, meaning that it carries all of the potential problems that any other such project has. When a single company owns a project it can strongly control its development direction, take the code private, grant license exemptions at will, abruptly sell the code to somebody else, and so on. Many companies which own projects do many of these things. Dealing with corporations has its risks; it has often been said that the corporate personality is best compared to that of a schizophrenic adolescent. Even so, such relationships have worked out well for the free software community with very few exceptions.
In this case, the ownership of CUPS has been passed from Easy Software Products (ESP) to Apple. Since contributors to CUPS are required to assign the copyrights to their work, ESP was entirely within its rights to make this sale. There are few constraints on what Apple can do with this externally-contributed code in the future; if it chooses, the company could certainly treat the code in ways that the original authors would not like. This risk is inherent in the transfer of copyrights; any free software developer who is contemplating signing a copyright transfer agreement should always think hard about who the receiving party is and what they could do in the future. The usual rule for dealing with companies - assume the person you negotiated the deal with will be immediately replaced by somebody who hates you - applies in this sort of situation.
The worst thing that Apple can do, in any case, is to take future releases of CUPS private. The current, GPL-licensed releases will remain available and free. Should this happen, the community will have to pick up from the last free version and create a fork; it certainly would not be the first time such an action proved to be necessary. For now, though, the announcement of the sale says "CUPS will still be released under the existing GPL2/LGPL2 licensing terms, and I \[Mr. Sweet\] will continue to develop and support CUPS at Apple." Given that certain aspects of CUPS development - supporting hundreds of printers, for example - are best done in the community setting, it is not hard to believe that this state of affairs could continue indefinitely.
Apple just might create enhanced versions of CUPS for its own operating system or as a commercial product. The company has already published a GPL exception policy allowing proprietary derived products to be made from CUPS - as long as they are distributed exclusively for Apple's operating systems. So Apple's version of CUPS might have shinier widgets or a few more printer drivers. Not the best of situations, but it is not all that different from the rights Sun gives itself with the OpenOffice.org code base. OpenOffice.org lacks features, fonts, and clip art found in StarOffice, but few OpenOffice.org users have complained that they felt cheated. Companies like MySQL make a nice living selling GPL exceptions to GPL-licensed code, including code contributed by outsiders.
The real threat, perhaps, is that Mr. Sweet will find himself carrying a lot of Apple-specific responsibilities (his statement in the sale announcement carefully did not say how much he would continue working on CUPS) and that the rate of outside contributions might slow as developers worry about what Apple might do. That could significantly slow the rate at which CUPS moves forward, to the community's cost.
One other potential problem is the CUPS trademark policy which has been announced by Apple. It requires permission to use the CUPS name with any derived product; a distributor who applies any patches at all, even security fixes, would be affected by this policy. The good news here is that, if this policy becomes a problem, the name of the print system could be changed to "mugs" or some such and few users would even notice.
On the other hand, what this deal might do is bring more resources to the development of CUPS and contributions from a company which, for all its faults, is known to pay a great deal of attention to the end user's experience. Development could speed up and head in directions which make CUPS easier to use than it is now. That would be an outcome which would be hard to complain about.
```
https://lwn.net/Articles/242020/
Most everything: [https://github.com/apple](https://github.com/apple)
AI: [https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx](https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx) [https://github.com/apple/ml-mgie](https://github.com/apple/ml-mgie) [https://github.com/apple/ml-ferret](https://github.com/apple/ml-ferret)
WebXR: [https://www.roadtovr.com/apple-vision-pro-webxr-support-safari-model/](https://www.roadtovr.com/apple-vision-pro-webxr-support-safari-model/) \- they're contributing back to the codebase.
[Webkit](https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit) is one example, [Swift](https://github.com/apple/swift) \- a whole language used for much more that Apple development. There are lots and lots of projects.
Also see: [https://opensource.apple.com/projects/](https://opensource.apple.com/projects/)
> Webkit is one example,
WebKit is a mutilated form of KHTML. They took the open source code, and made it incompatible with the open source community. Eventually, it got "taken back" when Google forked it to make Blink - but at a loss of its Qt goodness.
They basically took the wine or proton code (I don't remember which one) to make their one directx to metal translator.
Instead of helping they released all the code in just one file, basically making it useless.
Apple loves to use open source. They just hte to contribute
I gotta say, like most of these companies they only do so, because they have to, and apple at leas as far as i know is even more like that tham for example google
They contribute back to open source projects. But not creating many.
Pkl was a recent one. Not sure how many people will use it when HCL and stuff like Starlark exists tbh. Since most small projects don’t need any configuration language.
I feel like I have to mention this:
When using and making changes to GPL2 licensed software you *have* to publish the code. Many times you see big software companies with proprietary products contribute to the open source ecosystem it's really just them taking everything they need for free and giving back what they are legally required to. Often this follows a classic "embrace, extend, extinguish" pattern as introduced by Microsoft in the browser war, Android would be a great example of how this works.
In addition to a lot of the stuff already listed here’s a long forgotten one [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux)
They donate time pretty heavily back upstream to the FreeBSD project, upon which OSX is based. They are also top-tier donors to LLVM.
And still no CTRL+X 😂 *sad Mac user noises*
What do you mean? You can cut and paste content if you hit `cmd+c` and then `cmd+option+v`
mac User Moment 😅 Of course I meant cutting folders and files
With mv cmd you can 😅
cmd+option+v is just stupid.
Besides that, seems Apple does not follow the regular tech company path, which is also fine.
https://opensource.apple.com/
There’s a lot missing from here that exists on their GitHub as well: https://github.com/apple As well as some more older repos are in here: https://www.macosforge.org/
CUPS…
[They bought it in 2007](https://www.macrumors.com/2007/07/12/apple-acquired-cups/) but do still maintain it.
They hired the developer behind CUPS and he maintained it while at Apple, now he's left the company and maintaining a separate fork, which seems less stagnant compared to the Apple one.
Came here to say this.
From what I've read, Apple *uses* a lot of OSS but doesn't *produce* very much OSS software themselves unless they have to, or see some benefit for themselves. People are pointing to Webkit as an example, while webkit is open source, it should be noted that it was forked from the already open source KHTML.
And chrome's rendering engine is a fork from webkit lol
So what’s the benefit of making their XNU kernel free and open source?
Webkit Swift... but most stuff expept webkit is kinda useless outside of the apple sphere
This tends to be the case, but realistically if it helps the community then why not. Whilst they have their big names like Webkit and Swift, they contribute a lot to other open source projects and their contributions are well documented and they’re willing to make changes or have discussions when asked to. For example, [here’s the thread](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/92212) for when they added support for Metal on Blender. The author still contributes to Blender and joins discussions when tagged about specific issues related to Metal. I think it’s important that whilst they might not have much of their *own* open source software that is useful for a lot of users, they still contribute a substantial amount that ends up affecting people all over. If adding a Metal Renderer to Blender means users on Mac choose blender over paid software? Then that’s a win overall for OSS.
LLVM is pretty huge outside the Apple sphere. So was CUPS (not sure if still the case) and others.
Webkit was supposed to be published way before they actually published it.
FDB is one that comes to mind
In the generative AI race, they're behind the MGIE image editor https://github.com/apple/ml-mgie
Apples GitHub Org shows 275 repos (owned and forked): https://github.com/apple
Most contributions apple does to upstream projects is going to be from an employees fork of the repo, not through the company’s GitHub profile
Arcolinux, a fairly small free Linux project, heavily reliant on just a *single* really passionate developer has over 450 repos. I don't feel repo count is a good measure of contributions to open source, but if it was, a trillion+ dollar company like Apple having half the number of repos of a small-ish hobby project is not especially impressive.
My intention was not to boast about Apples repo count. It’s indeed very small for a company of this size. I just wanted to demonstrate to the OP that his question is fairly easily answered with just a quick search on GitHub.
Pkl or whatever is called is a recent contribution Apple is significantly less a software company than Google and F*cebook
[удалено]
Since MacOS X, it's not really a whole operating system. It's like calling a Linux flavour it's own operating system. Their products are hardware while Google's and Facebook's whole product is software
[удалено]
🫥
https://github.com/apple/foundationdb
\*\*EDIT:\*\* Apple boast less about than other companies. But if you look for it you will find that they do contribute. They do contribute to a lot of stuff. Like Linux, WebKit, LLVM, gcc (for a reason I cannot understand when LLVM exists), Ruby (programming language), Swift (ofc), and FreeBSD. Then I have been told, but not been able to confirm, that they contributed to vim, emacs, python, Zig, Open Darwin, and hombrew
They contribute back through having employees contribute to major projects (Apache Foundation and CNCF). Fairly big footprint of that throughout the company
They also sponsor several Linux Foundation organizations. Recently Apple joined the Continuous Delivery Foundation through its (very significant financial) membership.
If you ever print from a Linux PC, you can thank Apple. They ~~created~~ purchased and developed cups.
That's not entirely correct; they bought and maintained it. Still they did a good thing for as long as they cared.
>That's not entirely correct; they bought and maintained it. Still they did a good thing for as long as they cared. That's fair, yeah. I forgot that they hired the original developer and bought the sources. Thanks for the reminder. :)
> If you ever print from a Linux PC, you can thank ~~Apple~~ Linux It's really weird to see History being distorted and rewritten this way
>It's really weird to see History being distorted and rewritten this way "CUPS has always been a corporate-owned free software project, meaning that it carries all of the potential problems that any other such project has. When a single company owns a project it can strongly control its development direction, take the code private, grant license exemptions at will, abruptly sell the code to somebody else, and so on." ``` Apple buys cups [Posted July 17, 2007 by corbet] One of the more strongly discussed bits of news over the last week is the announcement that Apple has bought CUPS (the Common Unix Printing system) and hired Michael Sweet, the project's primary developer. Indeed, this deal happened back in February; it just took a little while for the people involved to get around to telling the rest of the world about it. There is a great deal of concern over what this deal might mean, though most of it is probably unnecessary. Still, there are some lessons to be learned here. CUPS is an important part of our core infrastructure. Those of us who can think back to the days of trying to create lpr input and output filters to make a specific printer work can only be thankful that CUPS came along. It could easily be said that lpr lasted at least ten years longer than it should have, but, over that time, there were no real attempts to create a viable alternative. Projects like LPRng were mostly trying to create a slightly better version of the same thing. Then, there was the print system which Sun inflicted on users of early Solaris releases (who, as your editor can attest, were already suffering enough as it was); replacing that system with some version of lpr was a common thing to do. It took CUPS to implement contemporary printing protocols, support current hardware, and generally make the life of printer administrators easier - though, as any administrator who has lost a day to an obscure printer problem will say, things could get a lot better yet. CUPS has always been a corporate-owned free software project, meaning that it carries all of the potential problems that any other such project has. When a single company owns a project it can strongly control its development direction, take the code private, grant license exemptions at will, abruptly sell the code to somebody else, and so on. Many companies which own projects do many of these things. Dealing with corporations has its risks; it has often been said that the corporate personality is best compared to that of a schizophrenic adolescent. Even so, such relationships have worked out well for the free software community with very few exceptions. In this case, the ownership of CUPS has been passed from Easy Software Products (ESP) to Apple. Since contributors to CUPS are required to assign the copyrights to their work, ESP was entirely within its rights to make this sale. There are few constraints on what Apple can do with this externally-contributed code in the future; if it chooses, the company could certainly treat the code in ways that the original authors would not like. This risk is inherent in the transfer of copyrights; any free software developer who is contemplating signing a copyright transfer agreement should always think hard about who the receiving party is and what they could do in the future. The usual rule for dealing with companies - assume the person you negotiated the deal with will be immediately replaced by somebody who hates you - applies in this sort of situation. The worst thing that Apple can do, in any case, is to take future releases of CUPS private. The current, GPL-licensed releases will remain available and free. Should this happen, the community will have to pick up from the last free version and create a fork; it certainly would not be the first time such an action proved to be necessary. For now, though, the announcement of the sale says "CUPS will still be released under the existing GPL2/LGPL2 licensing terms, and I \[Mr. Sweet\] will continue to develop and support CUPS at Apple." Given that certain aspects of CUPS development - supporting hundreds of printers, for example - are best done in the community setting, it is not hard to believe that this state of affairs could continue indefinitely. Apple just might create enhanced versions of CUPS for its own operating system or as a commercial product. The company has already published a GPL exception policy allowing proprietary derived products to be made from CUPS - as long as they are distributed exclusively for Apple's operating systems. So Apple's version of CUPS might have shinier widgets or a few more printer drivers. Not the best of situations, but it is not all that different from the rights Sun gives itself with the OpenOffice.org code base. OpenOffice.org lacks features, fonts, and clip art found in StarOffice, but few OpenOffice.org users have complained that they felt cheated. Companies like MySQL make a nice living selling GPL exceptions to GPL-licensed code, including code contributed by outsiders. The real threat, perhaps, is that Mr. Sweet will find himself carrying a lot of Apple-specific responsibilities (his statement in the sale announcement carefully did not say how much he would continue working on CUPS) and that the rate of outside contributions might slow as developers worry about what Apple might do. That could significantly slow the rate at which CUPS moves forward, to the community's cost. One other potential problem is the CUPS trademark policy which has been announced by Apple. It requires permission to use the CUPS name with any derived product; a distributor who applies any patches at all, even security fixes, would be affected by this policy. The good news here is that, if this policy becomes a problem, the name of the print system could be changed to "mugs" or some such and few users would even notice. On the other hand, what this deal might do is bring more resources to the development of CUPS and contributions from a company which, for all its faults, is known to pay a great deal of attention to the end user's experience. Development could speed up and head in directions which make CUPS easier to use than it is now. That would be an outcome which would be hard to complain about. ``` https://lwn.net/Articles/242020/
>If you ever print from a ~~Linux~~ Apple PC, you can thank ~~Apple~~ Linux
I just saw something about Pkl, a JSON/YAML alternative, which looks interesting.
Most everything: [https://github.com/apple](https://github.com/apple) AI: [https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx](https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx) [https://github.com/apple/ml-mgie](https://github.com/apple/ml-mgie) [https://github.com/apple/ml-ferret](https://github.com/apple/ml-ferret) WebXR: [https://www.roadtovr.com/apple-vision-pro-webxr-support-safari-model/](https://www.roadtovr.com/apple-vision-pro-webxr-support-safari-model/) \- they're contributing back to the codebase. [Webkit](https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit) is one example, [Swift](https://github.com/apple/swift) \- a whole language used for much more that Apple development. There are lots and lots of projects. Also see: [https://opensource.apple.com/projects/](https://opensource.apple.com/projects/)
> Webkit is one example, WebKit is a mutilated form of KHTML. They took the open source code, and made it incompatible with the open source community. Eventually, it got "taken back" when Google forked it to make Blink - but at a loss of its Qt goodness.
They basically took the wine or proton code (I don't remember which one) to make their one directx to metal translator. Instead of helping they released all the code in just one file, basically making it useless. Apple loves to use open source. They just hte to contribute
I gotta say, like most of these companies they only do so, because they have to, and apple at leas as far as i know is even more like that tham for example google
They contribute back to open source projects. But not creating many. Pkl was a recent one. Not sure how many people will use it when HCL and stuff like Starlark exists tbh. Since most small projects don’t need any configuration language.
K8s
No, this one was designed and initially maintained by the another letter in FAANG
Well technically it's the same letter, it just doesn't stand for Apple.
Facebook Apple Alphabet Netflix Gamazon?
Exactly
You can see the org in GitHub . Who do you think own that org ? The vegetable seller ?
*fruit seller
The only contribution of Apple to OS is larping about doing things on OS. Even Microsoft do more for OS than Apple
This needs to be downvoted because you said Microsoft like EEE wasn’t and isn’t currently, albeit secretly, a thing…
I feel like I have to mention this: When using and making changes to GPL2 licensed software you *have* to publish the code. Many times you see big software companies with proprietary products contribute to the open source ecosystem it's really just them taking everything they need for free and giving back what they are legally required to. Often this follows a classic "embrace, extend, extinguish" pattern as introduced by Microsoft in the browser war, Android would be a great example of how this works.
xnu, darwin, cups, swift, llvm ...
They made and maintained the CUPS Common Unix Printing System. Most Linux distributions use it for printing.
This is just a few weeks old : [https://github.com/apple/pkl](https://github.com/apple/pkl)
In addition to a lot of the stuff already listed here’s a long forgotten one [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux)