I'm curious why you think Apple would support any effort that does not benefit t...

justin66 · 2025-12-19T18:29:12 1766168952

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

stackghost · 2025-12-19T19:33:02 1766172782

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.

justin66 · 2025-12-19T19:43:14 1766173394

> 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 want to run FreeBSD on their laptops probably numbers in the hundreds. Not exactly a threat to Apple's bottom line.

On the other hand, some of those people are FreeBSD developers who create and maintain code that Apple would like to have the option of using. That relationship is worth something to Apple.

stackghost · 2025-12-20T00:10:47 1766189447

>On the other hand, some of those people are FreeBSD developers who create and maintain code that Apple would like to have the option of using. That relationship is worth something to Apple.

It wasn't that long ago that we used to have to endure HN commenters spamming the same copypasta every time BSD was mentioned: "did you know BSD runs your playstation and netflix and <...>. You should donate money!"

Evidently it's not worth more than the cost of assigning engineers to this, otherwise Apple would already be doing it.

justin66 · 2025-12-20T13:58:57 1766239137

I don’t really follow any of this cynical humor but

> otherwise Apple would already be doing it.

The gap between what Apple ought to be doing, even if for no other reason than its own good, and what Apple actually does is sometimes pretty wide.

reactordev · 2025-12-19T19:26:53 1766172413

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.

bitwize · 2025-12-19T19:42:58 1766173378

There's no GPL in the BSD sources used by Apple or Sony. They are free to release their operating systems as closed source; Sony does this. Apple releases Darwin sources "out of the goodness of their hearts", meaning, back in the 2000s they wanted to capture mindshare amongst the tech community for whom Linux was the strongest contender. Now that the future has refused to change, the year of the Linux desktop never materialized, and macOS has become the default developer's workstation OS, Apple has been much more sparing with Darwin source drops and may cease them altogether.

reactordev · 2025-12-19T20:08:05 1766174885

https://www.playstation.com/en-us/oss/ps4/

https://opensource.apple.com/

GPL where applicable. If it's MIT or just "as is" then no, they won't but they definitely publish the sources to what they are required to. Since FreeBSD is "as is" 4.4BSD licensed, they aren't required to publish the sources of Orbis.

p_ing · 2025-12-20T02:50:09 1766199009

Why would BSD use GPL?

BSD has a BSD license. It doesn't require source code releases.

reactordev · 2025-12-20T12:43:29 1766234609

Only the kernel is BSD licensed, other tools in user land are GPL. Don’t be dense.

LeFantome · 2025-12-21T08:24:43 1766305483

This is a wonderful self-own.

Perhaps the person you are responding to is dense enough to know that Apple uses a BSD licensed userland: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/file_cmds

Or perhaps they know that the entire system is built with Clang and LLVM and not GCC.

Apple distributes very little GPL code (like bash) and even then it is only GPL2 (older versions).

p_ing · 2025-12-21T00:11:21 1766275881

BSD utils in macOS are BSD licensed.

themafia · 2025-12-20T02:59:22 1766199562

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 · 2025-12-20T07:27:50 1766215670

> 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.