I’m not making the argument they contribute nothing. I’m saying it’s comically low compared to Google or Microsoft as the other 2 big commercial OS vendors.
Relative to them they contribute almost nothing at all to the wider ecosystem.
> Apple developed Clang, a new compiler front end which supports C, Objective-C and C++. In July 2007, the project received the approval for becoming open-source.
Not that you're wrong, they're resting on a vast amount of free labour from the open source community. Though that's not exactly uncommon.
I mean sure they are technically open source but they are very much Apple things. I’m talking about contributing to the wider ecosystem which I think they do very very little of.
This doesn't seem very interesting to me. I dislike the implication of the title, as if this somehow means something more.
"Contribute to open source" has a broad range of meaning. These are miniscule patches. Most IP attorneys I know at megacorps wouldn't even want to be informed of contributions of this scale.
in order to know how FreeBSD and Apple's OSes are related.
I still wonder what they "get out of" patching FreeBSD -- maybe there's more FreeBSD in the Apple OSes than we know. (I do not think it's possible a dev by accident used his/her @apple.com address).
