

Apple: We have decided to no longer release Libm source (2013) - dvhh
http://openradar.io/12436495

======
0x0
The opensource.apple.com website provides less stuff for every OS release. iOS
releases stopped at iOS 6.1.3 (nothing for 7.0.x, 7.1.x, 8.0.x, 8.1.x). OSX
releases are usually delayed for quite a while (10.10 is not yet there, for
example).

The trend here has been to close up more and more stuff for quite a long while
already :(

~~~
techrat
Are we honestly surprised? Apple has a history of being quite hostile to
consumers despite their image as a trendy company. Nothing they do is done
unless there's an actual threat to their bottom line, whether it's finally
offering larger screens for the iPhones, finally making iTunes (partially) DRM
free or closing up code/eliminating venues for cross compatibility.

Apple is about anti competitive as they get.

~~~
Terretta
> _history of being quite hostile to consumers_

That's going to need some really impressive fact-based justification.

I think a good case could be made Apple's the only PC maker focused on making
mass market consumers happy (vs enterprise or technology buyers).

They've also seemed more focused on the product experience than on market
share.

\- - -

Some TL;DR specific thoughts on each of your examples:

\- _" finally offering larger screens for the iPhones"_ \-- the giant screen
move feels anti-Samsung, not pro-consumer. There is an ideal _one handed_
screen size, and the 6/6+ are not it. The 5 series was already pushing it. The
problem for Apple is in the big box or mobile store, bigger looks better. In
every day use, once the phone is part of you, one handed becomes natural when
right sized. (If you've only used bigger, you don't know any better.) In the
store handling with two hands, you don't realize it won't go well. Buying
experience and _using_ experiences are at odds here, though I grant the bigger
screens are nice when you are _not mobile_.

\- _" finally making iTunes (partially) DRM free"_ \-- it's well documented
that movie, TV, and record industry execs were the problem here, not tech
providers, and Apple's fight to liberate music was quite public.

\- _cross compatibility_ \-- this is a bugaboo (something that causes fear or
distress out of proportion to its importance). with rapidly evolving
technologies, it's extraordinarily difficult to have an end to end ecosystem
'just work' for normals not interested in diagnosing why it fails. Apple
controls that end to end to make sure it works. Even then, things happen, like
the Airport Extremes and iOS 8 WiFi, but because they control both, they can
release updates to both to fix it. They don't have to support the lowest
common denominator, they can push for performance and stability both. The
bargain a user makes with Apple is "buy into the ecosystem, get peace of mind
and eliminate the need for a tech guru."

~~~
pjmlp
Well, I remember another Apple, back in the 80-90's.

Not the open source friendly one, that developers that only know Apple since
Mac OS X days seem to think about.

~~~
davidw
Exactly - Apple has always been about _control_. Back when Microsoft was
building up their software monopoly, Apple was aiming for control of both
hardware and software.

Maybe they require it for their users' benefit or something, or say they do,
but Apple is very much about control in a way that I, as a hackerish kind of
guy, am not ok with for the core of my computer usage.

My parents have Macs on the other hand, and are very happy with them - it
seems to be a good system for the kind of people who don't hack on stuff and
like the tight integration.

~~~
halostatue
It’s also a good system for people who don’t have time to hack on things that
aren’t related to their core interests. Like me. I stopped building my own PCs
in 2001 (when I switched to laptops almost exclusively) and stopped fighting
with both Windows and Linux desktop configuration horrors in 2006 (when I
switched to Mac OS X as my host system).

I have things that I think are far more interesting to work on than worrying
about hardware compatibility. If I ever reach a point on Apple hardware +
software where I can’t hack on the things that _I_ want to hack on, then I
will leave it. But as of right now, it gets out of my way and lets me do those
things that I want to do. (Some of the various Linux distros have gotten
better about this, but they aren’t there yet, even for me—and definitely not
for my wife.)

~~~
davidw
I've been buying Dells with Ubuntu for something like 10 years, and once in a
while have a minor annoyance with something, but not more than I see people
complaining about on twitter with their Macs.

And I have had occasion to hack on low-level stuff like kernel drivers, now
and then, so knowing the whole system well because I use it every day has been
an advantage.

~~~
pessimizer
I'm astounded by the stories of misery I hear from computer people trying to
install Linux in the past 5 years. I agree that an appliance like Apple or
Google produces might be more useful for them: in the worst case, they can
just send it back to the company, and since it's going to be replaced every
1.5-2 years anyway, all problems are going to seem more ephemeral at that rate
of consumerism.

I'm shocked at hearing those complaints from people that want to be hired to
use computers, though. If I (as a developer) couldn't handle installing a
post-2010 Linux system within a few hours, I'd be ashamed, not indignant.

~~~
zanny
Well, some chipsets, gpus, etc are just broken in the kernel and do not work,
and you have to put hours in trying to fix them.

I recently built an OpenSuse box for a client, and since there is no "good"
motherboard manufacturer for Linux, I have to just randomly hope whichever one
I get works.

I've gotten Gigabyte, MSI, Asrock, and ASUS boards in the past. Of those, only
Asrock supports dhcp online updates to the firmware, which is nice considering
most of them supply some shitty proprietary firmware installer on Windows
without firmware imgs. So I went with an Asrock board.

Now, I know from experience Asrock boards wipe their EFI boot menu when you
update the firmware, so you need a thumb drive to boot into a Linux to readd
your OS to the boot menu. Their proprietary EFI gui is all right, better than
ASUS' in my book.

Problem is the board came with a mini-pcie slot, which did come with an
Atheros NIC, but something in that pipeline (board -> PCI -> NIC) meant that
handshakes would always time on when attaching to wifi. Dmesg was never
useful, it would just keep retrying requests without getting responses.

And then sometimes it works, randomly. It is probably an electrical problem
somewhere along the chain, but considering it was just a perky extra rather
than an important part of the system, I'd rather not go through the pain in
the ass of RMAing a board to get on back that might work.

I think fundamentally the problem is that unless you buy from Zareason /
Thinkpenguin / System76 (in the US, that does not have consumer protection
laws that mandate systems be made available without OSes like in Europe) you
are stuck building your own, and there is no computer you can assemble that
whole stack has Linux support.

I know that Mushkin and Kingston have SSD firmware updaters for Linux. AMD and
Intel obviously support Linux. RAM vendors do not need to care about OS, that
is the firmwares problem. But not a single motherboard vendor supports Linux,
and that is a real problem.

------
martingordon
Given that this is surfacing now – two years after the radar was filed and 19
months after Apple responded – I'm going to go out on a limb and say this
isn't a big deal at all.

------
duncan_bayne
Cached: [http://goo.gl/1g2On4](http://goo.gl/1g2On4)

------
CoffeeDregs
I'm very much for open source and all, and I'd love to see Apple as the bad
guy here (since I think they're a Bad Guy), but I'm not sure what is the big
deal. AFAICT, every CPU vendor has a libm implementation. Apple wants to be
tight-lipped about its hardware. [Maybe] Since hardware reviewers seem to get
their information on the hardware from compilers, Apple is removing as much
information as practical to avoid competitive information leaking.

It's a bummer to see a reduction in the amount of open source, but their
license is fairly clear and I can't say that I blame Apple for trying to keep
competitors away. Further, it looks as though most implementations is closed-
source-y since the source code is highly tied to CPU idiosyncracies...

Links:

Apple's libm license:
[http://opensource.apple.com/source/Libm/Libm-315/APPLE_LICEN...](http://opensource.apple.com/source/Libm/Libm-315/APPLE_LICENSE)

Intel: [https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-math-
kernel-...](https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-math-kernel-
library-licensing-faq)

AMD: [http://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks/cpu-
development/libm...](http://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks/cpu-
development/libm/)

Android:
[https://android.googlesource.com/platform/bionic/+/master/li...](https://android.googlesource.com/platform/bionic/+/master/libm/)
(from FreeBSD?)

~~~
zanny
> I can't say that I blame Apple for trying to keep competitors away.

I certainly can. They restrict their users freedom to own the machines they
buy by disrespecting their customers by giving them software without available
source.

You can _always_ blame them. It is not something that is ok, it is ethically
wrong to sell someone something without giving them the proverbial floorplan.
If it is a "competitive disadvantage" for others to know how your software or
hardware works, then you must not have a very compelling product if it cannot
stand on its own in the open.

------
macwarlock
Apple keeps touting itself as the only company able to offer such end to end
integration between hardware/software/services. If this is true, it would be
nice to see them make a real effort to open more of it's code base to help
improve the software ecosystem overall. Hell, they could open source all of
OSX and I doubt it would have any effect on their overall revenue/market
position, while gaining them serious brownie points in tech circles. I know
it's not a huge incentive, but a geek can dream.

------
fafner
And the danger of things like that is increasing with clang/llvm. That's why I
think RMS is right to be sceptical of it. Right now a lot of development
around it might be open source. But for how long? Especially if GCC is moved
out of the way.

------
jdiggidy
Anyone who's spent time developing on Mac or who has moved from a Linux dev
environment to a Mac environment should understand the flawed nature of the
open source argument here. Mac OS includes many open source tools from Apache
to jabber and many others. The fact that Mac OS is a BSD derivative should
indicate that the OS lends itself to open source. As an aside, control over
the ecosystem doesn't necessarily mean a bad thing.

------
jbrooksuk
Cached version:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Aopenr...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Aopenradar.io%2F12436495&oq=cache%3Aopenradar.io%2F12436495&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1169j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=119&ie=UTF-8)

------
stereo
It looks like a maths library, what was so special about it, and why does
Apple needs to make its own?

~~~
rwmj
If you have loads of engineers, special hardware of your own (ARM), and secret
insights into other hardware from your suppliers (Intel), then I can see it
could make a lot of sense.

That doesn't mean it's a nice thing to do. Was this derived originally from
FreeBSD code? This could be why the GPL is a good thing.

~~~
palunon
That's exactly what the GPL is for.

~~~
Shish2k
Though BSD advocates would make the argument that if it was GPL, Apple would
never have used it in the first place.

(Personally I'm not sure if it's even possible to definitively say which
situation is better; you can't do something scientific like releasing a
library under both licenses and seeing which people use, because they would
interfere - you really need two parallel universes to see the true effect of
that one change)

------
tempodox

      502 Bad Gateway
    
      nginx/1.4.1 (Ubuntu)
    

(edit: non sequitur)

~~~
iancarroll
Open Radar isn't run by Apple.

~~~
tempodox
Oops, didn't know that. Thanks for the info.

------
raldi
Can a moderator append [2013] to the headline?

------
Nanzikambe

       $ cd source/Libm
       $ git status
       ... snip ...
               new file:   Source/Intel/nsa_random_number_generator.c
               new file:   Source/Intel/nsa_random_number_generator.h
       **CARRIER LOST**
    

Disclaimer: yes yes I know, it's discouraged, but the point remains that it
has become virtually impossible to trust a closed sourced OS, and steps
backward like this do little to improve things.

