Apple and assisting with open source projects

[Nugat Trailers]

A terrible title, but not sure what to put.

I've noticed a few cases recently where Apple's been contributing developers and code to larger open source projects and programs, and I'm curious if anyone knows of any other projects that have been getting that level of assistance.

Blender has a Metal manifest authored by an Apple developer in August 2021, at https://developer.blender.org/T92212, and there was a recent blog post touching on Apple's contributions https://code.blender.org/2023/01/introducing-the-blender-metal-viewport/.

OBS Studio has also been receiving support, including reducing memory usage, improving performance, and adding support for the ScreenCaptureKit API introduced in Monterey.

There's very likely more that I missed since I know Apple has a 'Apple and open source' website, although Blender and OBS aren't mentioned on it.

 

[mfram]

Clang/LLVM gets a lot of support from Apple. XCode depends on it.

 

[theorist9]

Since you're looking for projects other than those Apple shows on its Open Source page, it's a good idea to start by listing those:

Apple Open Source

opensource.apple.com

 

[leman]

Apple software is literally built on open source and has a very long tradition of supporting open source. Their user-visible OS layer is a fork of OpenBSD, their kernel (Darwing) and system components are open source, Safari is built on WebKit, which itself started as a fork of the KDE browser engine (and Google later forked WebKit to build it's own browser engine). One of the most important modern open source compiler frameworks — LLVM/clang is literally built on Apple's money — Apple has employed the original author of LLVM who later designed Swift, which is also open source.

If you are instead looking for third-party OSS projects Apple is contributing to, a good place to start is to follow this GitHub account: https://github.com/Developer-Ecosystem-Engineering