Apple & FreeBSD relationship

[Nikola Pavlović]

On Wed, Mar 09, 2011 at 02:00:37PM -0800, Nerius Landys wrote:
> This is not a technical question.
> 
> Basically I have some cash sitting around.  I'm thinking of investing
> part of it with a company that I believe in.  Apple came to mind.  You
> could say that I'd like to judge Apple's moral character before
> investing money with them. 

A public company can't really have moral character. They are required to
do whatever it takes to maximize profit for it's shareholders regardless
of any moral considerations. Any ethical behaviour a public company may
or may not display is determined by law and/or PR requirements. What I'm
trying to say is that expecting a public company to be somehow
inherently ethical or unethical is unreasonable (except Google and Facebook, 
of course, they're evil :D)


> Does anyone know how Apple reciprocates to
> FreeBSD?  After all a lot of MacOSX is borrowed from FreeBSD.  I am
> not seeing Apple's name on this page:
> http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/sponsors.shtml .  Are there
> other ways in which Apple might be reciprocating?
>

As far as I'm aware their free/open source software contributions are
not strictly FreeBSD specific, but FreeBSD does benefit. Off the top of my
head, there's the Grand Central Dispatch framework which got ported to
FreeBSD, and the LLVM/Clang which will soon replace GCC as the system
compiler in FreeBSD (both very cool stuff).

I'd say that if your investment criterion is "how much is company X
giving back to the community", you could do a lot worse than Apple. 

Since you say you want to *invest* I won't try to persuade you to donate
to the FreeBSD Foundation ;).


-- 
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		-- Snoopy