Why Apple is a bad open source citizen

In contrast to the other companies that contribute to PHP, there is one bad apple, Apple. (drumroll)

To clarify a few things, I work on the PHP internals, that is the underlying C code that is PHP. My primary development environment for this is a Mac and you could say that I'm a long standing Apple fan boy.

So if you've ever tried to compile PHP on OS X, you'll most likely have problems using the default system libraries and in the end you'll use macports to install libxml and iconv. If you're not trying to compile your own versions of PHP and want to use a PECL extension then you'll find that the binary has had all the symbols stripped. Mid last year I tried to get some of these resolved, and filed a bug report with Apple but was informed these weren't bugs.

Since these weren't bugs and were more a support issue I dropped an email to the Apple Developer Connection address enquiring about getting some help from Apple. The speedy response from a helldesk operator was that for an all time low fee of $499.00 I could get some help from their support technicians.

Assuming I hadn't made it clear that this wasn't a commercial venture I did my best to explain that PHP is an Open Source project and that there was no magical bag of cash in which to give to Apple. If the PHP group had any sort of funds I'd be more than happy to pay. I even went on to explain that the software is already bundled with OS X and we wanted to make it better. I wasn't able to convince them it would be worthwhile and simple got ignored.

Skip forward a few months to December and I decided to give this another go, but this time I start out explaining that the software is already bundled, that we have no money pot to which to dive into and that we just needed some help with the abomination that is the bundled OS X libraries. This time I get a promise of a response soon as they forward it between departments, I let things slide until January and poked them again with the promise of a response soon.

Now its February, and the fact that I'm writing this blog post should suggest that Apple have yet to get back to me with any sort of response.

What was essentially asked for was help to improve PHP on OS X, but this has fallen on deaf ears. Apple are happy to take PHP but don't seem as keen to contribute anything back to the project. Yes they are perfectly entitled to do this, PHP is open source after all. But is waiving a $499 charge too much to ask?

It should be noted that I did manage to partially resolve one of the issues I was originally trying to contact Apple about, so with PHP 5.3+ you'll see support for a few of the missing DNS functions. However there is no guarantee this will work on newer versions of OS X since the PHP project has no access to the future OS X betas.

So if someone reading this knows someone at Apple who can help then leave a comment or drop me an email.

Comments

[John Appleseed]

Typically the best way to get at Apple engineers is to file a bug report at http://bugreport.apple.com.

Another way is to work your contact network and get in tough with someone on the relevant team directly.

Apple (the company) is pretty awful about dealing with any third party (even the huge ones, from what I gather). However the individual engineers are quite nice and helpful.

Good luck!

[Elizabeth Smith]

Hmmm - less than impressed that PHP has to go chasing after apple - other companies came to PHP and said "how can we help"

[Me]

Apple has done quite a bit for open technology and open standards and open source.

Looking at the PHP internals, I wouldn't be surprised that Apple didn't want to touch it.

[AppleDev]

You're going through the wrong channels. Try bugreport.apple.com, or sign up for the Xcode or Mac Networking mailing lists.

[Scott]

We're not asking for Apple to contribute directly to PHP, they could simple offer us a channel in order to liaise with them.

A bug report isn't always appropriate when its a support request or looking for clarification.

[Tom]

I quickly ran into these same troubles when I first purchased my MacBook. I never resolved them, instead I created a more complex, but IMO much better setup:

-VMware Fusion running Debian (Debian is used on production servers, too)
-MacFUSE + MacFusion for mounting the Debian VM in /Volumes/
-ifconfig on the Debian VM, then in /etc/hosts for OSX I make my own hostname for the local network IP of the VM, or you could run your own DNS server
-Now edit any files on your VM through /Volumes/whatever

More complex? Yes. Relevant to this post? A little :)

[Ignacio]

How ironic is the best PHP system are made on Macs?

[Ryan]

you might want to try MacPorts. Insanely easy to get custom PHP, Apache and MySQL running in 30 min. There's also DNSMasq for local DNS developing needs, imagemagick/graphicsmagick for image resizing, any version of Python, Perl, Ruby - basically source for any sort of linux/bsd program you could be looking for. You'll never look back

[Gabriel]

I am on the developers side of things and I'm missing things like mcrypt, gdlib, PDO-Mysql and xdebug. Without the symbols, the modules can't be installed. Hearing from your problems adds to my disgust for Apple.

I too have gone the VMWare route, but having to maintain another OS (and having to remember to connect and disconnect my smb shares) is painful.

[Wade Mealing]

Apple has not done that much in comparison to any of the larger companies such as IBM, Red Hat, SuSe, SUN and even Google to some extent.

KHTML was taken, hacked up, given back.. They bought the cups guys, have not seen improvements in that area yet.

I'll be happy to see (and proven wrong) any count of how Apple give back to the BSD community at large, but I've yet to ever see this kind of statistics broken down.

They have a long way to go before I can consider them a team player in open source.

[HieuUK]

This’s why I hate Apple (the company itself, not its products :P).Apple is always about itself. Never open!!!

[EllisGL]

"Apple has done quite a bit for open technology and open standards and open source."

I could have sworn that Apple was against open anything - unless they can close it off and make some money off of it.

[Demian Turner]

I agree with @Ignacio, been using MacPorts for last 3 years and all things PHP related work sweet, including xdebug, PDO, gd, u name it.

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