Regular readers may know that I’m a bit of a free and open source software advocate. Fundamentally I believe that if the code for software is open then its is more secure and useful. Many eyes make good code!
It also advances technology. Android is based on the open-source Linux kernel. Apple have in the past utilised open source technologies with BSD being the kernel of their iOS and MacOS operating systems.
Apple have been known to take from open-source but not necessarily give back upstream. However, today the news has broken that they have open-sourced nearly every version of their OSs (except the latest iOS 11).
https://twitter.com/dubstrike/status/913965740620963841
This is an unexpected but welcome development, it has however left people wondering what they are hoping to gain from this, as this is the upper layers of the kernel.
The source code of the ARM architecture for the kernel is now on Github.