Apple's Generous Open Source Contribution
Description
This is a two-part meme criticizing Apple's minimal financial support for the FreeBSD project, whose code is a foundational part of Apple's operating systems. The left side of the image is a screenshot of the FreeBSD Foundation's donor page, specifically the '$5-$24' donation tier. Highlighted in a red box within this list is 'Apple Inc.', providing a factual basis for the meme. The right side is a four-panel rage-style comic. The first panel, labeled 'Apple HQ', shows executives deciding to 'contribute back' for using BSD code, with one having an 'idea' upon realizing it's BSD-licensed. The subsequent panels depict a massive 'FreeBSD donation pipeline' stretching from Apple to the open-source community, which ultimately delivers a paltry '$24' to a greedily waiting developer. The joke contrasts the immense value Apple derives from FreeBSD with its comically small donation, satirizing corporate attitudes towards open-source dependencies
Comments
11Comment deleted
Apple using a BSD license is the ultimate 'It's not a bug, it's a feature' for their legal and accounting departments
Apple’s CFO: “According to our cost model that’s $0.0000003 per shipped line of BSD - congratulations team, we’ve achieved negative CAPEX on open source.”
Apple's $24 donation to FreeBSD is like pushing a hotfix that only updates the copyright year - technically a contribution, but everyone knows you're just checking a compliance box while your entire kernel subsystem depends on their decades of work
Apple's entire OS stack sits on decades of BSD work - Darwin kernel, userland utilities, network stack - yet their FreeBSD Foundation contribution is literally less than a Netflix subscription. It's technically legal under the BSD license, but it's the engineering equivalent of taking the entire buffet home in Tupperware because the sign said 'all you can eat.' Meanwhile, FreeBSD maintainers are debugging race conditions in code that powers a $3 trillion company for the price of a large pizza. The permissive license giveth, and the quarterly earnings taketh away
The BSD license: where “give back” is an optional callback - Apple executed it with a 24‑byte payload
BSD licensing is basically UDP - Darwin streams out, and the only ACK you get back is $24
Apple HQ's BSD donation: The kernel of their success, returned in pocket change
why did u assume it's $24, not $5? Comment deleted
ye, 5 sounds more like apple tho i think it was 5 on paper, 2 in reality Comment deleted
Which year? Comment deleted
IPhone 15 so $15. Comment deleted