People seem to give Apple a lot of flak for being a proprietary software company and while it'd be ridiculous to argue the fact that Apple is to a large degree closed source, what most don't realize is that they are a very active user of and contributor to open source projects. The kernel of the OS is based on FreeBSD and the source code is available for download at Apple's OpenDarwin website. It's been like that since the first release of Mac OS X.
Secondly Apple's Webkit, their HTML engine used in the Safari web browser, is based on KHTML from KDE, the desktop environment for Linux. The source code for Webkit is also available for downloading from the OpenDarwin website. And as a matter of fact I followed the instructions in this article to get the source code from the CVS repository, compile it and run the latest code. Very cool. It's even the first (and currently the only) browser to pass the ACID2 test which tests a browser's support of web standards (try that with IE).
So yes Apple is proprietary in many respects but they understand when it makes sense to be part of the open source community.
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