> No, I'm arguing that if Apple feels entitled to steal 30% of my hard earned money, then the open source maintainers should also feel the same entitlement
If the people who explicitly stated “feel free to use my software for free for any purpose you see fit” feel entitled to get any money for the stuff they wrote, they shouldn’t have said that, and, I expect, Apple would have used something else.
Writing a halfway decent OS kernel isn’t that hard, and performance-wise, you don’t really need more than halfway decent).
Also, Apple paid for many of the higher layers of iOS and/or developed them in-house (NeXT wrote NeXTSTEP, Apple bought NeXT, and then spent years before releasing Mac OS X)
That may be true, but those suckers (the open source maintainers) chose to give their work away for free, so they deserve what they get (nothing). Apple won't be making the same mistake!
(sorry for the sarcasm)
Apple owes their existence to the Open Source maintainers the same way Apple claims I owe my existence to their proprietary APIs.