Not in Apple's best interest. Were I Apple, I would tie this up in court until there is a better political climate. They have the money to kick the can down the road.
Throughput. The BSD networking stack has been very carefully engineered over time. Linux is OK, but nowhere near as robust. FreeBSD is legendary for load tolerance and network throughput, that on equal machines would choke a Linux server. Seen it, work(ed) with it. When we do something serious that requires heavy load and awesome throughput, we always lean on FreeBSD, never anything else. Everything else has always let us down.
Try OpenBSD. OpenBSD has the best laptop support of the BSDs. Dragonfly BSD offers nothing that Free- or OpenBSD doesn't IMHO. OpenBSD supports tons of chipsets, suspend, sound, wireless, you name it. Costs you nothing to try. I was sold after trying it all those years ago. It's better than ever now, and gets better every iteration. OpenBSD arguably also has the best man pages in the industry. Theo de Raadt and his devs really do care about the software they put out. Their code audits are legendary and it shows in the build quality of their OS and other products.
Very cool, very interesting. Regarding systemd, we here in the BSD camp welcome you. :) No such issue like systemd with its binary nonsense in FreeBSD or OpenBSD. And, one config file (plain text) to rule them all in /etc/rc.conf
Relative to the company as a whole. Stuff like this is built in to the slush fund as "hazard" money. The shareholders could care less. Apple has more money than the African continent. I doubt anyone is overly worried.
Not a fanboy, thank you, just a happy IT pro. We use and prefer BSD and attendant software because we prefer the BSD/CDDL(ZFS)/MIT and similar licenses. The GPL is off-putting for what we do, so we avoid using Linux or other GPL'd software where equivalent BSD (or similar)-licensed software is extant.
ZFS on Linux. No, thank you. I'll continue to use ZFS natively under FreeBSD, which is arguably a far better OS for what ZFS users would be wanting anyway. Been using *BSD since the late 90s. Never a real issue short of HW failure. I cannot say the same for the painful times I was forced to use Linux.
ZFS is indeed a lifesaver, but we in the BSD camps have know this for many moons.
America would be just fine with zero H1-B workers. There is zero deficiency in IT numbers that qualified Americans cannot fill. The issue lies with companies being cheap and disavowing Americans in favor of more profit to please the ever-demanding shareholders. I left for-profit IT in favor of non-profit IT to avoid being replaced by a foreigner. I make less, to be sure, but I'm not worried about my job being handed to an outsider who has no stake in my community.
I'm deeply in favor of killing the entire H1-B program. If American companies don't want to hire Americans, Americans should not buy from them. I'm willing to bet that if enough people got angry at Apple for letting the Chinese build iPhones instead of bringing that work back home. Apple make more than enough profit to allow Americans to have those jobs. Imagine their products saying "Designed and made in California" rather than simple "designed" here.
I tend to lean far right politically with exception being made for work-related issues. I am firmly pro-union and pro-protectionism, especially as it relates to Americans and their jobs.
Nothing at all wrong with putting foreign workers on a lesser footing. This is America, they are Indians. They should bloody well be grateful to even be let in the country, especially what with Disney and now IBM and others.
There is ZERO shortage of qualified American workers. It's a bunk chestnut always trotted out by companies looking for slave --, er, low wage IT workers to replace the Americans to whom they sadly have zero allegiance. Microsoft is chief among these companies. They are several other large IT concerns perpetually lobby to allow more and more foreigners to enter to take American jobs. Disney is but the latest scam in this vein. As an aside, I would have NOT trained my replacement. I would have walked out the door. I have for the last almost 10 years worked for non-profits to avoid this very thing. I'm in IT, but I love it and I don't want to risk my job to foreigners because the for-profits are always looking at ways to screw over people because the shareholders demand more and more money.
Hint: the second you go public is the second you lost control of your company. There is not enough money in the world to get me to go through that. I survived UUNET being eaten by WorldCom, subsequent buyout by MCI, buyout by Verizon Business, and then the next company I ended up with was also bought out by Verizon Business. I said screw it and went non-profit. I make less, but I'm not worried about losing my job to a foreigner who has no stake in my community and is only here for the dollars.