Edit 3: This is not edited but rather a real screenshot from early 2021.
Alexander Tharapos only shows up in 2021. David Choi is also in the $5–24 bracket.
Donations accrue throughout the year. Here’s one snapshot from late March 2021 showing Apple far below where they were at year’s end.
The FreeBSD Foundation’s 20th anniversary was in 2020, hence the logo.
However, this was after mid-January, as we have an archive from then when Apple Inc. wasn’t on the donor list yet.
Apple was in the $1000–$4999 range by year’s end.
This also comports with @RmDebArc_5@piefed.zip’s note about the donation matching program. A small automatic donation like this would make sense.
What’s more likely?
Apple, Inc. noticed and went out of their way to donate – but an amount so inconsequential that it damages their brand image and probably, due to labor overhead, cost them more to donate than the amount actually donated.
You can donate under whatever name you want, and someone just made their name “Apple Inc.” as a joke.
Edit: I checked the donors, and while I couldn’t go back farther than 2024 (even by changing the URL param), none of them were $5–24.
Edit 2: I went back to 2018 via the Wayback Machine and still couldn’t find this. I guess it’s possible it happened before this, but given every single year seems to be in the hundreds to thousands range and given a $25 donation by a company like Apple would be pissing money into the void, this seems dubious.
It’s also possible an Apple employee did the donation.
In most enterprise places I’ve worked at (as a software engineer), we’ve had a small discretionary budget we could allocate every year (or 3/6 months) to donate to OSS we’ve relied on. This would usually be a small budget, per team (last time it was £100 a year), and sometimes it had to be allocated based on how big a part it plays in my specific team’s work.
So I see it as quite plausible that a team got a budget for such donations, and since BSD made up part of the work, they had part of that budget allocated and donated.
Unfortunately with big corps it’s hard to properly align between teams when it comes to bureaucratic BS, so it’s even possible that Apple donated under dozens of names because yay, red tape if you want to do it the right way.
Edit 3: This is not edited but rather a real screenshot from early 2021.
This also comports with @RmDebArc_5@piefed.zip’s note about the donation matching program. A small automatic donation like this would make sense.
What’s more likely?
Edit: I checked the donors, and while I couldn’t go back farther than 2024 (even by changing the URL param), none of them were $5–24.
Edit 2: I went back to 2018 via the Wayback Machine and still couldn’t find this. I guess it’s possible it happened before this, but given every single year seems to be in the hundreds to thousands range and given a $25 donation by a company like Apple would be pissing money into the void, this seems dubious.
The US gave $150 in foreign aid to Switzerland in 2025.
It’s also possible an Apple employee did the donation.
In most enterprise places I’ve worked at (as a software engineer), we’ve had a small discretionary budget we could allocate every year (or 3/6 months) to donate to OSS we’ve relied on. This would usually be a small budget, per team (last time it was £100 a year), and sometimes it had to be allocated based on how big a part it plays in my specific team’s work.
So I see it as quite plausible that a team got a budget for such donations, and since BSD made up part of the work, they had part of that budget allocated and donated.
Unfortunately with big corps it’s hard to properly align between teams when it comes to bureaucratic BS, so it’s even possible that Apple donated under dozens of names because yay, red tape if you want to do it the right way.
God I wish people would ask the “what’s more likely” question on important issues. This kind of critical thinking has fallen off so hard.
To be fair, my two assumed possibilities were both wrong.
Still, your heuristics are good