Apple doesn't care whether the technology is open, so long as nobody else has sole control.<p>Supporting open web standards is the only way Apple can provide a decent web experience without constantly playing catch-up to whatever Microsoft implements in IE.<p>Creating OpenCL as an open standard was the only way they could provide GPU computing that wasn't totally controlled by NVidia, but would still get support from GPU vendors. Unlike Microsoft, Apple doesn't have the resources to maintain their own proprietary GPU computing language.<p>Killing Flash is the only way Apple can give their users access to dynamic web content with good performance, because Adobe clearly doesn't have the motivation to do it for them.<p>libdispatch is Apple's way of trying to make multithreaded programming easier, and open-sourcing it is the only way that it will become popular enough for most programmers to bother to learn it. Apple wants third-party software on their systems to be multithreaded so that it won't make their system seem slow. Similar things can be said about some of their other open-source projects, like launchd.<p>Overall, it feels like open-source is one of Apple's tools for avoiding the influence of monopolies. When Apple weakens existing monopolies or prevents the formation of new ones, it has the side effect of helping all the other little guys, too.