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Apple Terminates Safari Seed Program
coolmacdude writes "This morning Safari beta v67 was leaked to the Internet. Because this is the third time it has happened (v62 and v64 were leaked), Apple has apparantly had enough and decided to terminate the seed program that provided unreleased beta verisons to selected developers. In a email sent to all developers and posted on Mike Wendland's blog, Apple says:
'Due to Safari 67 postings to the internet, we have closed the Safari Seed project. We know that the majority of you are not responsible for the leaks to the internet, and we sincerely appreciate your feedback, time and effort with this project.'"
Thats too bad that a few had to ruin it for everyone else. Giving out software like that is a privage, not your God given right. People should respect Apple's wishes and wait until the full release, but no. Now its too late.
If they're not distributing it they don't have to release the code.
Part of the core rendering is based on Konqueror and is open source (and they do release the enhancements they make to that part back to the community). Everything else that is wrapped around it is not open source. So they have no requirement to let everybody see every little change they make there...and won't.
Safari's back-end (parser, script engine, etc) is based on KHTML, and that code is available here. Safari's front-end (lickability, bookmarking, etc) remains proprietary, and that is allowed by LGPL.
They're pulling to the 1.3 mozilla trunk for the version of geko they embed in camino right now, and they introduced a whole slew of bugs when they did so. You might want to stick to the .7 release for a month or so unless you're a real masochist.
.7 release or safari, and just check the nightlies when something I'm interested in gets mentioned on bugzilla.
I used to use the Chimera nightly builds almost exclusively, but these days I stick to the
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
If you don't like Apple, that's all well and good, but why then do you feel the need to post or even click on an Apple story? I suppose you just couldn't let an Apple story go by without adding your insults. It's called trolling, and we don't need any more of it. Your opinion is valid, but posting this in an Apple story is just childish and counter-productive. Grow up, please.
- j
Actually, v60 is the most recent public beta--it does not have tabs and was never leaked. It's v62 that was the first to include tabs and was leaked, supposedly unintentionally.
"The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." Albert Camus,
I think the parent is referring to the battery-killing-10.2.4 issue mentioned on Slashdot a week or so back.
Now, whether the parent is simply perpetuating the lie, or if Apple really did drop the ball is up to you to figure out.
Ack!
What about those of us who didnt get picked at all in gym class? Anyway...
Its a very childish move by Apple and will only hinder the development of the product. In this day and age you just have to expect things to end up on the Internet, to think otherwise is just silly and childish.
Apple just needs to grow up a little and then everyone will be happy.
Get it while it's hot:
s af ariv67.dmg
http://www.ewetel.net/~wolfgang.eichner/public/
If you look at the KDE WebCVS depository for kdelibs (where khtml resides), you'll see that it's licensed under the LGPL, and thus Apple are obliged only to release the source to the changes they make to khtml itself.
It's more likely that OS X will continue to ship with IE, but Safari will be the default browser. As it is, if you install Classic, your Mac ships with three browsers: IE 5.2, IE 5.0, and Netscape 4.7. What's one more?
As far as I know, Apple has released all of the improvements to the GPL'd code that they've released. The code they've written from scratch, they're keeping closed, as is their right.
Uh, just to clarify -- I meant, "Apple has released all of their improvements to GPL'd code that they've released in binary form." Sorry for any confusion and havoc caused due do my general semi-coherent weekend state.
Microsoft did exactly this during the Windows 2000 betas. When you'd download an ISO, the special download app would inject your obfuscated IP address and beta ID into the header. Some beta tester discovered this and was able to decode the obfuscation. MS wasn't too happy when this tester reported it to the beta newsgroup. Once people found out about it, it was trivial to remove or alter the injected information.
I tested v67 out and I think there was a reason Apple didn't want it out: Bugs. This thing has so many bugs... it freezes, you can't click/select anything sometimes (but you can still load pages), among other things...
So perhaps they simply didn't want to give a bad impression out, and don't want to be berraged by a million emails all pointing bugs out that they are most definitely aware of.
Best. Webhost. Ever. Dreamhost.
Why not publicly release nightly betas, so users can post feedback on development as with BugZilla?
Quality expectations are different for Apple than from many other developers. I suspect this is at least part of the reason. Not to mention all the journalists that would descend upon such a thing to pick apart every release.
Users don't expect the nightlies to be perfect
Normal users don't, Mac users do. They take it personally if there's a bug in a piece of software -- like Apple is after them specifically.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Not only the v62, 64 and 67 leaked out.
I saw v65 too.
Safari's rendering engine is open source. You will have to supply your own shiny buttons.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
khtml is LGPL'd
> Because of the viral licensing in the LGPL, they have to have a compatible license for their browser components.
This is not true at all for the LGPL. Things that wrap around the LGPL code do NOT have to be under a compatable license (unlike the GPL)
Downloading seeds from Apple typically requires you to have an account in their developer program, and to log in to their seed server - you then get a randomly generated user name/password combo for an ftp server that expires in a couple of hours. It would be quite possible to hook into this and to watermark binaries so that you could tell which seed account was used to leak the app.
Or have the app watermark itself on first launch, after prompting for a unique key which gets mailed out to each person in the seed program. Lots of ways you could do it, and I wouldn't be surprised if you start seeing some of them in the future.
We had to introduce a similar scheme for betas of our software, after a leak just before release - which has resulting in end-users mailing support asking for help when their ripped off copy fails to function with the latest data (wasting our time and slowing down support for our customers).
No. Safari is AFAIK not GPL. This is possible because KHTML (The Konqueror rendering engine) is LGPL-licensed, and this allows for it being dynamically linked into a closed source application.
Personally I'd say that they SHOULD release it as GPL.
it's because tabbed browsing is always on in this one, no need to turn it on....
KHTML is LGPL indeed.
You're either trolling, or you're simply ignorant. The restrictions you describe apply to GPL code, not LGPL. This is precisely why the LGPL exists. From the text of the LGPL:
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I mention this to quell the "+5 Insightful" (are the mods on crack today?) flamewar that's broken out over your message.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.