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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.'"
This is not violating any kind of license, like GPL? After all, Safari is Konqueror based. Or that will run when the final version is released?
given apple's history of siccing lawyers on sites that dare to post pics of the latest & greatest before they're officially unveiled, the only surprising thing is that it lasted this long...
Doesn't it make more sense for them to have as many testers as possible on pre-release builds? This way they find potential issues missed through the undoubtedly small QA team on the project.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
Why not just post the thing with a Talkback-like client and get feedback/bug reports from everybody? I know it is closed source but why not develop a Safari fan base by letting a community build around it. This is what Apple is best known for, right?
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
If you want to be on the bleeding edge use Camino nightly builds :)
t /
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/camino/nightly/lates
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
How hard would it be for them to put in the developer builds a little code to pop up a splash screen everytime that safari loads that reminds the user that it is a developer, not end-user build unless they disable that in the preferences?
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
With the KHTML engine still undergoing internal tweaking for better DOM/CSS/etc support, I think Apple should look to the Mozilla project for their approach to browser development. Why not publicly release nightly betas, so users can post feedback on development as with BugZilla? Users don't expect the nightlies to be perfect, but it would keep the tweakers (and web designers like me) happy, and the developers would get a lot more feedback on their progress, whereas most casual users can happily download milestone releases.
Otherwise, the standards compliance of the browser will possibly be delayed (all the esoteric little implementation issues, especially with CSS and DHTML). After all, many eyeballs results in better code, especially with something as complex as a web browser.
<!-- DHTML / JavaScript menu, popup tooltip, Ajax scripts -->
Without getting into the neverending "tabbed browsing" argument, I'll go out on a limb and say that these leaked builds will probably help Safari's marketshare in the long run. In browsing various Mac messageboards before and after v60 was leaked, I can tell you that many people dumped Camino the moment that tabs were discovered in Safari's debug menu. Had Safari's tabs been kept under wraps until the next public beta, Camino would have only matured and captured more users, which in the long run could've decreased the number of users using Safari. Of course this is all speculation. And I won't even get into the benefit that Apple realized by having a larger user base testing these builds.
It's out? Thanks. Quick Google search. Got it. Love it.
Should I notify Apple that when you leave the tabs on all the time and "Open in tabs" a docked bookmark that the first tab always looks "active" (though the windowing for the tabs works fine)?
It's too bad Apple is taking this stance. They should understand, realize, and if they were smart: CAPITALIZE on that fact that there _is_ a reason why us lowly end users are clamoring for the latest builds of Safari.
It works. Like most Apple software it works very well -- even at the beta level. Yes, this is too bad...
They should have done that trick where each developer gets a slightly different copy, possibly each having a different easter egg embedded inside. All they then have to do is download the version from the internet and trigger the easter egg to find out which copy was leaked and cut that developer off.
--
Dreamweaver Templates
1) They should have known that it would be available for download on the net as soon as they handed it out. If they didn't take that into account before starting the program they're idiots.
2) A lot of people justify Apple here by posting the standard shit about it being terrible for the public to see an unfinished product. This is wrong and silly. Most people who come across this type of thing and are willing to install a beta are a) warez people who aren't gonna buy it anyway, or b) early adopters who are itching to try it out and are going to buy it no matter what.
3) And finally some people are going to whine about the humanity of programmers having to see their beautiful program that they love like a child being stolen by the masses. Tell them to stop whining. The programmers are wage slaves. If the company earns more money because of massive warezing (that should be 'When the company inevitably earn more...') the programmers should shut up about the hurt to their souls and get back to fulfilling their contracts.
Software companies act like this because they are run by idiots. You have no clue of the true magnitude of the crass stupidity they are capable of.
And Apple just likes to throw temper tantrums. They probably lost more customers by canceling this program and making a stink than they would have lost by having betas escape into the wild.
> One is confusion among a less educated (some might
.-)
> also say intelligent)
I wont jump for your "Mac users are stupid" trollbait, but let me me use my words to describe your theory:
"the average mac user runs in danger downloading sources and binaries from a nearly secret cvs-like structure aside of the official updatemanager without noticing his wrongdoing"
Only the paranoid survives
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Fair enough in principle, but what unique features & goodies are there in safari? Is it not "just a wrapper" to WebCore?
--
"we live in a post-ideological world..." - Billy Bragg.
But they are still making beta's available to the public, just not every single beta. I imagine that their public beta releases (which seem to be based on more or less completing a new feature) will stay steady, just like they have been so far, and just like the X11 betas.
Far too many people here are confusing the seeding program with the public betas, and blowing this way out of proportion.
many game developers take when using a seed program.
All seeds are digitally signed in one or more ways, so that when the seed is found on the internet, the guilty party can be identified and removed from the program.
Another case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Nowadays the only people using them are die-hards and people who got them in order to play with their version of Unix. I'd like to play with their unix too, but I'll be damned if I'm going to buy a whole new computer to do it.
Interesting comment...I just bought an old PowerMac 7600/120 from eBay for exactly that purpose (ie: to play around with OS X). A few bucks on upgrades (a 500MHz G3 card from Sonnet and an additional 256MB of RAM, plus a 18GB Seagate Barracuda I had lying around, and an old Sony SCSI CD-RW drive), and the thing runs OS X pretty well. Of course I would have never paid the prices Apple wants to buy their equipment new. If Apple does OS X on Intel, Windows and Linux better watch out...
For a beta that's really alpha or dev (I thought the definition of beta was "All features in, bug fixes only"), I don't really understand why only certain "beta" releases are acceptable for the general public to use.
Either it's a public "beta" or it's not. Which is it?
Jory
i use mozilla all the time but sorry to burst your bubble, it ain't the best browser...
I think it is quite interesting that people recommend that Apple should have embedded watmermarks, unique identifcation, steganography and other stuff in the beta download to identify who leaked the copy.
Isn't this the same posters that normally oppose DRM? :-)
At first it was a hacked XP with the activation stuff disabled or worked-around.
Unfortunately, many of these installs of XP were rendered unusable when SP1 was applied, forcing a switch to the "Corporate" (or as you say, VLK) edition.
Either way, I'm sure MS is cooking up some way to have VLK in businesses without compromising the "security" of the product. Perhaps you'll be able to set up your own license authentication server/proxy in shop.
Who knows, but if they are going to keep trying to enforce the product protection they won't stop at Windows XP that you buy at the store.
As it's been stated before, MS needs new sources of revenue to continue functioning. It's the way the company is set up. This is one way to keep money coming in.
I for one would never buy Windows, but there's other people out there that would if they couldn't easily get a copy from a friend, online, or from work.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
/me thinks you need to releive your repressed sexual energy somewhere. And please wipe off your keyboard afterwards, thanks.
Anyhoo, replace "LGPL" with "GPL" in your post, and you're going in the right step.
Okay, I think some of you need a little education on how Apple operates. /Applications/Safari.app/Content/MacOS/ and typing in the command 'strings Safari | grep June'. You will see two line in the binary that read "Safari Beta will expire on June 30, 2003.
First off, the whole beta program fro Safari is/was managed by a small team. Second, that team has a goal to release either the next public beta or the full 1.0 release by June 30th, 2003. You can verify this by opening up the terminal and navigating to
Safari Beta expired on June 30, 2003."
This means that they are on a deadline and have a lot of work to do. A lot of people who have posted here are suggesting that they should do MORE work and add easter eggs/stenographics/blah-blah/security tracking to the seeded releases. Now you tell me, does that sound like a good way to reach a deadline? Especially one that is hard coded into the binary of the public beta? Now you could argue that putting in an arbitrary deadline is a "bad idea" or whatever, but I think it's a great way to keep a project both on track and managable. Pressure to perform and all that rot.
The other thing a lot of people are apparently misguided in thinking is that Apple was naive about releasing these developer seeds. For this you have to understand a little bit about Apple's corporate culture and social philosophy. While you may not agree with it, I and a lot of others, think it's a great experiment and helps move our culture along. To understand thier philosophy, just look at Apple's public stance on music piracy. They have put in place some very basic and easily defeatable mechanisms with the iPod that prevents users from sharing music freely with thier iPod. They have not completely crippled your ability to share music, however they do put s little sticker on the iPod's that says "Don't steal music." They have also publicly stated in many debates about music piracy that it is a social problem, not a technological one, and that technology will not solve the issue. So in that statement, they have made reasonably clear that they don't really want to spend a lot of time working on something that they see as inevitable.
They also want to trust those that they sign up for the seed programs. If you can't trust your testers to give you good reliable feedback, you are wasting your time and effort and you won't get your project completed or your bug fixed.
Now the thing with the Safari seeds is that they gave the seed users 3 chances, basically 3 strikes, your out. After the 3rd strike, they pulled the program because they saw it as more detrimental that useful. I'm sure they started getting an unmanagable amount of negative feedback or duplicate bug reports, or even worse, useless ones because all these people that downloaded the seeds that were not part of the seed program probably started sending in incomplete bug reports or even worse, stupid things like "the thingy with the buttons, doesn't work on my puter, fix it now assholes", or something to that effect. This means that those managing the bug database and trying to glean useful information or even just track any real bugs now have to sift through thousands of shit reports. Needle in haystack time.
Any of this sound reasonable.
And finally, the most telling thing would be the reports on rumor sites. Apple hates rumor sites. They are counter productive to thier business (believe it or now, they are). If someone reads on a rumor site that such and such feature is missing/broken/doesn't work or whatever on a rumor site, and bases thier judgement on that rumor sites word (I know, stupid people, but it does happen, I have plenty of ad hom proof), they end up loosing a potential customer, or thier market image gets tarnished.
I don't know about most of you, but these are the reasons that I see Apple's decision to pull the plug as both necessary and smart on Apple's part. Argue all you want about "the way it should be" or whatever, but these are the realities of this business. If you
Don't Ask Questions. I don't know the answers and even if I did I wouldn't tell you.
you say that all PC-motherboard makers are ignoring the market needs
No, I'm saying that their business heavily relies upon being as backward compatible as possible so that corporate types buy truckloads of their desktops. That means not doing anything radical like omitting ISA (heh) and making damned sure to have every other port created since time began. Apple doesn't do things this way. Their business relies heavily on innovation and most importantly, in providing a total software-hardware experience. THey can do things like omit the PCI slots that virtually no home user takes advantage of in order to experiment wildly with the form factor. The iMac sold very well. Therefore I think my remarks match very well with reality. Home users aren't buying Dells because they have PCI slots. They're buying them because they can get a deal on last years model and because their brother-in-law has one. Period. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's definetly not because they have PCI slots. That is reality.
it's only Apple's greed preventing PPC-CPUs and motherboards from appearing in stores at reasonable prices.
I really don't think you understand their business. If CPUs and motherboards were available in stores for consumers to buy then people would build their own Macintoshes. THis would instantly drive prices down and everyone would rejoice. In fact, Mac whitebox makers would spring up in every city and you'd be able to have one custom built for you out of off-the-shelf parts for half what Apple charges for a computer. And it would also be the end of Apple itself. Even if they survived the transition to essentially a software-only company, they would lose the very things that makes them attractive - innovation and vertical integration.
Apple would no longer be in a position to control the entire software-hardware continuum of the platform. That means cheaper prices, yes, but it also means "iffy" compatibility and the loss of the "one company designed this experience" feel. Scoff if you must, but this is the heart of the platforms appeal. That and software-hardware innovation like the firewire/imovie deal. Someone in Apple decided it was a good idea to bring digital video editing to consumers. The port didn't exist. The applications didn't exist. Now they do. Hard to do that when you have to convince seventy other companies to get onboard, each with their own idea on how to do it.
In short, the "make the whole widget" vertical integration Apple has in the Mac platform is both the worst and the best thing about them. It keeps prices high and marketshare low, but without it they'd dissapear in a sea of other boxmakers and software makers, with no means of distinguishing themselves.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?