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Safari vs. KHTML
Johnny Mnemonic writes "CNET has a story that describes the divergence between the code base of Safari and KHTML. Although there were high hopes that Apple would contribute significantly to the OSS project, that optimism has all but disappeared. Is an unrealized danger of OSS that others may take your project in a direction you didn't intend? Can OSS code and goals harmonize with the goals and needs of corporation designed code? Is it that Apple mismanaged the relationship, or that the KHTML guys expected too much? Interesting warning for other OSS-corporate marriages." We've previously reported on the frustration in the OSS community on this issue.
Afaik the relationship between apple and freebsd is fine, and they use eachothers' patches etc. The problem seems to be that apple wanted to develop the browser in another direction than kde, and the communication stopped as they didnt use eachothers patches. As apple are having paid developers working on it, they should develop it their way and kde should maybe look at their methods to see if they are able to work in that way. If not, though luck.. I cant see that apple is the bad guy here.
We've previously reported on the frustration in the OSS community on this issue.
Atleast you're being honest.
As long as they're abiding by the terms of the license, does Apple, any corporation, or any entity for that matter, have any obligation to contribute anything back to the project? Who gets to decide when someone is contributing "enough"?
Additionally Apple posts all of its open source code; here's the page for WebCore, which states:
WebCore is a framework for Mac OS X that takes the cross-platform KHTML library (part of the KDE project) and combines it with an adapter library specific to WebCore called KWQ that makes it work with Mac OS X technologies. KHTML is written in C++ and KWQ is written in Objective C++, but WebCore presents an Objective C programming interface. WebCore requires the JavaScriptCore framework.
The current version of WebCore is based on the KHTML library from KDE 3.0.2. Changes that are specific to WebCore are marked with #ifAPPLE_CHANGES. Other changes to improve performance and web page compatibility are intended for integration into future versions of the KHTML library.
Sounds like a case of sour grapes to me. I'm sure the level of cooperation and collaboration that the KDE/KHTML/Konqueror folks had hoped for wasn't there, if only because Apple keeps everything secret before its release (including everything related to Safari 2.0 in Tiger). Another example of a corporate need butting heads with a contrary OSS philosophy. And I'm sure Apple's main priority is not developing an infrastructure to cohesively and voluminously contribute changes back to projects. It's more like, "Ok, here's our stuff..."...it's all there for anyone to see.
- Suse
- RedHat
- *BSD
- Knoppix
- Mandrake
And there are definitely more that I haven't included. If Safari diverges form KHTML, it's fine with me.In the article, Apple engineer Maciej Stachowiak said,
"One thing you may want to consider eventually is back-porting (WebCore) to work on top of (KDE)... We'd be open to making our tree multi-platform."
I wonder if that means they are looking to port Safari to Windows. It would give Windows users another taste of the Mac, and I for one would use it.
It's not unrealized, lots of projects have forked before. I think anybody who puts their code under a license that allows forking will realize that it can happen.
Can OSS code and goals harmonize with the goals and needs of corporation designed code?
Of course it can, this happens every day. Look at the kernel, GCC, Wine, etc.
Is it that Apple mismanaged the relationship, or that the KHTML guys expected too much?
I don't think expecting documented patches or a shared bug tracker is asking too much - this is the pretty much the minimal level of co-operation most projects would expect from a corporate good citizen. Some companies go even further than that, and hire some of the core developers, sponsor conferences, provide hosting facilities etc. There are plenty of examples in the Linux community of companies doing that.
So did Apple mismanage the relationship? Arguably there is no relationship. They certainly mismanaged expectations - if they'd come straight out and the beginning and said "we're not going to co-operate" a lot of frustration would have been avoided. That would have harmed their (mostly imaginary) pro-open source image though.
I doubt there's some kind of Evil Plan to screw over KDE here, it's more likely that Apple don't care or want to help the open source community, it's just a convenient place to take code from (go see how much FreeBSD has got back from them, for instance). Open source and Linux specifically are primary competitors and they'd be foolish to help the community more than they have to. After all, they're in the business of selling proprietary operating systems.
Does this really amount to anything more than a fork? I mean, it isn't as if there's never been an open source project that has been forked against the will of the original founders of the project. Does the forking by a company automatically make the fork bad? What if Google forked a project against the desire of the founder or "community"?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Apple is kicking 4ss, C|Net brings them down. This is a weekly occurrance. I wouldn't even bother to post such drivel.
"Here you go, dudes, here's the best parts of our OS. No, don't buy our hardware or anything, just run our stuff on Windows."
Oh! The Agony for the typical Slashdotter!
/.tters realize that Apple is just raping the OSS community. They did it with FreeBSD & now with KHTML.
Its Apple vs OSS!!! Whom to support? Whom to deride??
Ofcourse, things coluld have been more agonizing if it had been Google vs Apple vs OSS.
Will all the
I'd like to REALLY see some Apple fanboy defend this raping of OSS by Apple.
Is every story on the iPod a dupe since we've already had one? Every story on the new Dr Who TV show a dupe, since we've already had one???
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Obviously Apple is not sharing there code! Slashdot looks great in Safari!
Dashboard Widgets
How is this different from any other OSS project? Two groups see the project going in two different directions and it forks. Granted, the Apple side on this one may not be as open as the KHTML people want, but in all honesty, I'm willing to bet that Apple has a much better code base than KDE at this point. The fact that Apple is suggesting a KDE backport of WebCore is pretty amazing. How many corporations do we see telling an OSS group, "Why don't you just take our code and use it for your project whole-hog"? My guess is not many.
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
they suddenly turned into closed source.
So why is this a bad thing?
In fact, that is one of the points of OSS, isn't it?
There is always the possibility that somebody will fork, and the fork is still OSS as far as I know, so there is nothing wrong with interchanging code.
Apple is just a lousy company to co-operate with in an open source project. It is interesting that the KDE people mention that the fixes from Apple are more like hacks that break other things. This is _exactly_ the same as what happens with GCC. Always quick hacks to pass some benchmark or validation suite, or to paper over real bugs in dreadful ways. Never any real, constructive co-operation. Somehow, Apple appears to be unable to work with a community, instead of against it.
Besides, last I checked, the KHTML folks don't have a beef with Apple. They do have a beef with the fanbois who can't seem to grasp the fact that Apple using KHTML's Open Source code does not immediately mean that they're best buddies.
All it means is that Apple is using Open Source code. Period. Apple isn't violating anybody's trust.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Is an unrealized danger of OSS that others may take your project in a direction you didn't intend?
/. think for half a second and come up with one or two OSS projects sponsored by corporations where the code and goals are "harmonized" as the questioner puts it?
Only if you're a moron. Everybody understands OSS is subject to forking. It's been used as FUD against it. But the fact is, it's just the market at work. If others take a project in a direction you didn't intend...so what? You released it in a way that allowed that to happen. If you don't want that to happen, pick a different license.
Can OSS code and goals harmonize with the goals and needs of corporation designed code?
Duh. Of course. Do I really need to provide a list? Can't anybody here on
Is it that Apple mismanaged the relationship, or that the KHTML guys expected too much?
How about both?
WebCore-413
And here's everything from 10.4, posted on the same day 10.4 was released. They even posted full binary PowerPC and x86 installers for Darwin corresponding to Tiger that same day.
Its probably best to think of Apple's WebCore as a fork of KHTML; they are no longer one and the same. Apple has already changed WebCore enough that backporting changes to KHTML is very non-trivial. As usual, they are starved for developers, especially when the task is simply porting someone else's code, rather than solving problems for yourself. Many devs would much rather do the latter, even if "results" come more slowly.
This stuff is just stupid. Apple has done absolutely nothing illegal; arguably they've done nothing inappropriate. KDE and KHTML are not in any way any less well-off, and if this story accurately reflects the attitude of the primary KHTML developers, honestly, they're being jackasses.
What all this demonstrates is why using free code (especially GPL/LGPL code) is much more of a minefield than a reading of the license would suggest. You can comply to every last detail, and it doesn't do you any good against the negative publicity when someone decides you "owe something to the community".
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Is an unrealized danger of OSS that others may take your project in a direction you didn't intend?
This is not a danger, it's simply a attribute of OSS. Do you really think Linus sat down to write the kernel and ever considered it'd be used on millions of computers worldwide for mission critical systems? When you release your code Open Source, your basically saying to the world "do with it as you please". Some license clauses may prevent certain uses (i.e. many OSS SMTP Servers have a clause that says if you use this software for Spam, you're in violation of the license). But as a OSS Developer I can't say that only Americans can use my code, or prevent those of other religions from using it to benefit their religion. And I certainly can't prevent some company from "leeching" by profiting from my work without giving back equally to the OSS community. That's life and that's OSS. Most companies however realize that as a whole, you get back what you put into something.
Is an unrealized danger of OSS that others may take your project in a direction you didn't intend?
Yes if you license it in that way. This is the very spirit of OSS. Others can do as they please with your copyrighted works under limitations and freedoms as set forth in your licensing agreement. You can do the same. But back to your question, they can take it in a direction you didn't intend but that does not prevent you from continuing in your intended direction. May the best man win. Survival of the fittest. And that's the best part IMNSHO
Is an unrealized danger of OSS that others may take your project in a direction you didn't intend?
That's the whole point of OSS! They're just being babies about it because Apple is "following the spirit" of the license.
Ridiculous.
Is an unrealized danger of OSS that others may take your project in a direction you didn't intend? Can OSS code and goals harmonize with the goals and needs of corporation designed code? Is it that Apple mismanaged the relationship, or that the KHTML guys expected too much? Interesting warning for other OSS-corporate marriages.
There is always a danger that someone will fork your code. That being said, Apple must perceive sufficient commercial advantage to maintaining their own fork.
People don't realize that many contributions to OSS projects by businesses (particular projects that allow commercial closed source derivatives, e.g., Apache, PHP, BSD) are not motivated by altruism, but by a cost benefit analysis. If it will cost them more to maintain their forked version than they will gain from it, then they are hurting themselves in the marketplace. If they can get the project to accept their changes, then the next version will already have their changes and they don't need to cross/backport the code.
Apple has followed the obligation of the license.
:)
It's just a fork. Forks happen. Move along. If KDE guys think KHTML sucks compared to WebCore/Safari, they are free to fork THAT and start from there (backporting it to KDE). The source is open. Whine less, code more
If you didn't realize that's possible, you're just being stupid. If they're going in a direction you don't intend, then by all means continue in the direction you DO intend and don't worry about it. Would it be nice if Apple maintained a set of OSX specific patches and did as much as possible in the upstream project? Yes. Do they have to? No. Will it bite them in the future? Perhaps. The farther they diverge, the harder it will be to bring changes the other direction as well.
Hello Slashdot editors and fellow Slashdotters,
/. position on this particular topic? I would like to think everything related to OSS is in the right, and corporations are always wrong, but I have a predicament. We always let Apple slide on things like vendor lock-in and other topics other ideas we hammer other corporations for.
I am fine, how are you? Hope you are doing well.
Pardon my curiousity, but I would like to know what is the official
I'm just not sure who I should be rooting for! Please help! Respond to this soon, as my head is hurting from trying to decide on my own, I need you to make up my mind for me.
Thank you Slashdotters and Slashdot editors,
Sincerely,
Gabriel
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
It does not matter at all how a company use your code or if a firm contributes actively to the developpement of the code.
When you start an open source project you don't expect that comercial companies will help you.
You start an open source project because you want it, because you love that stuff.
Has Apple never used this code base for its browser, the situation would be no different: the project can only count on itself.
The project doesn't depend on comercial firm input !
Be happy and code !
Come on, you have to be kidding.
If you release code for people to see, they do what they want. If you dont know that upfront then you are a moron.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This is nothing but a childish spat between 2 diffrent groups of developers.
Apple published the patches, and changes and KHTML cries about them having to much OSX specific code in them? Thats just crap..
Apple is acting in good faith, they are basically asking Apple to make sure all patches are 100% compatible with the current code base.
The KHTML team might as well just ask Apple to take over the project in full.
Open Source does not mean "Anything you do must conform and work with our project or your not doing it right"
Open Source is "If you make changes please give back to the community with the understanding that your changes might not be compatible with ours, Your code changes may not be what we want, but we can't complain about that"
Personal Website
At the request of Apple the license was changed to allow them to integrate it into their proprietory software. See this discussion. Unfortunately they didn't forsee that Apple would obfuscate their patches by merging them into mega-patches.
Hi, just because you refresh the slashdot page 40 times a day and never miss a post doesn't mean everyone does.
It's the way news works, get used to it.
Is an unrealized danger of OSS that others may take your project in a direction you didn't intend?
Isn't that point of OSS, hoping that someone will take interest in your project and do something with it you couldn't do yourself?
And what's dangerous about that?
Is an unrealized danger of OSS that others may take your project in a direction you didn't intend?
Oh come on, is this really a "danger"? Nothing in any open source license says that you keep the right to direction of whatever your code ends up as.
This is like the "danger" that your source code can be "hijacked" in commercial applications if you use the BSD license.
KHTML is not objectively any worse off because of this... Apple isn't hurting them, Apple isn't taking anything away from them, their project is not imperiled in any way. It may make them feel bad that their source is out there with improvements and it's not as easy for them to merge them back into KHTML as they would like. It's quite a mental exercise to try to think of a rational justification for that feeling without becoming extremely vague (try it), one which no open source license could ever protect them.
To borrow a phrase from ABC News' mustachioed libertarian: Gimme a break.
Dupes are bad when they speak ill of Apple or OSS. Dupes are good when they speak of the evils of MS or how wonderful Apple and OSS are.
I think Apple made a decision that it needed to switch cores and at that moment has every right to do so and never look back. The fact that they are putting any effort into KHTML at all should be looked at as a mere bonus for the KTHML developers at this point. Apple never claimed to be the white night funding the KHTML project or that they would be the dominant developer for the future. This is not an example of IBM taking over a project. I think some KHTML guys read way too much into this relationship. It was pretty clear from the start that they were being used (but the nature of their license allows for this). It was great that they showed trust and attempted to built a relationship, but they should not have become in anyway dependent. I'm not saying this is the case, but the bitterness of their response seems to suggst this sort of dependence.
Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself cou
an "egosystem" perhaps...
quick someone else use it so we can send ot to the OED (if it's not already there...)
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
The story is blowing up something that should not be. Apple has been contributing code back to the KHTML team. The team has difficulty integrating it due to the large differences and lack of man power. Apple is simply suggesting that the KHTML team work with Safari to have one code base, which is a good idea. while I am not wild about the KHTML losing control of things, Apple has a full time group working on the base. So why not do the firefox/mozilla thing and move to where the action is. Besides, if KHTML moves to working closer with apple, it will produce a third major code base, behind MSIE and Mozilla. Basically, 2 out of the 3 will be in the *nix world. In addition, the 2 will follow the standards closer, which will lead to more developers following standards.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Apple has a long, long history of acting irrationally, often to the point of blowing its own foot off and snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. They have a knack for choosing a course that is not in the interest of their customers, yet not in their own interest either.
Involving them in a project in a non-essential role is probably about the only way you can involve them at all. To rely upon them is to court disaster.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
"One thing you may want to consider eventually is back-porting (WebCore) to work on top of (KDE), and merging your changes into that," Apple engineer Maciej Stachowiak wrote in an e-mail dated May 5. "I think the Apple trees have seen a lot more change since the two trees diverged, although both have useful changes. We'd be open to making our tree multi-platform."
The suggestion, which KHTML developers said they were unlikely to accept,
So Apple is open to making the tree cross platform, and presumeably to them back porting web core (which is nessesary to implement some of the things Apple has done since) and KHTML doesn't want to.
So by choice KHTML has already limited the changes they can use.
"In open source, everything's supposed to be done the right way, but sometimes the less correct way is faster," Rusin said. "In fixing one problem, they were breaking a whole bunch of other things. Apple developers were focused on fixing bugs in such a way that we could not merge them back into KHTML. Those fixes were never an option for us."
Ignoring for a moment the fact that OSS is not done the "right way" many times, Apple has an obligation to turn out code and to do it fast. They have obligations to their customers. The fact that KHTML wants to take their sweet time and Apple wants to get the patches done fast and out the door shows where the divergence is. Apple can't afford to take the open source approach of spending 5 years in beta before releasing the next version.
Once again a choice by KHTML. The patches are there, but they choose to do the patches their way, thus eliminating Apple patches.
KDE volunteers said they suddenly found themselves dealing with bug reports Apple deemed too sensitive to share, new requirements for auditing code before releasing it, and demands that developers sign nondisclosure agreements before looking at some Apple code.
So you mean once KHTML devs wanted access to code that wasn't part of KHTML, they had to play by Apple's rules? Say it isn't so! Apple plays by their rules for their code, but KHTML doesn't want to play by Apple's rules for Apple code. Again, choices by KHTML to limit their own options.
"As long as they needed us, they used us, but when they gained enough knowledge they had no reason to keep sending us reviews and patches," Rusin said. "At a certain point they decided it was a waste of time for them, and at that point the communication just stopped...We had hopes that they would pour resources into KHTML. But that never happened."
No, it did happen, but they're pouring resources in to the ways that allow them to serve their customers best too, and that means leveraging OS X technologies. KHTML has chosen to be just as uncooperative as Apple.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
you can't put donuts on the table in the break room and then complain when someone eats them.
Complaining about it shows a great lack of grace.
No, what's insane is to expect that Slashdot only post a story once-and only once, never to revisit the topic again, lest some asswipe complain about dupes!
p.s.
Complaining about dupes is so fucking redundant.
you merely linked. There's a difference: one involves actually talking to people and leaving your momma's basement.
"We've previously reported on the frustration in the OSS community on this issue."
use camino.
Apple hasn't done anything wrong. This is exactly the way OSS is set up to work. If someone made some software and you want to change it, you are free to do so. As long as you publish the changes. There is no rule you have to do it in a way that makes the original author happy, you aren't required to follow their vision. You are free from all that. If the original author likes what you've done, they should be able to take your work and merge it back in.
It's nice when everyone cooperates with each other, and keeps everything syncronized, but all that is frosting on the cake.
There is no clause about having to spoon feed your patches back into the project you took your code from.
And in fairness to Apple I don't see as nearly as many articles from them saying how "well they work with OSS" vs articles complaining that they don't work well with OSS from OSS users.
That said I do wish Apple zealots would stop raving about how well Apple does play with OSS. They IMHO are the root cause of all of the bad will. If they would just shut the hell up then we could look at Apple as what they are, a passive OSS user. Instead everyone yelling about how they don't play nice. Yes Apple doesn't help out with OSS as much as we'd all like, surprise. Let's move on and spend our time talking about the companies that do help.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
"millions of computers worldwide for mission critical systems?"
ha! funny. that's a good one.
First off, I do KDE work, not Apple.
KHTML is under LGPL. Apple is doing what they are required. In addition, they have offered to move their code base to be multi-pltform. In the end, I think that the KHTML team will move towards this. It will allow full time developers on an import piece of work.
The article is doing a disservice.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
How many times have you filed a RFE on an OSS project and gotten this back? "If you don't like how that works, feel free to submit a patch".
Okay, if you don't like how Apple provides its patches back to the KHTML guys, please feel free to write a tool that converts their patches into the form you prefer.
#DeleteChrome
boy, sure a lot of apologists
Don't call people apologists. It shows you're strongly prejudiced and that means you're trolling.
GREAT!!
Let them fork and both implement whatever they want. Let's have some competition between two very great projects. Then let the people decide which one (or even both) that they want to support.
Yes, there is some fear it will turn into some sort of Gnome vs KDE thing, but we're not talking about something so fundamental. In the big picture, it's just a web browser.
frob
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Is the relationship between Apple and FreeBSD okay?
This is all 'friend of a friend says' sort of stuff, but word on the IRC channels is that Apple has been doing nothing but take-take-take. Some folks justify it by saying they've hired Hubbard full-time to work on FreeBSD (which i'm sure he finds as a happy arrangement).
There are other justifications, but to me it just seems like a number fo the Fbsd folks were enamoured with the attention they were getting from Apple, and had high hopes for a win-win situation that was mutually beneficial, but over the last few to several years it has been pretty one-sided.
If it is the way it's being reported to me, it's kinda sad, really.
do() || do_not();
and they are really pissed?
What exactly more is there to this 'story' ?
Apple has been kicking ass with their html engine development and the KHTML guys seem to be just standing around watching Apple and bitching that Apple isn't doing their job for them.
Perhaps the KHTML guys need to find a license that specifies that one can't make better use of their base source code than they are?
This entire "issue" is nothing more than petty jealousy on the part of certain KDE developers. Once Hyatt posted that he had gotten Safari to pass ACID2, the crying began.
Why does Slashdot dignify this stupid whining?
Let me get this straight, the KHTML folks can't maintain their code and fix the bugs and make it adhere to the open standards set for it? They project, `Never'. And, the Apple folks fix it, upgrade it, make it do new tricks and make it conform, but the KHTML folks say, but we don't want to give you any say in the direction KHTML goes?
Obviously, the KHTML people are the fork, they just don't know it yet.
It would have been better to invite the Apple folks to be maintainers for KHTML, allow them to twist and pull KHTML in the direction they want, the KHTML people twist and pull it in the direction they want, and in the end, the code base is better for it, as then one base serves two bases.
If the KHTML people like the fact they don't conform to the Standard, and will probably face diminising market share in the long run, and don't have the extra 20 developers or whatever Apple would have brought to the table, well, then they are doing exactly right. If they don't, well, the solution is simple and entirely in their hands. Apple, not being in the position of control, has no control. The control is weilded by the people that call themselves maintainers.
One of the things you learn about Apple as you work with them is that secrecy is paramount. Among other things, that means that NOBODY gets access to their bug database. Developers have been clamoring for a more-open database for years. KDE's not getting special treatment, that's how ALL of Apple works. Love it or leave it.
...by getting everybody on the same source control software.
AFAIK, KHTML uses CVS, and Apple internally uses Perforce.
Nothing constructive can be done until everything is on the same platform.
Apple, offer to buy licenses of your source control software for the KHTML core. Even if they still spurn you, it will appear to the rest of us that you at least tried. You will look more and more of a villan until you make some effort at a reconciliation.
p.s. The KHTML team will need to be conversant with OSX to the point that they can remove GUI calls to it and replace them with QT. If this is a current problem, then some books might be in order.
Seriously, look right here. It's just a way for Apple to glue together C++ code (like KHTML) and their preferred language, Objective C.
Gabriel Ricard
As I sit here using Safari...... I wonder what this page would look like using IE; If you don't want your code vastly changed with little in the way of documentation don't release it OSS, the GPL says little in how you can modify code and much in your responsibility to release said modifications; Apple is paying, PAYING, folks to modify OSS code to better suit their customers needs, Safari is far from being the best browser and often I find myself using Firefox but wouldn't it be worse of Apple to take an OSS project and not improve it?
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
Dave Hyatt, one of the lead developers of Safari, has solicited comments and suggestions on his blog about how to better improve coordination between Apple's Safari group and the KDE Konqueror. team. Corporate support from Apple will have to follow, of course. I am sure that they are the main reason this coordination has not occured by now.
I can't speak to the documented patches, but I can to the bug tracker. Apple's bug database is private. Nobody on the outside gets access to it. It would be tremendously useful for Mac developers in general to have access to even parts of the database, and people have been asking as much for years. It hasn't happened yet. It could happen, but given the obsession with secrecy I doubt it ever will.
So that puts the KDE devs in pretty much the same boat as everyone else who works with Apple code. They're not being singled out.
If Konqueror is such a terrible browser, then how come Apple used its rendering engine to build Safari i nthe first place? Oh I forgot, you're just an anti-oss troll, not somebody with an actual point.
This definitely isn't a GPL violation, and doesn't even violate the spirit of Free/Open Source Software. The Apple developers are making their resulting branch of the code available in compliance with the KDE license. They're even trying to work to contribute their changes back to KHTML. Even if the patches don't apply cleanly, the KHTML developers are more than free to look at Apple's changes and add them by hand. Apple is even offering to give back their entire branch, to make it the new official KHTML, since their branch has advanced faster.
This really seems to be a case of the Apple guys offering their changes (or at the very least, making them available), and the KDE guys not being interested in them, or unable to use them for various reasons. It's really hard to blame Apple for that.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
...then it's still useless to me. I'll keep my crufty old pdksh.
Back in college I had written a patch to the core of a particular scripting langage. I needed it to get a microcontroller to talk to my programs running under Mac OS 7. I sent them my patches, trying to do my civic duty.
For reasons that go beyond this discussion, the modifications I had made were not a good fit for general consumption. After a bit of back and forth, I worked the modifications into an extension for the language.
The point is, as a user I had to really tweak the inner workings of the program to get my particular application to work. It just so happens that my needs, and the needs of the "vanilla" project were not compadible.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
It co-opts OSS code to save itself R&D costs, and gives back only as much as it needs to keep using OSS code. It's a nice racket if you can make it work.
While the gobstopping patches are a problem, specific mention has been made of code quality concerns in moving patches back into KHTML.
Apple is deadline-oriented, and this will sometimes imply sloppy code.
Apple doesn't need KHTML folks anymore. The newest build of Safari is simply the best browser available on the Mac, compared to even Firefox. It does layout beautifully, it renders type beautifully, and it's FAST. Sooo, why would they need to port buggy amateurish crap from KHTML to threre?
It's not Apple's fault the KDE development community doesn't have a lot of use for the code that makes WebCore.
This is the nature of OSS. Software continues to evolve and fork.
KHTML developers who can see the big picture beyond their own egos should be ecstatic that somebody has applied their effective, standards-compliant codebase to a commercially viable, successful product that will help bring tighter standards adherence to html / web authors.
It would certainly be a lot more sportsmanlike than "boo-hoo I can only use 10% of Apple's code".
Suck it up. You develop open source so that people can modify it for their own needs, provided they share their code with you.
I suppose the typical GPL liscence states that you need to share your changes or otherwise make them available.
But in practice, I dont think there is much stopping any given company from using an open code base to use a more or less closed product. The BSD liscence specifically permits this.
Being the sort that does not care much one way or the other about this topic, is Apple doing anything that the liscence in question prohibits?
If not, then its permitted, and if its permitted, no use complaining. If your going to have a code base that open, then you should not be shocked when someone uses that liscence to their own advantage.
END COMMUNICATION
and i get pissed at the OSS bad interfaces, but OSS people scream at me for it.
As opposed the OSS community that is unwilling to ever take anything out of beta and still has sloppy code. Not to mention non-existent documentation.
When will Sarge finally move to "stable"? It is beginning to look like we'll see Longhorn before then.
Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (a.k.a. woody) was released on 19th of July, 2002. The new (sic) release includes many major changes, described in our press release and the Release Notes.
It seems to me that there's nothing wrong with how either Apple or OSS/KDE/KHTML have gone in this project. While there were high hopes that Apple's efforts would contribute significantly to khtml, of course Apple is going to taylor the project to their needs - not the needs of everybody. There's no gain for them in that. To expect otherwise is unrealistic. khtml can use these changes or not use these changes, that's its choice. If it decides not to go along with Apple (or if it can't), that's fine. Nobody should really complain about what either company/group has done.
-Daniel
No we had to sign NDA's to look at code that _was_ part of KHTML, in fact directly based upon on our own code.
Apple loves to keep things secret between releases, and we can only hope they are start to grow up.
The open source community really needs to get its shit together. Nutcases like the above post are what the outside world is seeing as the true nature of the community.
The rabid kooks like this one were fun back a few years ago, but times have changed and the consequences are much greater.
It's time to lock up the loonies.
1) Howso? The iPod supports formats such as WAV, AIFF, MP3, AAC, all of which are standards, as well as the proprietary Audible and Protected AAC formats.
2) That's a Usability argument. Most experts would argue that less can be more in this regard.
3) I don't see the issue with not opening up GUI applications that Apple makes money off. Does Red Hat open up their commercial RHEL tools?
Is an unrealized danger of OSS that others may take your project in a direction you didn't intend?
No, because that isn't a danger and doesn't hurt you in any way. If you're worried that your feelings might get hurt over something like this, though, perhaps open source isn't for you.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
No we had to sign NDA's to look at code that _was_ part of KHTML, in fact directly based upon on our own code.
And the problem with this is.............?
If it wasn't released, they don't have to open the code.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Check out gtk-webcore; their browser (osb-browser) is incomplete, but the renderer is great. I was able to load Google Maps with it and zoom in, something I haven't managed to do on konqueror. There's also atlantis, which seems to use gtk-webcore--I haven't tried it yet.
So... if Apple's code is so hard to work with, how did these people get it working? And using gtk, no less! Sorry folks--I'm no Apple fan, but Apple definitely *is* releasing code, and it *isn't* unusable.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
If Konqueror is such a great browser, how come Apple didn't do a direct port of it to their operating system, instead of ripping out its core (the only thing that WAS good), porting it to Objective-C and then writing a new UI for it? Maybe because Konqueror actually does suck? If Konqueror is not a terrible browser, why do the vast majority of open source browsers use Gecko instead? Oh, I forgot, you're just an RMS felching faggot ass, and your points don't matter since the rest of us realize that KDE/Gnome/Linux/et al. are useless and retarded wastes of time. Sorry. I hope you fucks all die of AIDS from CmdrTaco's infected dick or die from being crushed by Cowboi's big fat ass. Go back to sucking cum out of Stallman's ass, retard.
it is what it is ... that's what i see
it may not be prejudical on my part
you, sir, simply may have assumed to much
how come Apple didn't do a direct port of it to their operating system
Because it was based around Qt. KHTML is easily separated from Qt, the whole of Konqueror isn't. Next question, you clueless fool.
I wonder if this would be as big an issue if Apple had started out by saying, "we want to fork the code." The license gives them that right. This is essentially what's happened. Neither team is actively using the others patches.
My experience is that merging code on large projects is a pain. Even when you share the same respository (CVS) and have teams working on different branches. I hate the thought of trying to merge code that's several months apart developmentaly. Besides just dealing with the code, check-in comments, when they exist, are usually vague, brief, and overly broad (25 files modified, the comment only actually refers to two of them).
It sucks, but, they might be better off just accepting it as the fork that it is. Both of these teams have differing objectives. Trying to keep the code in sync while trying to (in all intents and purposes) create different end products may be more pain than its worth (to all parties).
The developers of KHTML should be proud. They created an excellent product. A large company felt their product was of high enough quality to warrant distribution in a mainstream operating system.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
Being annoying is not against the law, but I will still complain about it....
What is your problem?
What actually happened, was this: KHTML developer Zack Rusin read one too many uninformed comment on the internets about how awesome the cooperation between KHTML and Apple is; being on the recieving end of the very not awesome cooperation, he understandably got a bit pissed off, and blogged about it. The thing to note here is his ire *was not directed at Apple* (recognizing that they were fulfilling their legal obligations, and were required to do no more), but rather at the uninformed idiots. This has now been spun, in part by those same uninformed idiots, into the KHTML devs being whiny Apple-haters, and the whole legality question has also been quite predictably confused into it all as well, which was never a part of it.
So far, I have seen exactly one comment on this thread with some understanding of this. it'd be sad, if it weren't so fucking ironic...
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.
KDE volunteers said they suddenly found themselves dealing with bug reports Apple deemed too sensitive to share, new requirements for auditing code before releasing it, and demands that developers sign nondisclosure agreements before looking at some Apple code. So you mean once KHTML devs wanted access to code that wasn't part of KHTML, they had to play by Apple's rules? Say it isn't so! Apple plays by their rules for their code, but KHTML doesn't want to play by Apple's rules for Apple code. Again, choices by KHTML to limit their own options. I didn't knew you could change the license of code originaly under the GPL! If the code (emphasis mine) is written upon the KHTML code, then that code is also under the GPL. Anyway, a lot of comments are off topic: the original story only dealt with making clear that Apple has not cooperated with the KHTML devs as a lot of people had imagined.
I can't imagine who modded this insightful. We really need the whole -1 factually incorrect mod.
iPod limited to apple services and formats, functionally a lockin product designed to trap users into the Apple Music Store.
iPods play MP3, AAC, WAV, MP3 VBR, Audible, and AIFF formats in addition to DRM'ed AAC files. Most users never use the iTunes music store. Also, why would Apple want to trap people using a store that they don't make any money on? You have it backwards. The store is a service they operate to make ipods more attractive.
Look and Feel. Apple has always imposed the most limits on the user's ability to customize his computer look and feel of any OS. Conformity is the Mantra at Apple. Individuality be darned.
Conformity eh, you mean like conforming to standards? Try editing the preferences of a program in Windows. What menu are they in? Answer, it depends on the program, they all put it somewhere different. Apple programs (and about 95% of third party programs for OS X) all have their preferences in the program menu and it is called preferences. All of the programs can make PDFs, from the same menu, in the same place. Can you see why that might be desirable? You don't have to hunt for things or remember different keyboard shortcuts, menu locations, menu names, etc. for different programs.
As far as look-and-feel goes, it is easy enough to change with third-party tools if you really want to, but you're right Apple discourages it. They spent a lot of time making things easy to use and don't want their systems getting a reputation for being hard to use because end users set the colors to really stupid things and put crappy bitmaps all over everything. They don't actively try to stop you, but they don't make it easy either.
Open Source. Apple plays lip services to opensource but does not give anything of signifigance back to the community. Darwin in open. Aqua is not. KHTML is open, Safari is not. On and on.
Everything Apple takes that is open source, they give back to. They publish their improvements and changes to WebCore which is what they have done with the Konquerer code. They take a different approach to things and provide a web service that all applications can use rather than just making one browser. You can write a basic browser using WebCore in about 5 minutes because all you need to add is the UI. Since the UI runs on a different window manager and rendering environment than Konquerer, the UI work is useless to them anyway. How about zeroconf? Apple wrote it and even provided a port for windows users. It is open and the protocol has been incorporated into printers, modems, routers, Tivo, etc. How about the new LaunchD daemon? It is a real improvement to a core UNIX service and not so different from the advanced schedulers used in some very expensive proprietary Server OSes. Linux can take the code and use it, or implement their own version using it as a reference. That does not include the patches they have submitted to Apache, MySQL, and dozens of other open source projects. It sounds like they are giving back to me.
Apple's image is ALL marketing spin.
Yeah, because contributing to open source is such a huge marketing fiat. Get real most people neither know or care what Open Source is and Apple sure as hell is not getting many sales by tricking the Open Source community into thinking they are helping the movement. Apple uses open source code because it works and they give back because it is in their own best interests. That is how open source works. Your view is severely myopic. Try reading some mainstream news for a change and seeing what the really real world thinks.
> It always amazes me how people associate Apple Computer with open-ness, free thinking, and
:-)
> individuality.
Personally, I've always seen them as a corporation that creates better products than everyone else.
> The company has demonstrated over the course of its existance that it is the direction opposite of
>all of those trends. Clised
Clised?
> Example 1: iPod limited to apple services and formats, functionally a lockin product designed to
> trap users into the Apple Music Store.
My iPod plays MP3's fine. Also, Apple does not own/control the AAC standard.
> Example 2: Look and Feel. Apple has always imposed the most limits on the user's ability to
> customize his computer look and feel of any OS. Conformity is the Mantra at Apple. Individuality
> be darned.
All the way back with OS5 people would install all kinds of desktop changing utilities. Hot keys, changing menu items in the finder, changing the colors, border, the look of feel. Konfabulator and others are useful these days with OSX. The funniest one was the extension that changed all the icons to fruits, with a yellow banana in place of the apple icon in the top bar.
> Example 3: Open Source. Apple plays lip services to opensource but does not give anything of
> signifigance back to the community. Darwin in open. Aqua is not. KHTML is open, Safari is not.
> On and on.
The last I saw I could get all the Darwin code for OSX from Apple for free.
> Apple's image is ALL marketing spin.
Your post is all uninformed bile.
jfs
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
How is this a 'danger', that other people do other things with a project that you have intentionally given the world the right to work on?
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
Apple is Bill Gates' little cage for those who have fooled themselves into thinking they "think different".
Apple has always imposed the most limits on the user's ability to customize his computer look and feel of any OS.
Actually, Mac OS X is extremely customizable down to a very low level. Apple doesn't give you a nice GUI for making these changes, because they consider the look and feel a brand, but neither have they made any deliberate effort to prevent people from providing the missing components. In fact, if they didn't hold their developers responsible for maintaining that look and feel it would be harder to go in and modify the GUI.
The company that is currently doing the most to take advantage of and develop the various hooks Apple has provided is Unsanity, and Shapeshifter is the premier tool of this type:
http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/shapeshifter
But there's also an open source project:
http://themechanger.sourceforge.net/
And there have been other applications going all the way back to Kaleidoscope on Mac OS 8. These apps don't just change the window borders, they change every detail of every control in every application... and Kaleidoscope did it first.
or forking. Forking implies someone with different goals/ideals starting a new project in keeping with those goals/ideals. As near as anyone can tell the Safari projects goals are perfectly in line with khtml's, it's just the corporation making things a little rough around the edges. What's bothering everyone here is that if it was just between projects then there's no technical, legal or political reason everyone couldn't just play nice together. Having a large corp involved is complicating things. This isn't necessarilly the end of the world. There's people at Apple no doubt trying to work this out.
At any rate, if people don't complain a bit, how's Apple going to know we want them to shape up the code a bit.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The real spat is between the KHTML developers and clueless assholes like you. They're pissed off that trolls on /. constantly post about how great the Apple Safari developers are, and how they contribute so much to the KHTML Codebase.
The reality is that most of the code Apple releases is usless to the KHTML Team, and they generally have to completely reimplement everything on their own.
They want stupid assholes to quick talking about how great Apple is for making KHTML better when they actually do very little of that (because of the way in which they choose to release their changes).
Apple took a lot of code from (Free)BSD, and while under the license they don't have to give anything back, it would be nice if they did something.
Anyone know if Apple donated anything to the FreeBSD Foundation? Or perhaps donated some rack space for a mirror? How about hardware for the PowerPC porting effort (which would help sell Apple hardware)?
KDE wants Apple to do their job for them. bunch of lazy crybabies. if they don't know how to use diff, they shouldn't be developing software.
This is all 'friend of a friend says' sort of stuff, but word on the IRC channels is that Apple has been doing nothing but take-take-take.
Rather than relying on hear-say from IRC channels, why don't you spend 30 seconds with google and just look up all the contributions Apple has given back?
If it is the way it's being reported to me, it's kinda sad, really.
I find it even more sad that you are willing to post a comment that begins with a disclaimer about how you don't know what you're talking about but aren't willing to find out and then proceed to engage in idle speculation.
Nice try, appleogist.
All RHAT does is prevent competitiors from using the "Red Hat" name.
This really is not unique to OSS-corporate cooperation attempts.
Anyone who has ever started something on their own, be it their own company, a software projects, or just playing with LEGO knows that when you add more people, it gets harder and harder to control the vision.
When the KHTML developers partnered with Apple, they thought they were getting the design and financial resources of a global corporation. What they got were more people putting opinions into their LEGO masterpiece.
I don't think this is a bad thing. Sometimes an inovator becomes so idealistic and perfectionistic that they cannot be objective and/or resoned with. Corporations tend to act very rationally because there are so many people holding them accountable that they have to justify actions.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
And here's everything from 10.4, posted on the same day 10.4 was released.
Great! Thanks! Since you're so knowledgeable perhaps you could take all the differences from WebCore and feed them in KHTML? Thanks.
Oh, BTW, once you're finished with that how about you do all the changes to the BSD code base, as well as Apache, Courier, mailman, etc....
One of the best insights from the outside into this whole mess of Apple vs KHTL I thought was made by Gregory Block: I just wonder how realistic the KDE guys are being about this, in the back of my head. Qt is a cross-platform UI, sure - but it's no different than any other UI when it comes to the fact that it's embedded all the way through the application. Is this about Apple modifying KHTML in ways that embed it with Apple UI calls? Is it any different than the KHTML guys embedding Qt in it? Having seen Netscape's cross-platform troubles from the inside, I can see why my gut reaction is that "cross-UI + cross-platform = total mess", because Nav 4.0's cross-platform stuff was... complicated, to say the least. Littered with #IFDEFs and a complicated build system to make that work, where each team routinely broke the mac build, over and over again. The fact that Apple has gone so far to build a Qt-alike API in order to keep KHTML in the state that WebCore is in - which the KHTML players seem to feel isn't good enough; isn't close enough to the Qt version - is already a huge gift that, given that past experience at Netscape, I have difficulty seeing as a long-term solution. So what's the answer? Is Apple expected to build and maintain a full Qt emulation library, or switch to Qt entirely? Is that a reasonable expectation? If it is not a reasonable expectation, is KHTML willing to spend its resources abstracting away its dependency on Qt? And is *that* a reasonable expectation? Or is Apple meant to do the abstraction, as they're the ones "who require it", and submit that back to the KHTML guys and hope that the dev team finds it acceptable? And if they don't, what happens next? And will all parties be willing to live with the performance problems, if any, that come from inserting that abstraction? Will both sides be willing to live with the resulting limitations that come from the differences between the systems? Talking about how the two sides 'differ in politics' misses something fundamental - the codebases appear to have fundamentally differing strategies, and I can't help but feel that I'm not actually hearing proposed solutions from the KHTML side - just issues with what's being done. I can't see how it can be done radically differently without endangering both products, as an outsider. The choice is either to move towards a Mozilla-like platform abstraction, or end up with a Navigator 4 #ifdef-hack. Sure, maybe there's a middle road, but all I'm hearing from the KHTML team is that they can't run WebCore diffs against their tree and are a little on the cross side about it. What would a diffable WebCore look like, and would the KHTML developers be able to live with the product that inevitably created? KHTML will have to change to meet requirements from the outside, requirements that may well be unacceptable to the KHTML community - and vice-versa; what then? Especially after what happened to the last Frankenbrowser? Netscape 4 is dead. Netscape 6 (Java) is dead, with its shelf still in the box. Netscape 5, dead. Everything that was left of 4 that wasn't part of the low-level cross-platform or security toolkits used by every other product went the way of the dodo, along with every attempt to build a new Frankenbrowser, aside from Mozilla - and Mozilla is what it is not only because of the decisions it makes about its architecture, but because of its xplat requirements. And I know that Hyatt knows that, because he was the guy who had to fix the browser over, and over, and over, and over again, every time one of the Windows guys checked in a change to Nav that broke the Mac. If I were him, I'd be strapping a rocket on my back to get away from any hint of a mote of an idea of a glimmer of a thought to return to that kind of cesspit of a codebase, and I can't imagine the KHTML developers would want that life for themselves either. Something tells me that neither side will be willing to sacrifice the one thing that made them stick with KHTML in the first place - the fact that it didn't have all of the cruft that c
iPod limited to apple services and formats,
MP3 an Apple-only format? Right...
I congratulate you on your troll though, you did make it as far as (4, Interesting) before anyone actualy analysed your comment.
'Nuff said.
Hack away, apple fanbois.
Mozilla will eat your lunch.
...and I'm sure it's impossible to replace the Qt parts of Konqueror with equilvalent code written in Cocoa, right? Hence, you'd have a Cocoa-fied Konqueror (which is what I implied above, you clueless fool). I've actually seen things like this done before - it's called PORTING.
Have you even wrote code before, on any platform? I'm guessing you haven't.
Shipping it within their product is clearly not releasing it!
proprietary apple open
Safari is not open source. Webcore is.
launchd is open source.
bonjour is open source.
darwin is open source and the license is OSI approved.
example 1 is a troll. it supports mp3. not free enough for you? it supports mp4 too. wait, that's a standard too. it's called aac. just wait for dvd jon to break the drm and never update quicktime again.
conformity is the mantra of support too. If things always look the same (and look good), it's easier to support. Check back in when you support 900 desktops and you think conformity in that regard is bad.
IHBT
After a long running viral and guerilla marketing campaign suggesting that "Apple is working closely with the open source community" and now doing this shows more than a lack of grace; it shows that Apple is as Apple was and as Apple always will be: a slick marketing outfit without conscience.
Has anyone here ever seen the movie Office Space? There is a great scene in the movie featuring Jennifer Anniston and Mike Judge (from Beavis and Butthead) that relates to the Apple vs KHTML drama.
Anyway, the scene plays out like this... Jennifer Anniston is being called out by her boss for not having enough "flair" on her work uniform. The minimum number of acceptable pieces of flair was 15, but it was encouraged to wear more than the minimum.
After being called out several times about her flair, Ms. Anniston is quoted as saying this, "If you want me to wear 37 pieces of flair like your pretty boy over there Brian, why don't you just make the minimum 37 pieces of flair?"
The bottom line is this: Apple is NOT an open source company. If you expect Apple to do more than the minimum, you should raise the minimum. You really can't expect Apple to do more than what they are required; it's just not a practical business model.
If the code diverts, then they cannot either take advantage of future OSS improvements, at least easily (same as happens for KDE guys at the other side). IMHO it would be better for them a more collaborative developing model (something simmilar to mozilla/netscape OpenOffice.org/Staroffice)
Dear Trollaxor:
I've been thinking of switching lately. I've used Windows my whole life, but recently began experimenting with Linux. I like a lot of things from both operating systems, and now I want one package to offer me both a nice GUI and a command line UNIX. Is Mac OS X what I'm looking for?
-Potential Switcher in Dayton
Dear Gentle Sir:
The first thing you have to look at is what you use your current operating systems for. Do you browse the web and check email? Listen to MP3s? Or are there some specific packages you use for a hobby or job? Are you into video editing? Your habits on your computers dictate how well you can switch. If you're pretty much just editing papers, browsing the web and exchanging email while listening to your favorite songs, you'll appreciate the tightly-integrated Mac experience over Windows and Linux.
If you're into Open Source programming, however, that's a different story.
Quite frankly, we don't want you on the Mac platform. You Linux zealots are all the same, and give a bad name to whatever cause you're championing this week. We Mac users don't give a shit whether something is free as in beer or free as in speech; is it free to download? That's what we want. Your subtle political differences mean nothing to this community.
We also like aesthetically pleasing things. The iBook, iMac, and all of Apple's other products are not only the best, but the best looking. Your pile of shit interfaces and GUIs won't cut it here, asswipe. KDE and GNOME got together on interface standards? Hi. I'm a Mac user. My OS has had interface standards for years. Oh, wait, look at that -- it even set most of the standards to begin with. Nice to see your fat pile of bloated code catching up 20 years later.
For a sample of how your festering pile of programming shit will go over in the Mac world, take a look at the GNU-Darwin project: turned away from Mac users and programmers because of some radical, childish political ideal. Ignored. Denied. Held equivalent to fecal matter. Not wanted. Do you really think anyone with enough money or sense to buy and use a Mac will pay any serious attention to your Open Source/Free Software communism? You're living in a dream world, pal.
Take a shower and get a clue. We don't have time for your communistic hippy bullshit. Slag right off.
-Trollaxor
My iPod plays MP3's fine. Also, Apple does not own/control the AAC standard.
But they do control the DRM features of their products, making it impossible for you to buy music from online stores other than theirs.
Just imagine, you but a car from Toyota, and you are only allowed to get gas from their own gas stations...
It's amazing what people are willing to put up with.
Aren't we all boycotting Apple over the A/UX thing?
Or am I stuck on a deserted island in my tattered
military uniform, eating coconuts and awaiting
further orders all by myself?
I find very ironic that only pro Apple comments (most from clueless people) get modded up. And I find even more ironic that the comments from Carewolf, which is a KHTML developer, get ignored.
Welcome to Slashdot.
Okay, if you don't like how Apple provides its patches back to the KHTML guys, please feel free to write a tool that converts their patches into the form you prefer.
...I thought the deal here was they got a zillion patches in a dump, instead of a bug report/fix combo. It's kinda like collect dripping water in a bucket, then hand it over for the KHTML team to split to find the original drops. Doesn't work.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Just because something isn't impossible doesn't make it a good idea. Clearly it's you that is clueless.
Slashdot used to be a linux site.
Now it's an Mac Advocacy site.
The reality distortion field is a strong force in the universe.
Anyway, the KDE weenies deserve to get whooped on with their own tactics.
"Interesting warning for other OSS-corporate marriages."
What is the warning? That others can take open source code and do what they want with it as long as they give back their code? This is a complete non issue and here is why.
1. Apple still has to give their code which they are doing. Anyone can take their code and use it. It may be a pain, but that's life
2. the KDE guys can keep improving their version as if apple never used their code and apple will either keep their version compatible or they will have to do a lot of work to integrate future additions by the kde team.
Who cares if apple doesn't make it easy. We still have both code bases as open source code,and we have wider use of open source even if apple doesn't make it easy on the kde team. It would be nice if they did, but we are still better off than if apple didn't use open source code at all.
There seems to be a widespread confusion between a copy of something and the original:
Is an unrealized danger of OSS that others may take your project in a direction you didn't intend?
Apple is taking their copy of the code in a particular direction. The original code is untouched by Apple.
This seems to be the same confusion behind common statements of theft of information, when the information was really merely copied and the copy used for some undesired purpose.
Dude, this is for parts that haven't shipped. When it ships, the source is opened.
it were Microsoft instead of Apple? I'm an Apple guy and no fan of Microsoft. I'm just wondering how upset rather than apologetic people on /. would be if it were Microsoft not "sharing" with the open source community...
That said... as long as Apple is operating within the license, they're not violating it. If people believe that it's a violation is of the spirit of the license type, then maybe the license should be updated...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Apple's bug tracking database is a mess. But more importantly the things people enter into it are seen as corporate embarassments, security weaknesses, spoilers of future suprises. and an unwelcome dose of reality. Listen to the buzz about Apple's new Tiger 10.4.1 software update under development, the thinksecret rumor site reports that it will contain 30 bug fixes. Only thirty? Compared to the number of issues being reported on the Mac tech and help websites, either this is going to barely scratch the surface of people's problems or it's an attempt to make the 10.4.0 release sound more stable than it is even in their private communication with developers.
Because of leaks of code, software, and information that's either embarassed or spoiled the impact of Apple's announcements, even paying developers who've signed their lives away with Non-disclosure agreements get only a bare bit of information more than what "free" developers get.
I'm not defending Apple's practices; I think they clearly do more harm than good. But complaining and trying to embarass Apple about the poor quality of their return contribution doesn't seem like it will have a positive effect in my opinion.
Things need to change, but lets face it you have almost no leverage to change that (in a positive manner) from the outside. Negative publicity generally get's Apple to tighten up even further. I wouldn't be suprised if the next Apple "code bomb" didn't come with filtering such that even those Apple bug tracker id numbers are replaced with generic messages.
eom
It's already +5, but it should be +10. like it should move above every other post to the top. or just automatically delete practically every other post.
Forked code not instantly applicable to parent.
Film at 11.
You're so wrong, you can't possibly be any wronger.
The KHTML devs are not complaining about apple not contributing back. They're complaining about all the mindless apple fanboys spouting "OMG APPLE DOES SO MUCH FOR KHTML YOU KHTML GUYS ARE A BUNCH OF LAZY FUCKS FOR NOT MERGING APPLES PATCHES IMMEDIATELY"
They took it for so long, but are no longer willing to stay silent on the issue.
In other words, their issue is with the legions of apple retards. Are you one of them?
the heck with apple - they use open source and built there bread and butter on a free os freebsd and they yet have created an itunes client and software for their airport card for linux or freebsd.
what gives apple - we thought we were your friends in that we were both going against microsoft -
I sure wish they would start giving back some - but it is just like microsoft - you are just following a different pied piper.
If they're so upset about this, why didn't they release their code under a more restrictive license? One that requires modifications to be released in piecemeal patches with full version control history, etc? Sounds like sour grapes, and really rather immature. They should be happy that someone is using their open source and contributing back. They got what they said they wanted from releasing under this license, but when they realized they really wanted something else, they yelled and screamed. They only have themselves to blame.
It's like some kid at the playground offers to play a game of basketball with "standard rules" and then complains that his opponent shouldn't be shooting so many 3 pointers. Very, very childish.
This is why I'm a fan of BSD style licenses, or even public domain non-licenses. Those are the ones that are truly altruistic, benefitting all developers, not just benefetting those who are willing to put up with the rules and whims of the original creator.
Look at the Apple apologists go!
It was my understanding that the KHTML team are only concerned with people thinking the Safari team is assisting them with the project. I think it is time for Apple to announce their project is a fork.
-- please mod my posts as blatantly obvious
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
They didn't feel like cooperating with the KHTML team or maybe didn't like where KHTML was headed and so they forked the KHTML code base.
So what?
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Hah. Try something as simple as moving the window widgets (eg close button) to the right side.
So much for "extremely customizable down to a very low level"...
Also, the method for theming in OSX is a hack. You can see the results of this -- some applications get past shapeshifter without being themed.
With UI frameworks like Qt, the theming is built in at a low level, it is well supported, and every app which uses Qt will follow the themes.
Statement: KHTML did Apple a favor by releasing the code. Response: No, they didn't. It is LGPL licensed. Statement: They should be required to submit their changes back as per the LGPL license. Response: They are providing their changes. Statement: It isn't easy to apply their changes to the originally source code. Response: But the LGPL doesn't require the contributions to be in a 'ready to use' format. Statement: But they should have given us patch logs so we can commit the changes equally. Response: Apple isn't obligated to give you access to their patch logs, only the changes. Statement: But they should have 'in the spirit of community'. Response: LOL. So, the GPL isn't just a binding agreement now, but a moral mandate? The bottom line is that Apple has fullfilled all their legal obligations to the KHTML community .. and then some.
My god, GPL advocates are annoying. Even when people comply fully with the GPL they are complaining about 'community' and 'spirit'.
To summarize: Apple is 'mean' because they aren't making the KHTML developer's lives easy, even if they have fullfilled all their legal obligations.
Firefox developer ben goodger has a nice view upon this subject. Check it out
I contend that if not for the GPL Apple would have chosen the Linux Kernel as a base for OSX and not BSD. I am not going to get into the technical arguments of BSD vs. Linux, but Linux is quite a bit more active in development and more useful in features. I am not surprised that Apple only took and didn't give back with KHTML. They are what they are... a corperation responsible only to money.
I can still remember mac geeks telling me that Apple based OSX on BSD because BSD is just better and more hardcore of a *NIX than Linux. PFFfftt.
Just remember Kiddies: Perception is everything.
Apple quite simply forked Safari. This happens all the time in the OSS world. Hello, does anyone really expect that X.org patches will remain 100% compatible with the XFree86 code structure ad aeternam ?
Could someone please tell me what exactly the problem is in the Apple-Safari case ?
The problem is that the Apple developer(s) follows the KHTML developers mailing lists and learns from the discussions there and applies patches as they come in and is developed. They follow the khtml development in CVS and copies advances from there.
The decent (NOTE: not required, but decent) thing to do would be to open up their development to the KHTML developers in the same way.
Is it so hard to understand that you should treat others as you yourself want to be treated?
and when I say "they" I mean APPLE, are just a bunch of OSS LEECHES.
oh, sure they didn't do anything "illegal" but, wrong, sure I would say wrong, they take and they give unuseable or not very substantial code back "as per the "licence" aggrement.
Apple, like other corperations ( M$, IBM) will do anything to make money. Apple is no panacia of giving or on a higher moral ground than any other company.
mac marines and penguinheads get over it, they are just a money grubbing company like any other.
they just wrap themselves in a marketing blanket of benevolence and sharing.
NONSENSE!!
What I find really amusing about all of this is that clearly from the links others have provided here, the KHTML devs and Apple really aren't terribly concerned about the mechanics of how code is shared (or not) between them. But, the KHTML devs are pissed off at people on Slashdot for claiming that there's a relationship there when there isn't. They share code, but only at the most basic level and there's little-to-no active dialogue between them.
So, someone posts a link to one of the KHTML dev blogs to this effect on slashdot with a flamebait story description. True to form, slashdotters pound out hundreds upon hundreds of comments that are often uninformed, many inflammatory. (We really need to be able to moderate whole stories, this one would definitely get a -1 Flamebait)
Cnet wants to generate a bunch of hits, sees original flamebait story on slashdot, posts their own. This gets linked back to slashdot with another inflammatory story description, and true to form all the Linux and Mac crazies go head to head for several hundred more often uninformed, often inflammatory posts.
All of this while the actual parties involved in fact barely care about what is apparently so important that it generates hundreds of comments on slashdot. And what they do care about is uninformed, inflammatory idiots posting to Slashdot about what they apparently care about.
God, I love this place. Sometimes the irony's so thick it's like being in a bank vault.
Free yourself. Everything else will follow.
"Apple loves to keep things secret between releases, and we can only hope they are start to grow up."
Apple needs to grow up?
You have got to be kidding me! They are a company that is, has always been and always will be secretive about their products, both software and hardware. It IS their business model.
If anyone needs to grow up it is those who complain about for-profit companies keeping their work product and products secret.
Seems to me that issue is that Apple is not participating in an open development process (a closed bugs database and 60MB code dumps are not part of an open process). Myself, I am concerned about the comments on the quality of the Apple code; Apple could be going down the path Microsoft has followed, where this major OS component is insecure and the insecurities are not subject to public review. Do we really need a second IE?
The GPL allows you to take a persons source code, modify it to your hearts content, then re-distribute it AS YOUR OWN with no requirements to give it back to the original tree. You just have to make the code available. If the KHTML guys want the apple code so much, they should push to get the codebase from Apple and spend THEIR time merging it back in. XFree86 was being taken in a stupid direction by the project leads, so X.org forked it and fixed it, and people have been flocking to x.org. This pissed the XF86 guys off, but c'mon, that's one of the virtues and dangers of open source.
The KHTML guys are throwing a fit now because Apple doesnt see KHTML as something that fits their needs? So they go and pout and scream FUD against apple, then an Apple rep mentions maybe the khtml guys should check out webcore, and they still pout?
I personally have never though highly of KHTML, I've used it before and it has issues, I prefer the gecko engine in Mozilla much more. It's customizeable as well.
So, now that apple wants to make something better because KHTML would have needed serious reworking to get it to work to their needs, and knowing the khtml guys probably wouldnt have liked that (it all boils down to ego) they went ahead and started their own engine.
This is something that plagues a lot of opensource projects, if someone sees something new and great, or if they see where something could be improved drastically, they try to apply it, and the devs of the project hate it because they wanna keep it in a certain way, that and it would undo their work, thus bruising egos.
The XFree86 project is guilty of this. there is a lot of stuff that would get rejected because there were devs who preferred to keep things status quo and not try to advance, because it was "good enough" to them, even though the changes were needed for newer and up to date features for the desktop, yanno, features that are beyond 1994 and all.
So this may be a bit one sided, and naturally people will favor the opensource project over the evil corporation. But this is how businesses run, if something is not working right or you want to improve it, replacing what doesnt work is critical, or else you could lose money. What a lot of projects want is the big guys contributing code freely right and left and not expecting a yield in return. Apple wants something out of this, and if the KHTML guys dont want to keep up, they should sit down and shut up. After all, apple doesnt have to contribute to them at all.
they're complying perfectly with the license the code was released under. why the hell would you expect more?
Try something as simple as moving the window widgets (eg close button) to the right side.
Mind if I repeat something I wrote a couple of messages back: "These apps don't just change the window borders, they change every detail of every control in every application."
Hey, having the ability to change from one window manager to another is a really neat idea. It lets people install Enlightenment and think they're customizing the user interface, because they can customize the window borders in ways no sane person would dream of. But they're not, they're just customizing one application.
On the Mac that particular application is less customizable, at least in that way. But others are more so. For example, you can go in to any regular Cocoa application and a lot of Carbon ones and move *all* the widgets around, rename or move menu items, even copy them from one part of the program to another.
Also, the method for theming in OSX is a hack. You can see the results of this -- some applications get past shapeshifter without being themed.
If I open up an xterm... you know what, it doesn't use my Qt theme! Why is that? Is it because Qt theming is a hack, or is it because it's using Athena Widgets instead of Qt? Of course nobody would say Qt theming was a hack, but the fact is there's so many competing toolkits on X11 that this is normal and expected. There's nothing you can do about it except to exterminate all the competitors (you have to provide your own cyborgs).
In Mac OS X, on the other hand, there are only two official toolkits... so the theming that's built into it at a low level is well supported, and every app that uses Carbon, Cocoa, or even many of the third-party toolkits (because they look up the theme and follow it) will follow the themes.
You can be totally compliant with the law while still being a total ***
Like the Emacs vs XEmacs problems?
"The fact that KHTML wants to take their sweet time and Apple wants to get the patches done fast and out the door shows where the divergence is. Apple can't afford to take the open source approach of spending 5 years in beta before releasing the next version."
This is quite ignorant. There are, admittedly some OSS project that are perpetually at a BETA stage. KDE is not one of them. KDE 3.4 had a few weeks of beta testing, and then it was released as final. Just as Tiger. Yes, there were a few bugs found since RELEASE - just as there were bugs in Tiger, and probably there will be more till the next release.
KDE developers did everything they could to help cooperation - in vain. And they don't even regret that as much as they regret that there are clueless users who overestimate APPLE's contributions.
And this makes hardly any sense:"Once again a choice by KHTML. The patches are there, but they choose to do the patches their way, thus eliminating Apple patches." Excuse me? What were you trying to say?
Mods: congrats!
Instead of of all this bitching, Apple and the KDE people should both be thinking about how to stop wasting their resources with two things that are pretty clearly second-best and how to move their cores to Firefox. The KDE people of course are doing this on their own time, so they are free reinvent whatever wheel they like to; Apple, however, is paying these people to waste their time with this. How about having them do something useful instead with the shareholder's money?
However, I've based my own statements on comments from the KHTML team.
Perhaps several branches will be required for a fully-integrated KHTML-Safari tree - STABLE, Apple-production, and development. One way or another, one side will constantly be folding in changes produced by the other. Perhaps they should all switch to Bitkeeper?
An Apple high-level executive should be arranging meetings with KHTML core to sort this out - the longer they delay, the worse it will appear.
I can imagine that the Gecko core is breathing a collective sigh of relief that they were not chosen. Perhaps the ability to fork with impunity influenced Apple's choice of KHTML.
"s an unrealized danger of OSS that others may take your project in a direction you didn't intend?"
no. if that was the case, it wouldn't be OSS, where anyone can fork the original sources. Look at xorg vs X11R6.
I don't feel like it...
the difference is that if you use Qt, theming is well supported from the bottom to the top, and no application can get past it.
with OSX, if you use carbon/cocoa, theming is a hack, not officially supported at all, and apps can get past the theming.
dont bother with the athena argument, its a red herring. you might as well argue about macos8. nobody develops new apps for either anymore.
let's see. if i use the 'official' frameworks on osx and i change themes with shapeshifter, and applications can get past the shapeshifter theming... this proves osx is somehow better?
qt/kde wants end users to be able to easily change themes to their personal taste, provides you easy and uniform ways to do it, and it is well supported. you're changing not only the application widgets, but also the window borders etc. for a completely consistent and uniform behavior.
apple is the complete antithesis to ui theming. they just don't want you to do it.
You have it backwards. The store is a service they operate to make ipods more attractive.
... real tried to start up an AAC shop, and apple pulled the rug from under them. If all Apple was interested in was selling more ipods, why not encourage third-party music stores for the ipod? No, apple wants to sell ipods, and they want to sell music, and they refuse to make one subservient to the other.
Hmm, I have my doubts about that. After all, there's no support for the wma DRM, so you can only buy from apple's store if you want to put downloaded legal music on your ipod. You might argue the wma DRM is too expensive to license, but
...has some more discussion:
5 _04.html#008054
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/200
...to Apple. The day Jobs stepped back into Apple Computer Inc, was the day Apple became a mercyless plundering machine of anything it wants.
Apple don't give a shit about KHTML, in fact I can guarantee they are laughing. If i were KHTML devs I would try and change the licence and lock Apple out.
Apple have used you, exploited you and now want to chuck you in the garbage and forget about you. They have got want they wanted from and that's it. KHTML have been done up like a kipper.
Just like Konfabulator.
Is not this the source code?.. with all the apple changes to khtml in the khtml folder?
wouldn't a little diff work out?
But any NEW code DOES NOT have to be released UNLESS you distribute the said combined new code. If the code was in development there IS no requirement for it to be published without an NDA. There IS a difference. Pay attention.
After all, there's no support for the wma DRM, so you can only buy from apple's store if you want to put downloaded legal music on your ipod.
If you were Apple with a dominant position in online music sales, would you pay additional licensing fees to make a technological move that would insure the default format for music was in a proprietary format controlled and patented by your biggest competitor who already has a monopoly and that has repeatedly been convicted of using that monopoly to illegally crush competitors such as yourself?
real tried to start up an AAC shop
Real did not license the DRM scheme. They tried to strongarm Apple then use a hack to use Apple's own servers to authenticate and enforce Real's proprietary DRM all without compensating Apple. It opened Apple up to legal liability and increased support costs, all with no compensation, while benefiting their competitor. Real did not even offer to pay to license the DRM, they were just trying to pressure Apple into supporting their own dying format and DRM on the iPod.
If all Apple was interested in was selling more ipods, why not encourage third-party music stores for the ipod?
Good question. They may very well do that in the future or they may not. Supposedly they have licensed the codec to motorola and it is being included in a phone to be released any time now. They have not yet licensed it to any other music services (AFAIK). Part of the issue is that to do so they would have to deal with all the support problems as people call them because they can't get some other company's service to work.
No, apple wants to sell ipods, and they want to sell music, and they refuse to make one subservient to the other.
If you take a look at Apple's financials you'll not ethey make money on ipods, computers, and software. They are about break even on music (not including the large initial investment they put in to get it set up). It isn't about making money right now, it is about stopping MS from grabbing yet another monopoly and using it against Apple and it is about selling ipods.
You could say the same from MS vis-a-vis the BSD TCP/IP stack. MS is leveraging their tech. to best serve their customers (or to best serve their interests, but you get my point).
Really, why they do it that way is irrelevant. What is relevant is if they are doing it by playing by the rules of the licence.
And indeed They are. If the KHTML team thinks that they've been fooled, then they should explain where Apple isn't following these rules.
I clearly understand that, because of how people are considering/envisioning FOSS, they can easily expect a much more community-like attitude from Apple coders. After all this is what we're witnessing with Linux : Most of the top coders are working for big business, and still the code goes back to the original source.
Lets say that the GCC project actually situationals like this greatly. We just tell the person who wants feature xxx from branch yyy, port it to the mainline and split it up and stop your complaining that it is not in a released compiler yet.
you can run darwin (OSX's core) on x86, its only the Aqua window manager that won't run on x86. http://developer.apple.com/darwin/ (Note, the link to dowload x86 is mislabelled, but it works)
When you leave you're groin unguarded, don't whine if I kick you in the balls.
Also, I'm not sure how much better they can work with the KDE guys on this. They're providing their patches. It's just not in a form that is extremely convenient for the KDE developers, it seems. That sounds like a problem for the KHTML maintainers to deal with. Why should the engineers at Apple be forced to maintain both WebCore and KHTML? It sort of sounds like that's what people are expecting of them.
the difference is that if you use Qt, theming is well supported from the bottom to the top, and no application can get past it.
Unless they don't use Qt widgets.
with OSX, if you use carbon/cocoa, theming is a hack, not officially supported at all, and apps can get past the theming.
Only if they don't use Carbon/Cocoa widgets.
The only difference is:
On the Mac, only a few applications out there don't use native widgets (and most of those are old applications or ports from Linux or Windows). Not only that, but most of the toolkits that don't use native widgets still use the native theme. There's only a few applications out of all the many available that won't follow the theme.
Under X11 most applications are not written for Qt or any other single toolkit. So only a few applications will follow the theme, unless you restrict yourself to only using applications using that toolkit. So you have the choice of using only a subset of the non-too-great selection of X11 applications that happen to follow your theme, or you end up with a user interface displaying half a dozen themes at once.
apple is the complete antithesis to ui theming
Apple invented UI theming.
They might not want you to use it, but they haven't removed it, and they don't try and stop you from using it, and they have enough influence over their developers that it just automatically works for most apps. KDE wants you to be able to theme your X11 environment, but they don't have the ability to force people developing to other toolkits to follow their theme, so it only works for the apps that happen to use their own toolkit.
"no application can get past it."???
Most don't even notice it's there.
If apple really supported open source, wouldn't they have backed Mozilla?
Apple invented UI theming.
Lollerskates!
WTF do you think X11 resources are, exactly? X11 theming has existed more than a decade before apple ever discovered it. Even ancient athena shit can be themed via resources.
Most don't even notice it's there.
Most don't even know OSX theming is even possible. Ever notice 99.99999% of all OSX screenshots look 100% exactly identical?
Apple does a good job of hiding this functionality from end users. Apple doesn't want users changing the UI appearance.
BTW the themechanger project is dead.
GPL Does not require redistribution of private code
The GPL and NDAs Please note the following
GPL and fair use
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
If you were a programmer you would know from experience that deadline-oriented usually does imply sloppy code. You want to make the deadline, so you apply some weird hack that makes the code ugly. It fills the need but long term is not sustainable. You later come to regret not thinking it out further in the first place.
As for your irrelevant Debian-bashing: Yeah, stable moves slow. If this bothers you, I would estimate that most people use testing and unstable anyway. If Debian STILL bothers you, maybe you should look into something other than Debian. Like Gentoo. Or Ubuntu. Or whatever. The whole argument is off-topic anyway; I think you just wanted to get in a jab and say "Linux sux0rz!!!!!"
Except in this part of the discussion we're clearly talking about the internal changes that would be covered under an NDA and not the shipped product whose relevant source code is available online. Please do try to keep up.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Apple doesn't want users changing the UI appearance.
That's really amazing. You made that point, I agreed that you were right, you made it again, OK, I'll agree with you again. You can make it a third time, and you'll get nothing but agreement from me. What you haven't done, though, is establish how "what Apple wants" is relevant, when I'm only talking about "what Apple does", and what Apple does is provide the functionality and make sure that the majority of the developers out there support it.
Apple can want anything, but it's what they do that matters.
WTF do you think X11 resources are, exactly?
Pretty good customization tools for the pre-theme era. Themes are more than just tweaking the colors and fonts of the user interface, a theme is a new skin for the whole user interface. The closet thing to themes Athena Widgets got was when people coded up new versions of them like Xaw3d. And by that time it was too late, really, because Xaw was already being supplanted by horrors like Motif.
How can one claim that KDE developers have been just as uncooperative.
Because they have. Perhpas one should RTFA?
They even offered to sign NDAs with apple (and their offer was completely ignored) in order to get them.
And according to the article, when Apple gave them NDAs, they balked.
And this makes hardly any sense:"Once again a choice by KHTML. The patches are there, but they choose to do the patches their way, thus eliminating Apple patches." Excuse me? What were you trying to say?
I'd explain it to you, but it would require reading the article to get the context. Perhaps you should try that.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
So, back to my point, which still stands: APPLE ignored any request for incremental changelogs in the past, and even the offer to sign an NDA. In other words, APPLE ignored any attempt on the part of kde devs to faciliate cooperation. They are far from being equally uncooperative, and even APPLE knows that. That is what the article is about btw - Apple recognizing their mistake (or at least one of their safari developers) and trying to come up and asking for solutions. And there goes you saying that Apple is no more responsible for this situation than KDE developers while "Apple declined to comment for this story. But Safari engineer David Hyatt did acknowledge KDE complaints in his blog, defending the scope of recent patches and soliciting suggestions on improving Apple's relationship with KDE."
While I have to applaud David Hyatt efforts, I don't think that everything we see as a solution from Apple is entirely honest. You can't expect khtml developers to ditch their own codebase in favour of webcore - that is a pretty cruel thing to ask from people who spent hundreds of manhours polishing, refining and improving their code, and became somewhat attached to it. And I believe Apple knows that as well.
So about this 'patches' thing? What did you have in mind when you wrote: "Once again a choice by KHTML. The patches are there, but they choose to do the patches their way, thus eliminating Apple patches."
As a futher note, for all the bitching about how hard Apple makes it hard to know what changes they've made and what teh fixes were for, the change log seems to have a description of the problem, the files changed and the calls changed for each bug:
/ WebCore-413/ChangeLog
http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.4
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
as usual, the hordes of apple morons abuse their modpoints by modding down anyone who disagrees with the ONE APPLE TRUTH!@#
if anything proves the idiocy of apple fundies its all these ridiculous -1 moderations.
Obviously you're not reading it right. Apple offered to let them get at most of what they needed, but they were going to have to sign NDAs and go through some screening since it was all based on internal builds. I don't give me any bullshit about how they're just bug reports. Look at the bug fixes described in the webcore changelong and see how many of them reference things that didn't exist until Tiger. There's information to be had from bug logs.
Again, the offer is there, the KHTML team doesn't want to take advantage of it because of the work involved.
You can't expect khtml developers to ditch their own codebase in favour of webcore - that is a pretty cruel thing to ask from people who spent hundreds of manhours polishing, refining and improving their code, and became somewhat attached to it. And I believe Apple knows that as well.
And Apple's team spent countless man hours on their fork. Should we expect them to give it up because their changes aren't compatable or easily integrated into KHTML?
What did you have in mind when you wrote: "Once again a choice by KHTML. The patches are there, but they choose to do the patches their way, thus eliminating Apple patches."
Just what I said. Apple had patches, but the KHTML team didn't want them because they were done the "wrong way".
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
But most importantly, khtml developers are pissed by ignorant users who demand them to merge changes back, and if they are not fast enough they attribute it to their laziness or somesuch. And even if they implement something (probably from scratch, for going through a 60Mb codebomb might be more difficult) ./ posters will attribute the success to Apple, which is no fun.
For more clue, read Pete's post - I entirely agree with whatever he wrote there.
You are mistaken. The provision for making source available applies only to people to whom you have distributed binaries. It says so right here:
Alternatively, you could support independent bands and buy music without DRM legally at emusic.com.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
yeah, but people aren't attracted to OSX for the darwin core. They could use Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, whatever. It's Aqua and the things that run on top that people are after, and that's why it's that portion of the OS that isn't open sourced. If they open-sourced it and someone came out with a free x86 port, their hardware sales would likely drop.
X11 and Aqua are not compatible. Complaints that Apple's patches don't work in X11, well, okay, it's understandable to complain, but it's not reasonable to demand. You'd be asking them to make Aqua into another flavor of X11, and there are good technical reasons they shouldn't.
As a matter of personal opinion, I would suggest that assigning a liaison engineer to help move code between the two forks (and help weed out the code that doesn't move) would be mutually beneficial. I think Apple is being shortsighted if they don't do it.
But armchair quarterbacking never gets the job done.
Yes, let's hear it for Unsanity. They took an open and free standard, themes and theme engines for OSX, and covertly made it proprietary (with the help of a few key theme authors - I'm looking at you Swizcore, Rad-e8 and Studio 28). This obsoleted themes in the old format as well as theme management tools, most of which were free/open. Yeah, really nice guys with community interest at heart. Personally I will never pay for or use any of their products again.
And if you'd bother to actually check, theme changer hasn't released any code since Oct 2003.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - BF
...Apple's worried about the Safari's open sores...
Why, open sores can get infected and Safari could die And open sores are unsightly and...
what?
We're not talking about open sores? Oh, Open Source.
I see.
nevermind.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Yeah, really nice guys with community interest at heart.
Where, precisely, did I say they were nice guys?
You can't expect khtml developers to ditch their own codebase in favour of webcore - that is a pretty cruel thing to ask from people who spent hundreds of manhours polishing, refining and improving their code, and became somewhat attached to it.
So attached, that they released that code under a license that allows anybody to do whatever the hell they want with it. That includes making it better.
WebCore has advanced more than KHTML is areas that count for a rendering engine. Period. If KHTML people want in on that action, maybe they should switch to a WebCore base.
Some history. Apple wanted a browser, looked at gecko and khtml, chose khtml, started working on it. Almost a year later Safari was announced. During that time the khtml team had done a considerable amount of work on khtml. When Safari was distributed, code as per the license was released. Already the two codebases had diverged, partly from Apple removing Qt stuff and inserting their own api stuff, partly from the diverging lines of development.
Once Apple released their code some muted complaints started. The word patch is mentioned. You are misinformed. Apple released a tarball of the source code, with a changelog. Any patches had to be extracted from the codebase. Nonetheless khtml improved considerably as it merged some technologies that Apple had developed.
Right from the beginning the Apple people were given write access to the KDE cvs repository. A mailing list (not public to protect the tender feelings of Apple Inc.) was set up for communication. Nothing really came of it. I saw one commit from Apple.
Any non-trivial project is far more than code. Bug tracking, code standards, direction. Remember when the Kernel developers decided against EVMS in favor of LVM? Apple had forked the browser code before they even released it.
I've suggested to the khtml developers to state clearly what they have to do with the Webcore code in their commit logs. Sometimes the 'fixes' are wrong, don't apply or the code doesn't meet khtml standards.
Apple has done what they needed to do to meet their license obligations. Nothing more, nothing less. That is their choice, and they have taken on the costs and responsabilities of maintaining a web browser.
Derek
So two years isn't countless man hours? Because the KHTML team has spent more time, that makes their code somehow more worthy?
Look neither side is being co-operative. KHTML doesn't want to jump through Apple's hoops, Apple doesn't want to jump through KHTML's hoops. It's a fork that has more work than either side is willing to put into to ensure that the forks run concurrent, and there's nothing wrong with that.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
I just read a blog from Allan Sandfeld Jensen (Carewolf):
Hyatt and Maciej joined us on IRC yesterday, and we had some really good discussions. I might as well also admit that Maciejs comment was true (but out of context). Please notice that that implies we are discussing solutions and a common future. The idea of a common source tree is pretty much abandoned as we have very different goals and requirements, but we are discussing improved cooperation. With Apple just having released Tiger and us preparing for KDE4 we have a unique opportunity for bringing our source trees closer again.
Since Apple is being a nice guy for the time being, I will let them announce how things will improve once we have a solution, but please, no more "vs." stories for the time being, we are working on solving it.
I don't know how many people read the ORIGINAL kdedevelopers.org blog entries on the subject, but one of the specific complaints is:
Doesn't sound like such a generous act of corporate citizenship to me.
(Posted with Konqueror 3.1.4)
There is something that just does not sound real in the statement "Apple does nothing of this, they just release multimegabyte hunks of code that are just *useless* (you would probably spend more time trying to separate the big blob into small patches than to rewrite these independently). Your example thus falls completely flat."
Apple may be being a bastard releasing the code this way because in this industry, unless you've got a CowBoy or a PHB, nothing gets changed or coded without explicit instructions to do so and all documentation/code must refer back to the explicit instructions.
Sometimes running a 'make' gets ugly but that's a small price to pay for getting a patch in and out of an image.
A patch may be a aggregate of smaller patches but at the bottom most level is the 'work-order' which addresses a single TR (Technical Requirement)
Apple may be disingeneous in not releasing the TRs at the lowest level of granularity, but that's up to the parties to hash out between them.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
All Apple need to do to stop passing off on the KHTML trademark (not registered, but used before Apple did) is to rename their fork to something else. Alternatively, they can try and play nicely with the KHTML devs. Either will do.
Yeah if I was a KHTML I would really feel good about:
"Okay so we forked your code coz we wanted to do things a different way. We won't provide patches in a way that makes it easy for you to integrate them into the KHTML source. So instead of trying to figure out the patchdump, why not use Webcore instead. Sure it isn't the way you want KHTML to be but WC passes Acid2! (kewl eh?)"
Wow, it's amazing K hasn't jumped all over that!
So then what? K-WC gets forked again and we replay the argument in another OS X release or two and it's SVG or something else Safari makes work because Dave Hyatt goes on a coding binge?