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.

Comments

Its only the bad things we head about?

[Folmer]

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.

Re:Its only the bad things we head about?

[angst7]

As others will likely point out, they certainly are within their legal rights to do what they like where patches are concerned. But you're missing a crucial distinction between Must and Ought.

It is not required that Apple play nice with the way they release patches. That is to say there is not 'must' apart from the requirement that they make them available. But there's alot of 'ought' that comes into play when you use OSS code. This is basically a niceness test that says, in effect, if you use this code to make money, great, but you 'ought' to give back in such a way that we can make use of as well.

Having said all that I feel a bit bad about even responding to an obvious troll. There's very little 'insight' in your comment.

Re:Its only the bad things we head about?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me get this straight...

KDE gives Apple (and everyone else) access to a monolithic block of code that doesn't run on Mac OS X, and that's considered a big favour. Apple gives KDE (and everyone else) access to a monolithic block of code that doesn't run on Linux, and that is the moral equivalent of spitting in their face?

Error, error, does not compute.

Re:Its only the bad things we head about?

[alienw]

Read The Farking License. It doesn't say "preferred form for the original developer". It says "preferred form of the work for making modifications to it". As in, ASCII source code. What they are saying is that you can't comply with the GPL by, say, releasing code only as a PDF file, or only as a hardcopy, or without the appropriate makefiles. Nowhere does it say you even _have_ to release a patch.

Re:Its only the bad things we head about?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

The thing is, the KDE guys did Apple a favor, and DID make it easy for them to get at the code. Apple just spit on their courtesy by just releasing their monolithic patches.

I'm not sure, what exactly did the KDE guys do to help Apple? Did they help them to incorporate the code into their Webcore fork of Konquerer?

Apple using Konquerer has already helped the KDE team in a number of ways. First they do have those patches to look through, in fact the acid test CSS patches from a previous article were even separately documented for the Konquerer codebase as much as possible given the divergence of the codebases. Next Apple using the Konquerer engine has made a lot of web sites compatible with Konquerer since Web designers are much more likely to test their pages against Safari than Konquerer. Also, they have advanced standardized HTML in general by promoting a browser that does not conform to either Gecko or IE's bugs and quirks.

I think it is unlikely that Apple is going to change versioning systems to make the KDE team's job easier, nor are they likely to implement changes on both browsers (even if they could which they can't since the Konquerer developers do not want to implement all of the same type of changes Apple has and don't use the same development tools or APIs). What they do, however, is provide their changes openly so that the KDE team can look through them and copy whatever fixes, improvements, or changes are useful to them. I'm sure both sets of developers are overworked and neither has enough time and both would like more people to do more for them. Maybe if the KDE developers asked for more granularity with the patches the Safari team would be willing to accommodate them. They would probably also be happy to answer questions and explain particular changes.

I guess I just don't see what anyone is mad about, and I'm not sure that anyone really is mad that is involved with Konquerer. This seems like a lot of people trying to make drama out of very little.

Open Source Is A License

[American AC in Paris]

Folks, if you want your code used in a certain way, you put the terms in the damned license. That's what it's there for.

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.

This is just stupid

[Otter]

The original story just had Zach Rusin saying that Apple's contributions to KHTML were exaggerated. OK, fine.

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".

Nothing to see here... It's just a fork

[Jarnis]

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 :)

Childish Spat

[cyberlotnet]

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"

No problem here

[booch]

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.

Re:Learning about Apple

[slipstick]

And the KHTML guys have decided to "leave it" and explain why. If Apple gets a black eye out of it so be it.

Apple could have tried to be a little more community spirited rather than just ignoring the needs of the very people they relied on to save them millions in development cost. How hard would it have been to include real comments in their patches rather than pointing to a bug database number?

This is being blown *way* out of proportion

[Illissius]

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...

Re:Sound like KHTML team doesn't want to play eith

[molnarcs]

This is unbelievable (I mean the +5 insightful moderation). How can one claim that KDE developers have been just as uncooperative. They set up a mailing list specifically for Apple devs. They gave CVS access. All they asked was incremental changelogs instead of 60Mb code dumps. They even offered to sign NDAs with apple (and their offer was completely ignored) in order to get them.

"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!