Slashdot Mirror
Konqueror Passes the Acid2 Test Too
An anonymous reader writes "A month after Safari , and after a lot of controversy, Allan Sandfeld Jensen announced today that Konqueror passes the Acid2 test too. Half of the patches could be merged from Apple's Webcore, the rest needed to be rewritten from scratch."
http://www.google.com/
Now we are waiting for IE to support the ACID2 test.
And only then, we could design web sites using today's CSS features. Oh, not today's, 5 years ago's but it will still be a revolution.
{{.sig}}
http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/
basically it's a rigorous test that ensures that a browser has all the goodies that web developers have been lusting after forever.
Its the exciting sequel to Acid1, The Dissolving. In the sequel the hero struggles valiantly with acid indigestion as he battles to save the world.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
There isn't any violation, technically, but IMHO the spirit of the GPL has been broken. Of course, spirit isnt legally defensible. Apple released patches in large gobs instead of in easily digestible chunks, and their code comments made many references to bugs in the internal Apple bug database (which isn't available to the KHTML team). They also made many Mac OS specific (KDE incompatible) changes and they disallowed CVS access.
OLPC Australia
The Konqueror team don't have access to the Safari code, at least not in a form they can use. Apple do have access to the KHTML code in a usable form though, the KDE guys make sure it's available in the right way for everybody.
Does it really matter what Apple's motivations were? The end result is that Open Source development has helped both products.
Clearly it does matter what their motivations are, this always matters. It means in future open source projects will know what's coming when Apple decide to get "involved".
As to whether it helped both products, well of that I'm sceptical. A key KDE developer has very publically burnt out on KHTML because of Apples actions and worse, because of the community of Apple fanboys who switched the blame around onto the KDE people. After starting out optimistic he's now bitter. I'd say that's a pretty huge loss.
Meanwhile, Apple got the code to a rendering engine for free and gave back little to nothing. It's like TransGaming all over again.
"Allan Sandfeld Jensen announced today that Konqueror passes the Acid2 test too. Half of the patches could be merged from Apple's Webcore, the rest needed to be rewritten from scratch.""
It's amazing what people can do when sufficiently motivated.
THIS sort of thing is EXACTLY what the khtml devs were complaining about. Yes, Apple does the bare minimum the LGPL requires with Webcore but the khtml devs accepted that.
The point these guys have been trying to get across over and over and over and over (repeat several thousand times for the extra dense) is that when Webcore can do something that khtml cannot IT IS NOT LAZINESS ON THE PART OF THE KHTML DEVELOPERS. WEBCORE CODE CANNOT JUST BE DROPPED INTO THE KHTML TREE. Webcore directly uses OS X features. That is one problem. The code bombs Apple drops periodically have inadequate documentation as to why some changes were made and not others.
Webcore at this point is a khtml fork that is about two years old. The khtml devs might as well be asked to merge Gecko code for all of the similarity they have at this point.
Gecko (the engine used in Firefox and Mozilla) probably won't be passing it too soon. See Robert O'Callahan's blog entry here. This means Firefox 1.1 won't pass Acid2.
My server
shouldn't Apple be doing more?
Doing more then what? By what people can tell, most of the dispute is because the Safari/WebCore and the Konquer people are doing different things with the code and also use different source managment systems. Apple uses one that most of the OS X devs use. And that is completly different then the one the KDE folks use.
Thus far, most of the complaints has been "Apple isn't doing it our way." Apple shot back with "Use WebCore, we will even show you how and assist on making it multiplatform", but that got shot down by the K folks. The issue isn't just with one side, it's with both using their normal work flows and expecting the other side to change everything.
Apple doesn't ship Konquer in their OS and has no plans to. KDE has no plans to use WebCore. So diversity issues are going to happen, and either side can just live with it, or do something about it. But it seems the KDE folks would just rather sit and whine about how Apple isn't doing things their way.
Maybe I missed it, but if you can point out to me where in the GPL it says you must bend over backwards to make a group of people happy, I'll conclude Apple is doing something wrong. Until then, I'll file this under the "people are never happy" section, and be one of the few to appreciate what Apple is doing to help OSS, and to promote the adoption of Unix in many areas. Sure, it's not the Linux way of things, but Apple is doing a hell of a lot better then say Sun with Solaris or HP with Tru64/HPUX to push the Unix platform across all spaces.
In related news: In an effort to open up their development process the developers of the Konqueror components KHTML, KJS and KSVG have launched the open Web portal KHTML.info. By providing a central contact point and source of information in form of an open Wiki the developers want to promote their work and embrace users and developers from both Open Source as well as commercial environments.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
Actually, if you read the email exchanges, you see Apple engineers discussed the patch tarballs and actively assisted khtml developers when they asked for reasonable things (ie, not access to internal Apple revision control systems). KHTML devs did not reveal this (to my knowledge) in their "open letter" this cooperation, which is quite a bit more than the LGPL. The LGPL requires you make the patches available- that's it. Apple sent them, discussed them, provided help interpreting them, did work by proxy, etc.
This is a logical fallacy called "fallacy by omission", and the specific technique employed was called "Stacking the Deck".
What becomes apparent is that the KHTML team doesn't like that Apple is doing everything they should be, getting commended for it, and that the work (supposedly) wasn't useful to them (we see now that's not the case, as half the patches were easily applied).
If integrating half of the patches only took a month or two, guess what- it wasn't nearly as impossible as the KHTML team made it out to be, and the code wasn't nearly as useless as they portrayed it to be.
WEBCORE CODE CANNOT JUST BE DROPPED INTO THE KHTML TREE. Webcore directly uses OS X features. That is one problem. The code bombs Apple drops periodically have inadequate documentation as to why some changes were made and not others.
The second is irrelevant because of the first; they're also unrelated, though you imply them to be compounded. It's not Apple's responsibility to turn over Webcore, or convert the code to use something besides Webcore. They're not allowed to sit on that code, they HAVE to provide it.
Second, they've provided several of what you've referred to as "code bombs", which is one step ahead of a company that would just provide them with ONE tarball; they're sharing work progressively, and have an active dialog with the khtml team.
Webcore at this point is a khtml fork that is about two years old.
And your point would be what? The LGPL doesn't say "help integrate old code". It doesn't say, "only fork recent code", or "don't fork code at all". It doesn't say "provide changelogs". It doesn't say "provide the project coders with access to your internal revision control systems and corporate network". It doesn't say ANY of that! EVER! PERIOD!
I'm sorry, but this whole thing has left me very embarrassed for the open-source community, and left me with a very bad taste in my mouth. Apple IS one of the better companies as far as contributing to open-source, they've brought open-source technologies to more desktops than anyone else, they've come up with some truly unique technology which they've provided source for- and they still get kicked in the teeth.
A lot of companies are looking at how Apple was treated, and thinking, "geez, Apple did more than just send tarballs, and they got pretty beat up for it." Question: do you think this will encourage or discourage companies to do work on open-source projects?
Please help metamoderate.
It does both. I've seen this misconception stated a few times now, it's just wrong.
The Acid test is not just a test for error handling. Error handling is something that is defined by the CSS 2.1 specification (and earlier specifications). In order to test full CSS compliance, they need to include errors as part of the test. This does not mean that all the test does is error handling, merely that it is one of the things the test does.
When IE does a decent job web developers can use the features that have been promised for years. It is IE that is holding back so many nice CSS features that are supported else where.
The developer in question was not mad at Apple per say, they were doing what was required. He was mad at people thinking Apple was doing something useful for KDE/khtml. Apple was not making things useful for KDE, but they were fullfilling all their obligations.
Once he spoke against those non-Apple, non-KDE people, those people tried to deflect the blame to Apple. Apple to their credit realized how the publicity was hurting them and changed their ways.
Once again, the KDE devs were not mad at Apple. They were disgusted because of being unable to get something useful, but not mad. They were mad at people who thought without checking that Apple was doing something useful.
The clean codebase helps KHTML and will tell more as the rushed hacks mount up in webcore. It costs them features in the short term, but in the long run keeping khtml clean makes it easier to work on.
I am trolling
When Konqueror doesn't follow Safari's new feature within 4 hours, don't blame us. When Konqueror finally follows Safari's feature list, don't automatically praise Apple, either.
It's not like Apple is giving out some drop-in patch, but that's OK. That's their right. Sometimes we take their patch, but sometimes we write things from scratch. When we'll use Apple's code, we'll be slow because of the way they produce their patch, not because we're lazy.
Apple is OK for me, but please stop bashing our laziness while praising opensource-friendliness of Apple. That hurts.
Yes, there's the bit that says you have to release "in the preferred form for making modifications", and it is implied in the preamble that is what you use yourself to modify it. I very much doubt the huge monolithic patchsets are what apple devs use internally, far more likely they use their VCS tree complete with comments. So that's what they should release.
I am trolling
Apple does the bare minimum the LGPL requires with Webcore but the khtml devs accepted that.
No, let's be clear. Apple does ALL AND EVERYTHING that the LGPL requires. Implicit in your statement is the suggestion that free software can be free if it includes tacit, implied promises not to fork and to satisfy its authors with all its changes. That suggestion is flagrantly inconsistent with the notion of free software, in any sense.
Fundamental to the notion of free software is that its authors cannot limit the rights of others to access and modify the software. Forking is not a problem with free software, it is a feature.
Ordinarily forking *is* a problem for the community, when the initial developers are adequately satsifying the needs of the community as a whole and working well with others. But this is not always the case. Sometimes politics, legitimate and petty, and aesthetics, legitimate and ludicrous, gets in the way of good agile development. When that happens, the community may well be better served by a fork.
Apple and the Konqueror clan were not working well together, but both had important and significant constituencies to serve. It was either going to work or not, but neither Apple nor the clan "owned" this free software. In its feral state, BOTH were free to decide by what methodology development of their respective trees will proceed, what features the code will have and what will be the quality of that code.
Darwin (no pun intended) takes care of the rest.
Evolution by forking is not the preferable state of nature, but it happens when it needs to happen. And people will abandon what is useless and use what is important.
If, someday, there is actually a need to harmonize this code, it will be harmonized. Otherwise, it may well be for the best there was a fork. The problem that it is difficult to harmonize advances in one tree into another is salient, but it is not due to any malfeasance of anybody. Apple WAS FREE to do what it would with the code. And glory be for that... So, too, is the Konqueror clan, and glory be for that.
The remaining whines in the message are puerile. Don't like the doco or the coding style? Its free software, change it. Don't like the way others are working on the code? No problem, ignore them, and use the free software of the existing code. Got a feature you need? Great. Code it up. Don't want to? No problem, but why are you posting your gripes HERE?
Apple has a free software realationship with the K-clan. K-clan could work with them or not, and vice-versa. If it doesn't work out, so be it. The code is out there. It was built the way it was built, and people may use it or not. Nobody has a gripe, because it is free software -- if you don't like it -- change it.