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Apple Releases WebKit
rohanl writes "Apple has responded to recent criticisms from the KHTML developers by providing a live CVS repository (including all history) of WebCore, JavaScriptCore and the newly open sourced WebKit, public mailing list, irc channel and bug database. Details at the new webkit.opendarwin.org"
They had contributed back. The OOS people chose a particular license. Apple followed said license and did everything required by it. OSS people got upset as they wanted more. Apple have now gone way over and above what is required and provided this.
Actually, according to Apple, they're hope to have the ENTIRE Macintosh line transitioned to Intel CPUs by the end of 2007.
"Mac OS on Intel is to be given to developers (ADC "Select" and "Premier" members) now and to customers "this time next year." The transition will be completed in less than 2 years, by the end of 2007."
This whole mess started when Zack Rusin blogged saying (basically) -
* don't keep bugging us about when Konqueror will do what Safari does because it's not as simple as taking Apple's patches and applying them
* don't keep saying how great it is that Apple are giving us these features
He explicitly said that it was fine for Apple to behave as they were. He just asked that people didn't keep giving Apple credit for doing things that actually needed to be done independently by the KHTML team.
The mess started when multiple news websites and bloggers misreported this as an anti-Apple flame and subsequently seemed to base their articles on each others, not the original post.
No one who has ever actually used Objective C++ and Carbon would actually complain about it. That has to be the nicest toolkit out there, bar none.
Jeremy
grr I mean cocoa of course. it is damn early.
Jeremy
Because there is no "-1 factually incorrect" moderation. The previous poster apparently had no idea what they were talking about. The KDE team made no agreement with Apple, Apple just took the code and used it in compliance with its license. Then they released the changes when they released WebCore, much to the surprise and delight of the KDE team. They have been giving back all the changes, but since the Konqueror project decided a lot of them were not the way the wanted the project to go and since both groups are using different versioning systems the KDE folks were having some difficulty extracting the changes they wanted from all the Webcore code.
After some time of this one of the KDE guys got sick of everyone telling him how easy his job was now that Apple was doing all his work for him and wrote a very reasonable and clear statement about how Apple's changes were really hard to incorporate and why and how they wished Apple would give the team access to a CVS repository. This got posted to Slashdot and horribly misinterpreted by the vast majority of the readers into some sort of "Apple is stealing open source code" thread.
Immediately thereafter one of the Safari guys fixed Safari so it would pass the acid compliance test and made sure to put in special notes just for the KDE guys. Again, Slashdot picked this up and there was a huge rehashing of the previous argument, despite Apple trying hard to be nice. Now Apple has gone to great lengths and released exactly what the KDE team asked for despite the fact that it is extra work and expense (which they might have done earlier had they actually been asked).
The previous poster of course only read a few idiot's comments on Slashdot, never read any of the articles and thus was spreading his ignorance on Slashdot even more by restating factually incorrect third-hand interpretations of opinionated and poorly informed comments from Slashdot. Hence the modding down (or so I guess since I did not mod him).
Objective C++ is a bridge, allowing you to ( fairly ) seamlessly call C++ from objective-c and visa versa.
E.g., with ObjectiveC++ you don't need to write a pure-C bridge, to get Objective-C and C++ to interoperate.
Now, that said, it's not like you can write a C++ subclass of an Objective-C class, but it's useful. Really useful.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
You don't know what you are talking about.
Apple forked a major free software project, essentially taking it and hiding it. Oh yes, they released the source once and a while.
The patches you talk about were the first in two years of discreet patches. Most of them were useless. The time required to 'merge' them was possibly longer and vastly less satisfying than writing yourself.
This is a case study on how to destroy a free software project. 'Cooperate' with it, raise expectations, then hide everything. The core developers will quit because the satisfaction and challenge is gone.
Expect to see this happen in other projects where a firm has a competing interest.
khtml survived due to the large developer base of KDE and the recognition of the strategic importance of khtml to the KDE project. In other words, khtml isn't a stand alone project. An active stand alone project would have been killed by what happened here.
Derek
The KHTML developers NEVER complained about this. They complained about the people that were pissy about them not merging the Apple updates fast enough. Your post here is as bad as all the new sites that failed to read the original post and have since mis-communicated the whole freaking thing. Good work.
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
Their behavior boils down to "Wah, I offered my friend a lollipop and he took it."
No, that's slashdot's behavior. Most of the KHTML developers really wish slashdot would keep their damn uninformed blathering to themselves, and while they're at it, get a little informed and stop demanding that KHTML support Safari features within 1 day of implementation because "they're the same codebase, right?"
No one but slashbots are griping incessantly about the licensing.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot