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Apple Gifts Top WebKit Contributors with MacBooks
soundofthemoon writes "Just nine months ago, Apple started the WebKit Open Source Project. In that time, contributors have added some significant improvements to WebKit (and thus Apple's Safari browser). Today Apple gave their open source contributors a big thank-you, including rewarding the top contributors with some nifty goodies: 'As a thank you, we are giving MacBook Pro computers to twelve of our top contributors. We've also invited five of them to attend Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference 2006 on Apple's dime.' Looks like donating your time isn't a thankless job anymore."
Perhaps I'm just a little too cynical here, but this sounds like a great way to get free labor using an open source project. You release it, give some early adopters a thank you gift, and then wait as more people contribute to the project. You leave people with the hopes that they too will get "paid" for their work. Considering the (relatively) small amount of money spent on the gift vs. hiring people to work on the project it comes off as quite a deal. You might even get free advertising.
Good example?
Let me tell you a story about a job I had. This job paid $8.50/hr and I spent my day on the phone blocking, unblocking, and collecting payments from the customers of a certain long distance company. The Company I worked for was in financial trouble, so they started cutting back actual pay increases in favor of contests.
The rules were simple. Produce more than every one else on the floor and get paid closer to what you were worth for that month. "Brilliance!" they must have thought. They could pay us less and increase production at the same time!
Immediately, the entire business fell into two camps:
1) People who decided it was futile to play this game. These people's morale was shattered, and as a result, their production decreased.
2) People who cheated to boost production, often leaving horrified customers in their wake, thus making it futile for anyone with a sense of ethics to play the game.
I do not like the "contest" style of compensation. I believe if Apple really wanted to do something, they should compensate every person who did good work for them. That would be fair. As it stands, for every chosen one, there will be many wringing their hands, angry that their hard work goes unappreciated and uncompensated.
NASA about a year ago sent gorgeous crystal cubes to the top contributers to their worldwind project. They had a couple of NASA logos etched on them along with our names. When the manager of the project popped into our community chat room I suggested some NASA schwag for the top contributers. I was thinking stickers/pens... something small. I was quite surprised to recieve a heavy box a couple of months later containing the perfect desktop gem.
I think that to be the case.
/open-source/ WebKit was quite controversal. Apple as a big company with lots of customers has to follow some security lines. That was the culprit why WebKit became so distant to its ancesor kHTML.
1 5227 - and the solution http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/04/144021 3
Apple's decision to
The problem was that KDE and Apple has very different targets on how to release patches and etc. Some of the changes Apple did to WebKit would never be accepted by kHTML team. That in fact forked development of WebKit and kHTML.
After Slashdot bashing (it was in times of release Acid2 test), when kHTML people said that Acid2/kHTML is a very distant (low-pro) target, Apple promised to come-up with solution to the problem. The solution was to clean-up internal repository and open it up the FLOSS community. kHTML people wanted to bring standardatization work done by Apple to kHTML on one side. And on another side Apple wanted to move to newer improved version of kHTML.
Fork the it was going benefited no-one. The way things everyone wants is to have kHTML clean and strandard compliant and WebKit with some hacks and quirks to deliver top notch performance and compatibility for Apple's Safari. Hacks/quirks has always a potential to evolve into a proper solution.
So I think your guess is right: most contributors would be the kHTML team. Thou I expect some other caring souls would wander the repositories too.
P.S. Story about Apple's WebKit v. kHTML. the problem: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/28/12
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
This is cool and it puts Intel Macs into the hands of people who contribute. Maybe Apple understands that OSS contributors can't necessarily upgrade to the latest. This makes sure that the top dozen contributors to Safari get "Intellized". Smart AND nice.
Your job sounds almost like a scam a friend of mine was involved in, and it sucked the life out of him. Basically, he answered an advert in the local newspaper looking for proofreaders and transcribers with guaranteed work. Indeed, when he phoned them they gave him a job on the spot.
Except the job involved bidding money for work, and if you bid the most money for a particular job, you got the work and were paid for it. You were paid good money for it which is why it looked so appealing, I think he was on $45 per hour for transcribing from news broadcasts. The only problem was with such a large pool of "employees" it wasn't unusual to find they were bidding $40 for a job that only involved an hour's transcribing. Do the math and you can see how it works.
That was a scam though, your job sounds like it ended up the same without management quite realising how bad it was.
Nine months ago, that changed when Apple started exposing the VCS for WebKit and actively helping kHTML developers to integrate the WebKit improvements to KDE, and integrate the newer kHTML code to WebKit. In the initial situation, Apple benefited. After opening the repository, everybody benefited, and now Apple is saying "Thank you," in a very tangible way.
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I was invited to WWDC on Apple's dime a few times and they do this with student's every year to some extent. It's Apple's way of getting to know you better as you will also meet with engineers and others at events and invited lunches etc. This is Apple's interviewing tactic... you never even know you are being interviewed, until they offer you a job.