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."

Comments

Obvious

[Bombula]

Shoot me for stating the obvious, but this sets a good example for other companies to follow, not just in tech but across all industries.

Re:Obvious

[tibike77]

Well, it's not like this is unheard of, but not in THIS specific form :)
Can you say "X-Prize" or "DARPA Grand Challenge" ?
How about "PayPal donate link on Sourceforge" ?
Or, even cuter, "shareware" ? :D

It's on a different level (of commitment), yet it's (basically) the same thing: you work for something you care about, expect no (financial and/or direct) reward, yet, if you do it right, you end up with something.

So, yeah, always a good idea to keep hopes up for those who work for free and/or as a hobby... it's way cheaper (and on a much grander scale) as paying a lot of employees ;)

Re:Obvious

[SetupWeasel]

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.

Re:Obvious

[asliarun]

This is different. Agreed, internal competition can actually damage morale in a company. However, what Apple has done is reward open source contribution for individuals who didn't expect the reward in the first place. This is a good thing, as it encourages open-source hackers by giving them recognition as well as by giving them an unexpected reward. Everybody likes to get recognized and rewarded, especially for something that they take intellectual pride in. Hats off to the people who take the time off from their regular work and participate in such projects, simply because they want other people to benefit and learn from their skills and contributions. They thoroughly deserve such rewards.

Back to your example, where your company screwed up was in the fact that they confused incentive/recognition with unhealthy internal competition. It takes a very good people manager to instil a culture of competitiveness while making sure that it doesn't get degenerated into a political dog-eat-dog culture. The first encourages employees to benchmark themselves against their (better) peers and helps them pull up their socks when they feel they're sliding. The key here is that the manager should balance out the weaker employees' efforts with the company's goals, and make sure that they too are recognized and rewarded, along with the star performers. The second, OTOH, makes the weaker contributors feel a sense of futility, which makes them resort to cheating or give up the race. In my experience, i've met very very few people managers who can pull off this balancing act with success.

You have a valid point that all contributors should be rewarded and duly recognized. However, the key contributors also need to be rewarded more than the others, for that is the essence of meritocracy.

Re:Obvious

[weileong]

no it's completely different. they posted the X-prize first in order to stimulate entrants etc.; here, Apple is rewarding the people who contributed *with no expectation of personal gain* (well, beyond things like satisfaction and if they use the code themselves), which is more true to the spirit of the GPL, as a complete surprise. this is much more of a real reward, and not some mercenary kind of thing.

Re:Obvious

[16K Ram Pack]

It seemed to me that the X-Prize, whilst giving some compensation was only a fraction of the amounts spent. I think the money helped to create publicity and make it look worthwhile.

Re:Obvious

[mblase]

I believe if Apple really wanted to do something, they should compensate every person who did good work for them. That would be fair.

No, that would be employment.

Re:Obvious

[Bombula]

I certainly agree with you that what you call 'contest' style compensation is ineffective at best, and immoral and unethical at worst. Take it to the most macroscopic scale: the labor market worldwide. Workers in Bangladesh and the Phillipines are in 'contest' (ie: free-market competition) with workers in the US and Europe, and like you said, it's a brilliant scheme for the corporations who get to pay the lowest possible wages to those who have the highest productivity (productivity here meaning 10-year-old kids working 16 hour days in sweatshops).

Within our own countries, labor laws and unions product workers from such abuses - and I'm guessing you could have easily taken your case to a union with the possibility that you employer's practices were downright unlawful. But international law makes no such concessions, instead favoring the holy grail of 'free trade' and 'free markets', including of course the totally unregulated labor market.

What Apple is doing is quite different. They are showing genuinely generous appreciation for what is an entirely voluntary effort, and they are certainly under no obligation to do so. Comparing the two situations is comparing apples to oranges (pun fully intended).

Re:Obvious

[baryon351]

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.

Re:Good for Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

I see they've found a way to unload all those pre-Intel Macs sitting in their warehouse.

As a thank you, we are giving MacBook Pro computers to twelve of our top contributors.

They are giving them intel versions.

It really is unlucky

[agent dero]

Never before has number 13 sucked so hard.

Sucks to be you, top 13th contributor ;)

That's what they'd like you to think

[Sux2BU]

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.

Re:That's what they'd like you to think

[Kjella]

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.

Well, for one the result is an open source project. Not something Apple can just lock up. Secondly, if you're in this for the money you're seriously not thinking straight. They're giving these to their top developers. It's a trinket for what they've contributed, it's not anything like a lottery where you can "win" and get a decent wage. Apple is simply seeing a way to make people that are already interested in doing an open-source project be a little more motivated. It's a win-win situation for both. That's not a crime or anything.

Re:That's what they'd like you to think

[mister_tim]

I was waiting for someone to say this. Basically, that argument just shows that with the Open Source model you can't please everyone.

If a company doesn't open source, plenty of open source advocates say they should and will complain about closed environment, etc etc
If they do open source, then you get arguments like this - either that they are taking advantage of free labour, or using cheap labour.

If you accept the open source model, then things like this are the outcome. In this case, it is very nice of Apple that they rewarded some of the top contributors, which they were certainly not obliged to do.

Re:That's what they'd like you to think

[Goth Biker Babe]

One thing everyone seems to have missed is that with the move over to Intel they would probably like 'their' top Open Source developers to have appropriate hardware to develop on.

Re:That's what they'd like you to think

[cowscows]

I don't think you're giving the people working on these projects enough credit. Anyone with the skills to contribute meaningfully to this project should be able to get a job that pays well enough that they could buy a laptop on their own. And I'm sure they all know that.

You see, one of the cool things (although sometimes a weakness) with open source development is that the people doing it are very often doing it for fun. It's a hobby for them, and even without the MacBook, if they weren't getting some sort of a feeling of accomplishment or something, they would've stopped doing it. Apple isn't taking advantage of people any more than the habitat for humanity takes advantage of their volunteers. While writing code is different than building homes for impoverished people, there are a lot of parallels.

In both cases, someone willingly donates their labor, for their own reasons. And in both cases, a lot of people benefit. With Habitat for humanity, the volunteers get the satisfaction of having helped with something bigger than themselves, and often gain knowledge about construction. A family without the means to buy their own house gets a decent home and their quality of life significantly improves. And society in general has one less homeless person to try and support (or if you don't believe that others should be forced to help those lazy bums, there's one less homeless person sitting around in your neighborhood).

With open source webkit, the volunteers get the satisfaction of having helped with something bigger than themselves, they've likely gained some new knowledge pertaining to computers and programming, they've potentially gained some name recognition for their effort and talents, and some of them have even gotten new laptop computers. Apple benefits by having a better piece of software included in their operating system. The rest of the world benefits because they have that exact same better piece of software that they're free to use with their own programs. Oh, and coincidentally, the fact that this particular piece of software pertains to web browsing, it stimulates more competition in the browser market, so the world gets even more better browsers.

But yeah, there are two points. The people donating their labor to this project before must have been getting some sort of happiness/satisfaction/reward for it, or they would've stopped. I've yet to hear of any sweatshops in asia where kids are forced to write code for pennies by their cruel taskmasters who keep any free laptops sent in reward. And secondly, Apple is not the only one benefiting from this. They aren't using laptops to pay people to write code for Apple, they're rewarding people who write code available to anyone. That's approaching philanthropy.

NASA Worldwind

[Llynix]

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.

Verbing nouns: Gah.

[minginqunt]

Off-topic, I know. So mod me. But...

Gah! "Gifting"? Wtf? Gift is a fucking NOUN. What's wrong with "Apple gives MacBooks to top WebKit contributors"?

It seems that the disease of corporate-speak has infected even the minds of Slashdot contributors who (a) should know better and (b) probably think they're immune.

Action this at once.

Re:Verbing nouns: Gah.

[Mikey-San]

According to the "American Heritage Dictionary", but not according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Tsk.

Frankly, I speak English, and this half-arsed corporatisation of American colloquia needs to stop. It's not attractive, and it makes British ears very unhappy.

I speak English, too.

http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/gift

gift

noun 1 a thing given willingly to someone without payment; a present. 2 a natural ability or talent. 3 informal a very easy task or unmissable opportunity.

verb 1 give as a gift, especially formally. 2 (gift with) endow (someone) with (an ability or talent). 3 gifted having exceptional talent or ability.

Hey, look at that. Looks like Oxford says you need a refresher course.

Re:Verbing nouns: Gah.

[SurgeonGeneral]

Definitions are interesting, however it is the etymology of the word that will explain to the parent why his anger at the use of "gift" as a verb is a mistake.

Gift is a word that is originally derived from the ancient German word geban - which, incidently, is a verb. The word grew to be a noun, but kept its verb meaning as well.

The word gift has been used for a long time now as a verb in legal proceedings. When a person bequeths objects to people in a will, it generally is referred to as gifting. That meaning of the word has recently raised its head in major media where it seems to be a "new" use of the word, when actually it is only new to you.

Re:KHTML?

[ThePhilips]

I think that to be the case.

Apple's decision to /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.

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=05/04/28/121 5227 - and the solution http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/04/144021 3

Apple has done this before

[sagefire.org]

Apple has supported GIMP-print this way for a while now. Granted, they weren't giving them laptops. But, people working on GIMP-print got iMacs and were given special discounts on buying other macs for personal use.

It's a great model. Hopefully, they will continue to do it for years to come.

Not quite the same

[necro2607]

Well, it's not quite the same thing. These developers were rewards *after* doing a lot of work. They did the work without any knowledge of any potential "reward". That's what makes this situation a little different. :)

Intel books...

[skingers6894]

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.

Re:KHTML?

[buysse]

Poor wording by grandparent. Apple always kept to the letter of the LGPL -- they dumped source when they released binaries. One big chunk of undercommented source.

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.

Use the Source, Luke

[argent]

do you think they'd consider releasing some form of Safari for Windows?

You have:

* The complete source to Webkit.
* Gtk for Windows.

What else do you need for a Windows port?

Job offer... (Anonymous to protect the innocent)

[spicyjeff]

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.

Not the First Time for Apple

[cshotton]

Apple has been rewarding the open source and shareware community for a long time. In September of 1994, I was one of the recipients of Apple's first "Cool Tools" award. They identified all of the open source, public domain, and shareware authors that were making the Mac one of the best Internet-capable computers of the time. Here's a link to an old TidBITS article about the award. All the winners got PowerMac 7100s which helped get most of the Cool Tools ported to PowerPC. Maybe a bit self-serving of Apple, but they were setting the standard for recognizing good work in their third party developer community over 12 years ago. And I got MacHTTP ported to PPC in about 2 days because of it!

OK, I know there are some apple haters out there..

[DynamoJoe]

Apple can't even say thanks without getting blasted? How cynical is that? 'Boo hoo hoo, apple didn't do x' or 'apple could easily have done this since they're a supermegacorp and those're eeeeevil'.

Jesus. Get over it. If you never get "gifted" in life, maybe the problem is you.