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How Competing Companies Are Jointly Building WebKit

Posted by Soulskill on from the getting-along-behind-the-scenes dept.

New submitter jgb writes "WebKit is, now that Opera decided to join the project, in the core of three of the five major web browsers: Apple's Safari, Google's Chromium and Opera. Therefore, WebKit is also a melting pot for many corporate interests, since several competing companies (not only Google and Apple, but also Samsung, RIM, Nokia, Intel and many others) are finding ways of collaborating in the project. All of this makes fascinating the study of how they are contributing to the project. Some weeks ago, a study showed how they were submitting contributions to the code base. Now another one uncovers how they are reviewing those submitted contributions. As expected, most of the reviews during the whole life of the project were done by Apple, with Google as a close second. But things have changed dramatically during the last few years. In 2012, Google is a clear first, reviewing about twice as much (50%) as Apple (25%). RIM (7%) and Nokia (5%) are also relevant reviewers. Code review is very important in WebKit's development process, with reviewers acting as a sort of gatekeepers, deciding which changes make sense, and when they are conforming to the project practices and quality standards. In some sense, review activity reflects the responsibility each company is taking on how WebKit evolves. In some sense, the evolution over time for this activity by the different companies tells the history of how they have been shaping the project."

6 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Companies can work together just fine... by mwvdlee · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...just as long as you keep managers, marketeers, sales people and HR out of it.

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    1. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      So who decided they weren't confident in opera's own engine and let's swap years of work out for webkit? Developers?

    2. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by Grond · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You don't think management was involved Apple's decision to use KHTML as the basis for Safari rather than Gecko (the Mozilla engine)? Or the decision to use an open source engine in the first place rather than creating their own proprietary engine? You don't think sales and marketing were involved in the decision to feature the open source nature of the engine when Safari was first announced ("Safari’s features include ... the industry’s best rendering engine based on KHTML, from KDE’s Konqueror open source project, to which Apple has made significant enhancements that will be contributed back to the open source community."). You don't think HR was involved in recruiting software engineers with experience working with open source projects?

      The same is true of every other company that has used WebKit. Companies that base products on open source projects are not self-governing programmer utopias.

    3. Re:Companies can work together just fine... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So who decided they weren't confident in opera's own engine and let's swap years of work out for webkit? Developers?

      I doubt it's so much a matter of confidence as it is a matter of outbreaking common sense. Why spend resources on your own engine when there is an open, fast, very popular, well-supported, and well-regarded engine available for free? I'm surprised they waited so long, though I am not surprised that Microsoft is outlasting them.

      A small fraction of users care about what engine their browser is using. They care that the websites they visit work, and WebKit certainly has the edge over Opera's old engine on that point.

  2. Re:Why won't this paradigm work on an Office Suite by erroneus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Critical mass.

    *.DOC(X) is not just he most universally accepted format for word processing documents, it's the most universally EXPECTED format for word processing documents.

    And then there's the ridiculously high amount of integration which is the expected norm for all of this. It's more than just office. It's everything it touches. And as we saw when Microsoft took an active role in attempting to stop ODF from becoming an ISO standard and we saw it in how Microsoft inexplicably got an incomplete and impossible to implement standard fast-tracked through the same process.

    They have no shame or sense of morality when it comes to defending their territory and will never allow anything to get in their way.

    Now, if there were such a collaboration I'd be all over it. Right now? I just can't see it happening.

  3. Re:Is there any reason by erroneus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The moment "everyone" goes to the same platform is the moment everything slows to a crawl or even a stop.