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How Competing Companies Are Jointly Building WebKit
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."
...just as long as you keep managers, marketeers, sales people and HR out of it.
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I interned on the Chrome team 3 years ago. Google was still building up towards being a major player on Webkit. This lead to issues when Google's interests didn't match Apple's.
For example, there was a bug on a KURL object (held a url in it or something). According to specs, it was supposed to wipe out certain data whenever such and such an event occurred. I do not remember the specifics. But, Webkit had this bug where it did not do that, going against its own documentation and specs. This was causing Chrome some issues, so they wanted to patch the problem.
Apple refused to accept the patch- there were many places where Safari RELIED on the bug to work. If you wanted to fix the bug in Webkit, Apple would have to fix Safari. Since Apple had the majority of commiters/contributors, they could outvote any decision, open source be damned.
In the end, Google made a GURL object for their own purposes, which was essentially the same object, without the bug.
*Note: I may be mistaken on many of the details here, or the specific object names (it was a while ago), but the overall scope of the issue, I'm telling it to you like I remember it happening.