Submitted by Apple is handing out a MacBook Pro to each of the top twelve contributors to the open source WebKit project. Apple is also inviting five of them to this year’s Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference, expenses paid by Apple. “WebKit is the system framework used on Mac OS X by Safari, Dashboard, Mail.app, and many other OS X applications. It is based on the KHTML engine from KDE.”
Good to see Apple rewarding people who contribute to open source.
Congrats to the developers.
– Kelson
Thats a bit weird way of saying it.
I think its more like they are rewarding people who contribute to things that are useful to them. Which is good of apple.
Now, I think apple shouldn’t give any laptops to anyone till the memory leaks of safari are fixed. No browser should take 1 gig of ram just because its been running for over a day even with no pages loaded.
What a classy move by Apple.
Nice to see companies support the actual individuals who truly make up the minds, spirits, and soul of the open source community.
While I applaud Apple for doing this, it is also to Apple’s benefit to do it(and to their detriment if they do not).
A MacBook Pro does not cost Apple a lot, however the benefits gained for continuing support of the WebKit (for free) are priceless.
Of course it benefits Apple… and you can’t blame ’em.
This is subtle advertising that won’t make the mainstream press but will have a nice impact on developers.
I wish they did it more often.
We all applaud
Jb
Who is, generally speaking, a WebKit contributor?
Those that have contributed code to the Apple side or also the main KHTML developers?
yeah, i wonder abou that too.
What a crappy prize.
Nice apple,
Good developers = Good software
and also Happy (Appreciated) Developers = Good Software
Edited 2006-02-10 20:59
I thought webkit was rather semi-amiably divorced from KHTML at this point. So it’s probably those that have been contributing to WebKit directly.
I thought webkit was rather semi-amiably divorced from KHTML at this point.
No, that has been an intermediate problem. The two developer teams are working on merging their code differences as much as possible to allow future extensions to be more or less copied over.
I actually guess that some of the KHTML and KJS developers are part of the twelve lucky ones
The two developer teams are working on merging their code differences as much as possible to allow future extensions to be more or less copied over.
This is also my understanding. I remember when Open Source community got mad at Apple for dumping all their KHTML code changes in KDE’s lap with the bare minimum of documentation. While there was nothing legally wrong with this, a little more was expected from a company with a moto of “Think Different”.
Anyways, they have made amends, and this is renewed colaboration, if I am not mistaken, should be a part of what will make KDE 4 something to keep your eye on.
I think its important to note that Apple doesn’t want you to keep your eye on KDE4, and from what I have seen, they haven’t done anything to improve the process… they are just continuing to keep their code forked and developing without helping KDE very much. Its a bit of a sad situation. Its unfortunate that Apple’s slogan “think different” also means thinking different from the companies which have become good contributors over the years to open source (novell for example)… meanwhile, Apple still refuses to release ANY software for Linux. You can’t use iTunes, Quicktime, etc. Apple doesn’t even recognize its existance anywhere on its site. Apple has the ignorant “whats linux?” attitude. Infact, thats the exact response I got from Apple support when they said that Quicktime works on both Macs and PCs and I asked them when there would be a Linux version… they basically told me Linux does not exist.
from what I have seen, they haven’t done anything to improve the process.
They have made improvements on the WebKit process, even bigger than I thought they were willing to. They have made their code publicly available from cvs, as they should have done much earlier. In stead of that stupid code dump policy, that’s no way to do opensource development. And the impressive part, at least one KHTML developer has write access to their cvs server.
I think with Apple and opensource, its this; they want to maintain a reasonable level of control whilst also encouraging some freedom – its trying to find the right balance between a strong direction and allowing people to let their creative juices flow.
But then again, the approach and mishandling is no different to the moves other companies have made when moving their code into the ‘opensource world’ – its a new culture, new atmosphere, and it takes time for a lage organisation to learn the ropes.
“Apple doesn’t even recognize its existance anywhere on its site. Apple has the ignorant “whats linux?” attitude.”
Please…
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aapple.com+linux
Results 1 – 10 of about 127,000 from apple.com for linux.
Bonjour, Shake 4, linux ifdefs, and obligatory how to switch from linux to mac os x.
Now for laughs…
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aapple.com+freebsd
Results 1 – 10 of about 42,900 from apple.com for freebsd
And FreeBSD is heavily being used in Mac OS X! From Google’s point-of-view, I would think Apple does care about linux.
Jon
1) Niether does MSFT (write for LINUX)
2) Quicktime is not strictly *needed* for LINUX; Quicktime is a wrapper for various codecs. One can access, eg H.264 and other flavors of MPEG-4 uisng MPlyaer, no?
3) Most of what I fill mY iPod with comes from around the web; rather little *depends* on having iTunes.
You do realise, however, that nothing actually ever stopped KDE from simply dropping their code, or simply applying the added features they developed to webkit and use the webkit as the new KHTML – sorry, correction, apart from GCC not including Objective-C++, but even so, had the move been made, GCC would have been given a good reason to merge Objective-C++ into the mainline GCC development.
As for KHTML, its great to see it moving forward, and I’d like to eventually see it being used for just a library for Linux/UNIX; porting it to Windows with a nice win32 front end would do wonders and hopefully pull even more developers into the stable.
You do realise, however, that nothing actually ever stopped KDE from simply dropping their code, or simply applying the added features they developed to webkit and use the webkit as the new KHTML – sorry, correction, apart from GCC not including Objective-C++
It it had been that simple they probably would have done just that. But the problem was that Apple was using Apple-specific APIs, so the KDE developers would have had to either rewrite those bits to use QT (very difficult without much documentation) or implement an emulation layer for those API calls (recipe for a maintenance nightmare).
Apple forked KHTML and released there changes to a version of KHTML that was over 6 months out of date. The code was impossible to merge as the KHTML devs already implemented many of the features of WebCore and the code was highly incompatible. It also had a lot of Apple specific stuff. In other words, they maybe could take some stuff out of it by going through tons of lines to figure out what it did with no comments, but thats all they could do without throwing out 7 months or so of great KHTML development and instead spending that time forking WebCore again to reimplement Apple-specific parts.
Where is the thank you from http://dot.kde.org?
The team was quick to whine during the big fiascal but not to write a small commentary on this show of appreciation by Apple to those that do a damn fine job?
…I thought there was an article recently about current CVS of KHTML being almost the same as Webcore?