Re: So what is happening with Safari Patches?

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Re: So what is happening with Safari Patches?
by Eric Laffoon on Wednesday 06/Oct/2004, @23:33

> Interesting way for a company to take advantage of open source.

> Take a (l)gpl'ed product and fork it so fast that the original developers can't keep up with it.

I don't think that's a fair evaluation. Ask some rational questions. What is Apple supposed to do after they have made their changes? Wait for KDE developers to catch up before the make any more? There are several things we want from webcore to use with Quanta, but it just looks like a long time before a lot of them can be brought in and it's no simple merge.

Open source is a marvelous thing, but unfortunately for a lot of people it's a mythical concept that works this way... Because the source is open zillions of developers constantly review and update it. Of course a "zillion" is a fictitious number and therein lies the truth. A remarkably small number of developers, as in a tiny fraction of a percent of all users, do an amazing job of producing software. Even the percent who "contribute" by griping is remarkably small. ;-)

Consider the numbers... KDE has millions of users, hundreds of developers and how many core applications? Do the math. Better yet learn to code. ;-)

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Re: So what is happening with Safari Patches?
by Carewolf on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @02:46

The nice thing would be to send the changes back as a series of patches, or atleast keep openly track of changes in their release, so we had a kind of changelog. Currently we have no idea of whether or not a bug is fixed in WebCore, or when we spot a change what is supposed to be good for.

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Re: So what is happening with Safari Patches?
by superstoned on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @03:39

I dont understand why they dont help... they where quite cooperative, the first time they did sent patches or at least a comprehensive list of changes, did they?

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Re: So what is happening with Safari Patches?
by anon on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @06:57

They still release a comprehensive set of changes in each version of Webcore, but most things rely on other things to be merged. And merging is very hard to do right without breaking stuff. A shared code base would probably been the best thing to do in hindsight. @ a khtml.org or something.

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Re: So what is happening with Safari Patches?
by brockers on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @08:35

So does this mean that the Safari/khtml thing is screwed? Do we bascially have two seperate code bases that don't crossover at all? What need to happen to get these two groups working together again? Gecko is ok, but from a design standpoint khtml is far far superior and I just hate to see what could be one of our best deverlopment resources waisted.

Bobby

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Re: So what is happening with Safari Patches?
by Datschge on Thursday 07/Oct/2004, @16:44

Pretty much all developers working on KHTML also/mainly work on other areas within KDE, while KHTML definitely needs someone to focus on it full time (and doing so within KDE, not for Apple). When looking on CIA (see some posts further down this page) the only one who seems to work on KHTML exclusively is Germain Garand, someone should hire him to let him do so full time. =)

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Re: So what is happening with Safari Patches?
by Mike Hearn on Friday 08/Oct/2004, @08:12

I think it is a very fair evaluation, to be honest. It's well known how to have corporate hackers work well with volunteer hackers, it's done in open source projects like the kernel, Wine, and yes KDE/GNOME all the time. You send back patches in series, with a detailed changelog. You should develop those patches in the open, with discussion on the mailing lists.

In other words, you do not do what Apple has done - effectively fork the codebase in secret and then give the original developers a huge unworkable patch dump. I've had to deal with such things from TransGaming in Wine and they're basically useless, especially as often they duplicate code already written by volunteers and usually nobody understands the changes except developers who aren't in the community. The way CodeWeavers does it is *much* preferable (disclaimer: I am biased, I work for CodeWeavers. But I wouldn't work for them if they didn't interact with the community well).

To be frank it doesn't surprise me that KHTML has forked, Apple clearly have no interest in working with the community on it and demonstrated this from the start. They fulfill their legal obligations and do no more.

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