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Re: OT: acid test..
by Derek Kite on Friday 29/Apr/2005, @08:31
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To suggest that khtml is or was dying is a troll. It isn't and wasn't.
A little history here. Apple is doing the minimum it can to fulfil it's license operations. That is their privilege and right.
Apple announced Safari with much fanfare after working on it for around a year. They based their work on an earlier version of khtml, did their changes, integrating the improvements from the khtml team over that time. All in secret. Then they released the software, and as per lgpl, released the source code. Already at that point the code bases had diverged, some due to the removal of any Qt stuff, and over that year considerable progress had been made on khtml without Apple's contribution.
Many improvements were merged into khtml and that work continues. The merging consists of taking a tarball, figuring out the differences from the previous one, matching that to the changelog, factoring out the Apple specific api stuff, and then changing khtml. Repeated requests have been made to have access to the source management tree so that at least patches could be extracted for specific issues. But no.
Apple can do what it wants. Fine. They have essentially taken on the development and maintenance of a browser and html engine. Any of the economics of FOSS don't apply anymore here. They are on their own. Any goodwill that may have come from this decision is gone. The license responsabilities are an expense without any of the benefits.
Khtml development continues and will continue with or without Apple. Maybe they figured that eveyone using KDE would drop it for the vastly better MAC os, all the while kissing their feet with admiration and devotion, and continue to improve khtml for Apple's benefit. It hasn't happened that way. When it is no longer in Apple's interest to spend the money to maintain Safari, they will discontinue development. Apple is in a situation where the squeeze is coming from both sides. Microsoft is again taking interest in the browser. The free desktops are grabbing the Microsoft castoffs, or at least a percentage of them. The standard zero sum game of the software business is at play. I ran across an interesting comment the other day. Two three years ago at the Linux conferences most people were using Apple products. That is no longer the case due to the improvements in Linux and the desktops.
What Apple does is up to them. I really don't care for them or their products, and even less so seeing how they work with the free software community. I don't need to buy their stuff, and they have given me a reason why I shouldn't. The odd thing is that they would have benefitted from a little openness.
Derek |
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