Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 10th Feb 2006 15:28 UTC, submitted by Shane
Apple 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."
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Good for them...
by Kelson on Fri 10th Feb 2006 15:52 UTC
Kelson
Member since:
2005-07-06

Good to see Apple rewarding people who contribute to open source.

Congrats to the developers.

- Kelson

RE: Good for them...
by Brad on Sat 11th Feb 2006 00:56 UTC in reply to "Good for them..."
Brad Member since:
2005-07-06

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.

Classy Move
by BWhaler on Fri 10th Feb 2006 16:21 UTC
BWhaler
Member since:
2005-07-06

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.

There are always two sides to a coin
by mini-me on Fri 10th Feb 2006 16:29 UTC
mini-me
Member since:
2005-07-06

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.

GrapeGraphics Member since:
2005-07-07

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

Contributors
by anda_skoa on Fri 10th Feb 2006 18:11 UTC
anda_skoa
Member since:
2005-07-07

Who is, generally speaking, a WebKit contributor?
Those that have contributed code to the Apple side or also the main KHTML developers?

RE: Contributors
by superstoned on Fri 10th Feb 2006 18:32 UTC in reply to "Contributors"
superstoned Member since:
2005-07-07

yeah, i wonder abou that too.

v Ugh
by MediaSex on Fri 10th Feb 2006 18:35 UTC
Apple
by aaronb on Fri 10th Feb 2006 19:19 UTC
aaronb
Member since:
2005-07-06

Nice apple,

Good developers = Good software

RE: Apple
by vikramsharma on Fri 10th Feb 2006 20:59 UTC in reply to "Apple"
vikramsharma Member since:
2005-07-06

and also Happy (Appreciated) Developers = Good Software

Edited 2006-02-10 20:59

RE: Contributors
by neowolf on Fri 10th Feb 2006 19:46 UTC
neowolf
Member since:
2005-07-06

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.

RE[2]: Contributors
by anda_skoa on Fri 10th Feb 2006 20:05 UTC in reply to "RE: Contributors"
anda_skoa Member since:
2005-07-07

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

RE[3]: Contributors
by gary1979 on Fri 10th Feb 2006 21:02 UTC in reply to "RE[2]: Contributors"
gary1979 Member since:
2006-01-31

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.

RE[4]: Contributors
by aent on Fri 10th Feb 2006 21:42 UTC in reply to "RE[3]: Contributors"
aent Member since:
2006-01-25

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.

RE[5]: Contributors
by Morty on Fri 10th Feb 2006 22:42 UTC in reply to "RE[4]: Contributors"
Morty Member since:
2005-07-06

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.

cykyc Member since:
2006-02-11

"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

RE[5]: Contributors
by TomB7 on Mon 13th Feb 2006 18:09 UTC in reply to "RE[4]: Contributors"
TomB7 Member since:
2006-01-03

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.

RE[4]: Contributors
by kaiwai on Fri 10th Feb 2006 23:44 UTC in reply to "RE[3]: Contributors"
kaiwai Member since:
2005-07-06

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.

RE[5]: Contributors
by nimble on Sat 11th Feb 2006 05:41 UTC in reply to "RE[4]: Contributors"
nimble Member since:
2005-07-06

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).

RE[5]: Contributors
by aent on Sat 11th Feb 2006 06:08 UTC in reply to "RE[4]: Contributors"
aent Member since:
2006-01-25

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.

What? No Dot News article?
by tyrione on Sat 11th Feb 2006 03:02 UTC
tyrione
Member since:
2005-11-21

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?

Hmmm...
by JonO on Sun 12th Feb 2006 16:13 UTC
JonO
Member since:
2005-09-23

...I thought there was an article recently about current CVS of KHTML being almost the same as Webcore?