Intel has been contributing to Chakra, the JavaScript engine for Microsoft Edge (and previously Internet Explorer), since 2012, bringing their expertise in web runtime development and JIT code generation. Recently, Intel expanded its efforts by contributing to the larger Microsoft Edge codebase, specifically focused in the areas of graphics and performance optimizations. Intel has been a major contributor to open source browser engines such as WebKit, Blink, and Gecko, and with our expanded collaboration, they are now directly contributing to the Microsoft Edge codebase to deliver an improved browsing experience for Windows 10.
While this is very interesting, instead of working with just a few partners, Microsoft should’ve just opened the code for their new rendering engine altogether. At this point, it makes little sense to keep this kind of important code closed.
When it comes to open source, the new Microsoft is only a little bit new.
Like with Windows, I’ve heard it said they have too much licensed code to be able to open it up fully. IRIC, OS/2 had the same problem.
Licensed code may be a problem with IT, but Edge is supposedly new code. They could, as Mozilla did long ago, write it from the scratch with all new, and license clean, code.
Edge is not new code at all. It is just a part of the Internet Explorer codebase (arguably the newer) that doesn’t have to take care of being backwards compatible/legacy.
The IE/Edge codebases might diverge from now on but both will receive new code and contain old code.
IE: For business that depends on things to keep working the way the work now
Edge: For consumers that want things to work the way they should work
Edited 2015-05-25 09:14 UTC
According to Wikipedia “[EdgeHTML] It is a fork of Trident that has removed all legacy codes of older versions of Internet Explorer and rewritten majority of codes with web standards and interoperability with other modern browsers in mind.” That sounds like the perfect opportunity to get your license (open or not) clean.
A opportunity they most likely missed. Albeit i do recognize that MS is doing quite a good job to modernize his own corporate culture lately, sometimes this new culture stumbles on practical problems created by the former culture.
They simple don’t have any reason to open it. So they don’t have the need to clean the code from cumbersome thirty party licenses. Had the engine been done from scratch, it would have been easier for some OSS evangelist in their development team to convince MS to go down that path, because they would not have the need to use man-hours (money) to rewrite working code. It’s hard to convince any manager of the need to rewrite code that is not broken out of a ideology, you know.
I do hope that I’m wrong on this one, although. A new open engine would be great.
I’ll probably get all kinds of hate for sdaying this but screw it, as far as MSFT is concerned opening the code would most likely do them little to no good and a LOT of harm!
Lets face it, the guys that typically contribute to FOSS projects? Would be more likely to throw their PCs into the sea and become beggars than contribute to a MSFT project. Hell go to a site with a heavy programmer base like Slashdot and mention MSFT in an article on FOSS and see the pure venomous hate you get, you’d think the company was run on the corpses of baby seals!
OTOH you have every blackhat and script kiddie targeting anything MSFT because they know whatever comes default in a MSFT OS? Will be used by a LOT of users that have zero clue about being safe on the net. Like it or not this is the side effect of having a popular and easy to use OS, just look at all the Android malware out there. Unless you take admin rights away from the owner (ala Apple) to where it can only run what has been vetted by the parent company? You are gonna get malware and anything that is default will…well by default be the thing most likely used by those who do not know anything else and those are your most juicy targets as it is they who are most likely to fall for tricks like fake security popups, malicious downloads, etc.
So for MSFT the upside would be extremely low and the downside high.
You are missing the point of this discussion: it was about how Intel contributed to Edge and how such external contributions (from corporations, not from FOSS developers) could be easier with an open project with a clean license.
Does anyone know what kind of contributions Intel has made to other browsers?
From the “Companies and Organizations that have contributed to WebKit” wiki page at https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/Companies%20and%20Organizations…
Intel contributes code to WebKit EFL, WebCore and other parts of the WebKit code base. This includes work on new functionality as well as bug fixes. Intel is also maintaining the official ​EFL 64bit debug build bot.
.. back in the day when they released the 20k LOC for the kernel that they had invented FLOSS, right? Or so was their spin.
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