Open Source WebKit

I don't know what effect things like this will have on Linux developers in particular, probably not much. The big news for Linux this week, I think, was the processor annoncement. People will always want to run Linux on Xboxes, but assuming that IBM Cell processors don't make thier way into consumer systems any time soon, the major Linux vendors are no longer looking at supporting PPC into the distant future. That doesn't mean development will end--Linux hackers are all about legacy hardware--just that PPC kernel will get less and less attention, like 68k, AFS, and Vax projects get now--and the main thrust will be toward x86 development. It's probably bad news for Terrasoft (Yellow Dog). What we've really seen, though, is the future of big, cross-platform projects like KDE. The ideal business-F/OSS relationship involves companies that use F/OSS getting involved in development and becoming part of the community so that, for instance, Apple's work on WebKit benefits KHTML. That hasn't worked, though: commercial vendors are too focused on specific optimizations, and rightly so. I think we're going to see more and more companies forking F/OSS projects off of established development lines, and new communities of developers cropping up to support projects with mopre limited scope, like WebKit. Of course, there's nothing stopping the WebKit developers porting it back to qt-based solution. We've seen that to a certain extent with Darwin: it runs in some form on a significant portion of the systems NetBSD supports. But it's no longer recognizably NetBSD. In other words, I don't think it's good or bad, just different.

Does this fuel the fire of assertions like Dvorak is making about Linux vs. MS vs. Apple (and the switch to Intel)? Or is this good news for Linux developers?