Filed under: OS, Software, Open Source
Open Source WebKit
When one door closes, another opens, as they say. Dave Hyatt has announced http://webkit.opendarwin.org, the WebKit Open source Project. Apparently, Apple has finally decided to fork from the KHTML project and start their own development branch. The new development site contains the CVS for WebCore and JavaScriptCore--the open source khtml and kjs derivatives, and also the newly open sourced WebKit itself, the Objective-C WebCore API that Apple web apps are built on. Patches have already been submitted.The timing certanily helps alleviate some of the "Apple is turning to the dark side" fears. I can't say that it worked completely, but kudos to Apple for reaffirming their commitment to the open source community.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
_victor said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
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?
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Jay Savage said 4:20PM on 6-16-2005
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.
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