Daring Fireball on why Apple won't open source apps

Mungler, I don't think it does.

What Gruber (and Bray) were referring to was the ability to fix/modify a portion of the app that needs improvement. Often, it's a UI thing or something in the preferences. Webkit is just the web-renderrer of Safari, and Safari itself is not open source -- so if there's something about Safari that needs improvement, developers are unable to do it. Releasing "parts" of an application is _not_ akin to releasing the whole app.

snackcake: thank you for your informed and utterly smart-arsed comment. i am perfectly well aware that webkit != safari, but lets face it, its the guts of it.

my point was that apple *is* active in the opensource community. opensourcing major parts of an application is akin to opening the whole app. obviously they want to keep safari as an entity separate, but given you can download webkit and use it as a browser itself (a browser which looks suspiciously like safari), i think my point stands.

I love DaringFireball. I think Gruber's a genius and find myself regularly laughing out load when I read his articles.

this is bullshit. the new features and code in the apps are so closely tied to the version of osx that comes out that none of the new features would work anyway without massive porting effort, and hell, if people want to go ahead and do that? you think apple would care?

What's next? Asking Adobe and Microsoft to open source all of their apps?

Not sure why most of this site's writers worship this Gruber guy, his stuff's ok but it's not going to change your life or anything.

So, tell us your favorite pundit/writers on Apple/Mac topics?

I think John Gruber usually does a thorough job of clearly and intelligently summarizing interesting points about issues, often in a way that can serve as food for thought in followup discussions. John Siracusa often has a similar "provocative" style I enjoy. Reading them gives me an impression they've put reasonable time and thought into what they're writing, compared to many writers who just redundantly parrot with little or no research. Of course I don't enjoy or agree with everything they write, but they've managed to keep my interest level more consistently above average than others.

I agree completely with Brett. Apple uses its software simply as "bonuses" to their hardware(granted, their amazing bonuses, which in the end makes their hardware that much more attractive to the consumer). Besides, it leaves the OS X software market open to some amazing competition. As compared to say what I've noticed more and more in the Linux community. One application gets all the attention, has all the great features and in the end nothing thats truly new gets brought to the table. Ever. Things like GAIM, GIMP and just about every application bundled with KDE and GNOME come to mind. Whereas on OS X we have killer apps like AdiumX, all the stuff the Panic boys put out, the Omni gang, etc etc.

safari isn't open source. webkit is, but it's not an application. you probably would have learned about it if you RTFA.

Well they didn't have a choice by webkit since its based on khtml which is open source as well. And webkit isn't a complete browser, safari is. Webkit is just the rendering engine like Gecko is for firefox/camino.

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