One of the interesting back-and-forths about this releationship between Apple and KHTML's dev team can be found at Dave Hyatt's "Surfin' Safari" blog.

Dave Hyatt recently took on the Web Standards Project Acid2 test, and within 2 weeks managed to make Safari/WebCore fully standards compliant in regards to the test. Unfortunately, folks not in the know about development thought this would mean an instant patch to KHTML, and started voicing resentment at the KHTML developers for being so slow in implementing WebCore's changes.

The KHTML devs penned a rather angry notice towards those folks, letting them know just how little of the WebCore patches they could actually use when porting those changes back into KHTML. Part of the problem is that Apple isn't "playing well with others" in releasing it's patches in a timely and organized manner,but also because WebCore links to an adaptor library and to MacOS GUI hooks for certain effects, things that the KHTML team have to rewrite from scratch.

I hope Apple manages to work this out. Apple has benefitted well by Open Source technologies, and it would be a loss to both the community, and future development at Apple, if they don't reciprocate in a way that benefits the community as the community benefits Apple.

So much for Apple's support of open standards.

It's still better than Microsoft support of open standards.

"Damned with faint praise"

Apple, the new Microsoft

...I hope that Microsoft will never be substituted for Apple! It doesn't matter who'll have the monopoly - it is bad either way. The important thing right now is that there is only two players who can do something about the near-monopoly - Apple and the open source community...

Oh please. You people obviously don't know too many software developers. I can gurantee Apple is just getting fed up with the whiney open source guys.

"Wah, wah Apple made a fix that we don't deem suitable for merging into our codebase!"

Ok so be happy that you're at least aware of the bug and go come up with your own fix. It sounds like enough process wasn't documented ahead of time to define how these types of situaitons would work. Most likely because Apple didn't have to. The KHTML guys probably didn't care since they probably aren't used to bothering with all the constricting formalities of proper engineering process.

Without Apple, KHTML has nothing. So hopefully they can suck it up and work with Apple to develop a system that allows corporate and open source teams to work together. Maybe Apple can spring to send them all to a nice Business 101 class.

Apple and the open source guys live in two different world. Open source volunteer programmers can take all the time they want in fixing a problem where Apple has commercial users that want the fix ASAP. Apple is also going to do a lot of work integrating Safari into OS X that will be of little or no value to the open source group. No big deal as the open source community is not forced to use anything Apple gives them. This is just the difference between volunteer efforts and running a business.

Huh? Isn't that backwards? I believe you mean, "without KHTML, Apple has no Safari." Let's not forget who took what from whom.

I, too, would be a tad annoyed if someone took my work, hijacked it, and profited from it. Oh yeah, that's Business 101.

The problem isn't that Apple isn't willing to help KHTML, but Webcore diverged so far from the original KHTML base that providing the enhancements would be a major effort.

Oh I'm sorry what's this story about again? Apple pondering ditching KHTML for something else? Oh so then lets see.. we have KHTML off on its own getting crushed by Firefox and Apple going on it's merry way.

The KHTML people were oh so happy when Apple "took their work". Suddenly KHTML had a major player behind it. But of course they didn't stop to think about what it meant. They just want everything their way. No compromising on the fact that this major player is a corporation and has certain rules they are constrained by.

Another part of the article I really liked was when some of the open source guys were upset they had to sign NDAs to look at Apple code. DER!!! These are the kind of people Apple has to deal with?! Good lord!

"Huh? Isn't that backwards? I believe you mean, 'without KHTML, Apple has no Safari.' Let's not forget who took what from whom. I, too, would be a tad annoyed if someone took my work, hijacked it, and profited from it. Oh yeah, that's Business 101."

Please allow me to then to quietly laugh at you for letting someone else make a profit off your product, rather then you yourself making a profit off it.

Really, it's as simple as that. Your "payment" if you are in Open Source is the knowledge that other people are benifitting from your ideas- that your solution is helping people. WHO benifits, and WHAT it helps them do is not something you can control, and you know that up front before you even contribute.

So why wouldn't you be HAPPY about that,

It's no wonder Apple is moving away from the Open Source community. Half the time all they are dealing with is a bunch of whiny bitches. On one hand you want to be all altrusitic and give your stuff away, and on the other you get upset when a company uses its financial resources to improve upon your idea and distribute it to more of the world. But think a moment- isn't your purpose to bring people value? If you get some big player like Apple, who takes your solution and runs with it, in actually MUCH MORE people will benifit from your solution then if it sat there on your computer doing nothing. Wouldn't you gain more satisfaction seeing MORE people benfiting from your stuff then less? Rather then spoutting off some crap like "waaah, waaah, they stole my idea!", you might consider the fact that you yourself learned from other people in your life, and that other people will learn from what you contribute. A cycle that brings more good things into the world, instead of less.

It's not some company's fault that you don't value your own stuff well enough to charge money for it.

GPL means _ANYBODY_ can fork your code. Deal with it.

You know from reading this thread & putting it together with my knowledge, Apple could do something to REALLY put Linux in a good competitive spot against Microsquish, and STILL leave itself in a good competitive spot:

Open up WebCore to Open Source. That way Linux would get the better browsing experience, giving it a good leap forward in usability & rendering... making it that much more usable in enterprise & home environments.
(Yes Yes I know a lot of WebCore is MacOS Specific... Open up some of that too... just enough to make WebCore Mac AND OpenSource the best browsing experience.)

Just my 2Ñž
John Boyarsky
RSMS ISS Guy, Tutor & Dirt Burner
Fairbanks, AK

"WebCore is a framework for Mac OS X that takes the cross-platform KHTML library (part of the KDE project) and combines it with an adapter library specific to WebCore called KWQ that makes it work with Mac OS X technologies."

Uh... so an OS X-specific version of KHTML should be open sourced? Did I miss something? Is Apple going to open source the rest of their UI to go along with Darwin? I didn't see that press release.

Perhaps C|net is at fault here, but I think the TMO version could have corrected the misconceptions. The real story here is that KHTML and WebCore (Apple's version) have diverged to the point of a de facto fork, creating animosity that is pushing things closer to an official fork. It doesn't sound like the fault is 100% Apple's -- the KDE people have rejected at least some of Apple's patches, for reasons they believe to be valid, and Apple hasn't seen fit to remove those patches from their tree.

At the same time, there appears to be some effort to resolve the differences between KHTML and WebCore. Naturally, Apple is going to start with "why don't you ditch KHTML and replace it with WebCore?" That's Negotiation 101. Apple's engineers almost certainly didn't expect the KDE folks to take that offer. Whether they actually resolve their differences, or what form some resolution might take, remains to be seen.

"One thing you may want to consider eventually is back-porting (WebCore) to work on top of (KDE), and merging your changes into that," he wrote. "I think the Apple trees have seen a lot more change since the two trees diverged, although both have useful changes. We'd be open to making our tree multi-platform."
This statement is "conveniently omitted" by the Apple bashers, when it makes things clear that Apple is sticking to its part of the license, it clearly and ambiguously says "We'd be open to making our tree multi-platform", which is a major undertaking on its part. The ball is now in the camp of the KDE people. Instead of whining, they only have to make a decision: join Apple developers and keep improving their code, or let Apple ride on its fork. When they rejected Apple's patches, they may have had good reason to do so, but Apple had never promised to drop them in case of disagreement … they were still free to use them in their own work, and this is where the fork appeared. Now, we hear about the ones bitching, but an interesting questions is : is it unanimous, or is it a vocal minority ? Obviously, it'll be hard to find out …

Despite using a significant amount of open source software in their products, Apple is not now, nor has it ever been, an open source company. Apple does what it needs to do to win in the market against Windows and Linux. If the KHTML guys don't like it, they should not have licensed their code in such a way as to allow Apple to use it. Apple owes these people NOTHING, and that is as it should be.

Apple is not a charity. It owes these guys nothing. If they cannot keep up with Apple's development, then they should leave the market.

Safari is an exercise in redundancy. Browser choice is about as important as "media choice". Why does apple need its own browser at all? To increase the development overhead of every web developer by rendering content differently than the other browsers