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by ninedays 2492 days ago
> There is no open source in iOS and the entire platform has an anti open source culture.

People really have short memory and unfortunately have too much biais to even make a simple Google Search to get some informations. Trying to define this as "one is better than the others related to X" is childish at best.

https://developer.apple.com/opensource/

Warm vibes,

1 comments

WebKit, you mean the source code that was forked from KHTML and because it was GPL, Apple would then do incomprehensible code dumps to comply with the law? WebKit that was forked by Google because they couldn't collaborate with Apple?

I'm glad that they ended up releasing it, but to show that as an example of open source from Apple ... indeed shows that people have short memories ;-)

> WebKit that was forked by Google because they couldn't collaborate with Apple?

You say "they couldn't collaborate" I say "Google really wanted to compete".

Remember that it was Google who decided to perform a fork because they had a different approach than Apple for how "multi-process" should be implemented. Google had an implementation that they didn't want to integrate into the Webkit branch - hence the Blink fork.[1]

Also Apple would have been happy if they could use the Google's implementation instead of using their own - they said that repeatedly [2]

You can also find more details of the story here. It looks more and more obvious that the decision to create a WebKit fork was more political than technical : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5490242

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/05/blink-goo...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5490661

I am not defending Google. Google is really shitty in terms of open source collaboration. Many of Google's OSS efforts are OSS just in license, but not in spirit.

All I'm saying is that Apple's WebKit is not a good example of OSS and if that's what you have to show for iOS, then it's a really sad state of affairs.