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by doe88 4820 days ago
This is a fallacious argument in this context, this is a pretext, that's why I used the word 'hypocrisy'. And also I really think that a so called 'diversity' of implementations of open source projects may only really be sustainable for large companies with big resources to do things on their own and know they don't need to rely on anybody. But ask yourself, now, what if Apple decided that for being competitive with Google they must do the same thing and ditch everything that don't suit to their plans? And what if Samsung does the same and Blackberry and so on... would it be great for diversity? Would it be great for small vendors? I don't think so. Excuse me but in this case I don't praise this kind of diversity.

Edit: I didn't know I replied to a Google employee, just s/Google/your company/ in my post.
2 comments
jmillikin 4820 days ago 

  > But ask yourself, now, what if Apple decided that for
  > being competitive with Google they must do the same
  > thing and ditch everything that don't suit to their
  > plans?
They did, remember? WebKit was an open-source rendering engine that Apple secretly forked, worked on in private, and then released as a new project. At the time, people were quite upset that Apple hadn't simply adopted an extant dominant open-source engine (Gecko).

Looking back, Apple's choice to go their own way was obviously beneficial both for themselves and for the web in general.

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lawnchair_larry 4820 days ago
How has history proven that what Apple did was "obviously" better than using Gecko?
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pyre 4820 days ago
I think that the point being made is that we now have 3 popular rendering engines loose on the web: WebKit, Trident, and Gecko. This diversity and competition gives us a much better ecosystem to work within than even the dual culture of IE* / Gecko.

* Trident might not even exist if not for the significant competition (or the name might not be the same were history changed).

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doe88 4820 days ago
@jmillikin

I remember they contributed back to the KHTML project by releasing a patch. Do your employer plan to release a patch back to Webkit? And you also seem to forget that back then there wasn't as many small vendors as there are today. Gecko never was much used outside of Mozilla, which is of course very different for Webkit.

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makomk 4820 days ago
Errrm, Apple did the bare minimum required by the license of the KHTML code they were using, which was to release the changes they'd made to KHTML as a single blob. It looks like Google has already done more to contribute back than Apple originally did.
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doe88 4819 days ago
Would be great if they answered this question though https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2013-April/024...
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