[jxi]

Wow, that is the most ridiculous thing I've ever read. Pretty sure it's a troll post trying to make frontpage with sensationalist bullshit.

For example, he claims it's a political move, yet the official FAQ lists many practical reasons for the move. Also, he says it will fragment the web: half the comments in this very thread explains why it won't. Then he says it's not open source because it's hard to understand how an HTML parser works? wtf?

[coldtea]

>For example, he claims it's a political move, yet the official FAQ lists many practical reasons for the move.

So what? They couldn't make up excuses?

>Also, he says it will fragment the web: half the comments in this very thread explains why it won't.

And others argue why it will.

>Then he says it's not open source because it's hard to understand how an HTML parser works? wtf?

A complex multi-million line project representing 1000s of manyears of work, essentially needs dedicated full-time highly skilled engineers to be forked. It might be technically "open source", but it's not bazaar-style open source, the way something like a simpler program or web framework is.

Even a highly skilled C++ programmer has to spend months to understand the WebKit codebase, much less do any pervasive changes or take over the code. This kind of devotion cannot be sustained by unpaid volunteers. That makes it essentially un-forkable unless some other company can devote resources to it.

Highly complex codebases seldom progress much as community projects after the original company has abandoned the paid contributors (see the lackluster Gnome development the last 10 years, after all the late 199x early 200x backers backed down, Open/Libre Offices --haven't progressed much from 2000's SUN's offering--, etc). And those are the cool cases, others die completely or languish (e.g Hazel's Nautilus, or Evolution).

[dragonwriter]

> A complex multi-million line project representing 1000s of manyears of work, essentially needs dedicated full-time highly skilled engineers to be forked.

WebKit, from which Google Blink was forked includes dedicated, full-time, highly-skilled engineers from Apple and elsewhere that could incorporate material from Blink -- as well as all the other browser projects which might want to use material from WebKit (pre- or post-fork) or Blink; so the situation with regard to "open source"-ness is the same as it was before the fork, even with this "it needs full-time highly-skilled engineers" to use it proviso.

> Highly complex codebases seldom progress much as community projects after the original company has abandoned the paid contributors

Which is one of the reasons that forks between projects where both sides of the fork are paying contributors and the fork results in both sides being able to streamline and more efficiently return value to their sponsors (thus, making the sponsorship from both the prime sponsor of the original project and the sponsor that used to pay people to work on that project but which is now sponsoring their own fork more likely to continue) is good, as it puts each post-fork project on a more secure footing than the pre-fork project was.

[tshepang]

Why do you say paid GNOME contributors have been abandoned? Where do you get this idea, and which company are you referring to? Also, what do you mean by "GNOME development is lacklustre"?

[jxi]

> So what? They couldn't make up excuses?

?? If there's practical reasons, then you need to explain why the practical reasons are not strong enough to warrant this? Just look at what was accomplished by this, they were able to delete over 8 million lines of code that was boilerplate.

> And others argue why it will.

Then, it's still not a strong argument against this.

> [snip]

What exactly are you advocating? Look at all the chromium design docs they wrote, and all the code reviews are in the open. If anything, the WebKit reviews are much harder to look through. The rest of your rant is irrelevant. Do you want them to spoon-feed you everything Chromium/Blink engineers do?

You can argue all day if you want, but what exactly are you proposing the alternative is? How does not forking help in any of those?