Blink is the hostile fork of WebKit. And you would not like if any corporations did this to your Open Source project; on HN alone I see a small army's worth of people who bitch about websites built for Chrome but not Safari. That's how Konquerer users felt back when Apple didn't collaborate downstream, so turnabout is truly fair play.
> That's how Konquerer users felt back when Apple didn't collaborate downstream, so turnabout is truly fair play.
You are rewriting history here. The main KHTML developers were hired by Apple and Konqueror got on with the new engine. There was no fuss and no drama.
The reason why it’s fair play is that the license allows it. Google is no white knight out to avenge the poor KHTML users from 2003.
I think there was some perceived initial concern about the patches provided by Apple to KHTML in so much as they now had to merge a huge amount of code into the project and much of it was (IIRC) lots and lots of ifdef statements.
Yes, but the main issue was the volume and frequency of patches, not that the patches were intentionally hard to upstream (you can always complain about style, though). I don’t have the links handy right now but I remember the discussions amongst the KHTML devs at the time.
Okay. Just make sure nobody searches up the KDE blogs from back then, it might derail your argument.
> Google is no white knight out to avenge the poor KHTML users from 2003.
Nope. They're here to molest your runtime. Portions of are not expected to survive the assault.
Normally, this is where I'd say "us Linux and Mac users should join arms and fight the corporations!" but that bridge has been burning for almost 20 years now. These days I'm quite content with Safari's fate regardless of how cruel it's treated; after all, the license allows it. No fuss, and no drama. Healthy as a horse, honest.
The developers moved on, that’s all, that’s why there was no fork and no momentum behind the original KHTML library. WebKit became quickly the gold standard at the time of the Acid tests, replaced KHTML in most places and nobody looked back. It remained functionally identical, except that it had orders of magnitude more resources than before.
There’s more blood and drama every time there’s a GTK update.
> These days I'm quite content with Safari's fate regardless of how cruel it's treated; after all, the license allows it. No fuss, and no drama.
Well, bitching is not very productive. We can regret a Blink monoculture, but it would have been exactly the same if Chrome kept using WebKit (if anything, that would have been worse), or if they switched to Gecko. The drama with Chrome has nothing to do with who forked whom.
> There was no fuss and no drama.
I didn't write my initial comment here to relitigate this, but you are absolutely the one rewriting history. I remember reading about it because I was a KDE user at the time. But sources are easy to find; there are blog posts and press articles cited in Wikipedia. Here's a sample from one:
> Do you have any idea how hard it is to be merging between two totally different trees when one of them doesn't have any history? That's the situation KDE is in. We created the khtml-cvs list for Apple, they got CVS accounts for KDE CVS. What did we get? We get periodical code bombs in the form of them releasing WebCore. Many of us wanted to even sign NDA's with Apple to at least get access to the history of their internal vcs and be able to be merging the changes incrementally, the way they can right now. Nothing came out of it. They do the very, very minimum required by LGPL.
> And you know what? That's their right. They made a conscious decision about not working with KDE developers. All I'm asking for is that all the clueless people stop talking about the cooperation between Safari/Konqueror developers and how great it is. There's absolutely nothing great about it. In fact "it" doesn't exist. Maybe for Apple - at the very least for their marketing people. Clear?
https://web.archive.org/web/20100529065425/http://www.kdedev...
From another, the very developer they later hired described the same frustrations in more polite language:
> As is somewhat well known, Apple's initial involvement in the open-source project known at KHTML was tense. KHTML developers like Lars were frustrated with Apple's bare-bones commitment to contributing their changes back to the project. "It was hard, and in some cases impossible to pick apart Apple's changes and apply them back to KHTML," he told us. Lars went on to say, "This kind of development is really not what I wanted to do. Developers want to spend their time implementing new features and solving problems, not cherry picking through giant heaps of code for hours at a time."
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/06/ars-at-wwdc-intervie...
This uncooperative situation persisted for the first 3 or 4 years of the lifetime of Apple's fork, at least.
> The reason why it’s fair play is that the license allows it. Google is no white knight out to avenge the poor KHTML users from 2003.
You're right about this, though.
Anyway, there's no need to deny or erase this in order to defend Apple. Just pointing to other open-source projects they released or worked with in the intervening years, as many other commenters have done in reply to my initial comment, is sufficient!
> And you would not like if any corporations did this to your Open Source project; on HN alone I see a small army's worth of people who bitch about websites built for Chrome but not Safari.
Those are unrelated things.