For Apple Apologetics (And Sour Grapes), Apply Within

The latest storm in the Apple world is the somewhat overplayed conflict that Apple has had with the KHTML developers over Safari, the high-profile web browser project developed by Apple that was, ostensibly, supposed to be the showcase of how Apple liked to play nice with the OSS (open source software) community. Trouble is, the KHTML people are annoyed at the fact that changes posted by David Hyatt (the lead developer of Safari) are so hard to integrate back into Konqueror, the open-source KDE-based counterpart of Safari that they just don't bother trying. Now, Firefox lead developer Ben Goodger's weighed in with...well, a justification of what Apple's doing - something which has raised the ire of people who, well, don't seem to really understand what either side is saying.

Hyatt himself pretty much lays it all out: the changes that he submitted to the KDE/KHTML developers were changes made to WebCore, not KHTML; KHTML is the rendering engine behind Konqueror, and WebCore, the rendering engine behind Safari, is based off of it: Webcore != KHTML. The Safari team, and Apple, have effectively forked the KHTML code, in the same way that Firefox, has, effectively, been a fork of the browser code of Mozilla. Just like how Mozilla and Firefox are two totally different web browser projects that have originated from a common ancestor (heh), Safari and Konqueror have the same relationship. And like Mozilla and Firefox, they're two totally different projects.

The trouble here is that people seem to think that Safari is just an Apple-branded version of Konqueror, when the reality really couldn't be farther from the truth. That's essentially what Hyatt is saying, but the media has of course blown this totally out of proportion, and has failed to see what the fact of the matter truly is.

Goodger's comments do raise a good point; Apple's "vision", for better or for worse, is one that is user-centric, in stark comparison to OSS projects like Konqueror, which arguably are more developer-centric. I don't buy into the interpretation of one comment from a KHTML developer which was construed to say "We don't care about users, only developers", but its just that like most OSS projects, the fact of the matter is that developers are front and centre, not users.

So what ultimately is my take on this, as a user? People point to the relationship between Apple and the GCC OSS community as an example of How Things Ought to be, and I'd generally agree. I don't know as much as I should, but I suspect that Hyatt's working method differs enough from the KDE developers that for either one to shift their method of working on the code to the other's methods would just be too much to ask. Maybe there's more, but beyond that I really can't say.

I think that the real fault lies with the media and the pundits who've really lost sight of what's really going on here. As always they've turned a molehill into a mountain, and as a result, Apple's relationships with its developers has the potential to suffer some degree of appreciable damage. And that's really too bad.