4 ms·

> Maybe with enough experience you start to realize that it happens close to never that a proprietary fork of an open source project ends up outpacing the origi

by vladd 14y ago

> Maybe with enough experience you start to realize that it happens close to never that a proprietary fork of an open source project ends up outpacing the original project. Apple's MacOS uses BSD code. Safari uses WebKit. In terms of audience outreach, I think both have obviously outpaced the original.

binarycrusader 14y ago
Except that Apple contributes back to both, so while Apple may have "outpaced" the originals, the originals also benefitted from that.
- radarsat1 14y ago
  My understanding was that Apple's big code dump back to WebKit/KHTML was not useful for the KDE project. Apple is following the OSS spirit in a technical sense but is not succeeding in actually working with community contributions in a meaningful way. Feel free to refute me, I have no evidence, but this was my understanding.
  - pygy_ 14y ago
    That was the case for the first two releases. After that the KHTML guys complained vocally (it made Slashdot) and Apple started to release diffs, then completely opened the dev process.
    - gcr 14y ago
      Pardon my ignorence, but what does "completely opened the dev process" mean?
      - TheCoreh 14y ago
        http://trac.webkit.org/ http://trac.webkit.org/
    - radarsat1 14y ago
      Ah good to hear, I never did read about any follow-up after that affair.
pygy_ 14y ago
WebKit is licensed under the LGPL. Apple can't close its source.