No, Apple is plenty flakey in lots of areas
but on this particular issue - I don't think its fair.
I work with the Safari developers on compatibility issues and I know them as people. Its a little harder to think of people you "know" being evil than it is to think of corporations being evil.
They want to do the right thing. They have an employer and customer base to please too.
Hyatt writes: [link|http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2005_04.html|http://weblogs.mozil...ives/2005_04.html]
"For what it's worth, the patches I posted are to WebCore, which consists of both KHTML and KWQ (our port of Qt). They are posted to illustrate all the WebCore bugs that had to be fixed in Safari to pass the Acid2 test. They are not solely KHTML patches. The antialiasing bug was in KWQ, and so doesn't even apply to KHTML. The better object element support necessarily involves KWQ as well, since the plugin code is (obviously) platform-specific.
What do you think Apple could be doing better here? Comment or trackback. I'll read it all."
And one of the complaints is:
"The annoying part is not that Apple don't cooperate as much as they could. They are actually helpfull in answering questions and _tries_ at least to separate OS X specific features in the code (allthough they fail miserably at it). No, our problem are users who think Apple does more and underestimate the effort it takes for us to implement patches from WebCore. We are doing this for free and for fun, all we really want is appreciation for our effort.
In December 2004 I "ported" the CSS text-shadow property from WebCore. I put ported in quotes because the only thing ported was the code to parse the property. In the rendering Apple had created an extension to KWQ (their Qt) that used an OS X call to draw the shadow. This meant that to "port" it I had to write the shadow drawing myself. "
So the complaint isn't that Apple doesn't give back its stuff. Its that people don't appreciate the amount of work the Konqueror people still have to do because their target OS has less to work with.
But what was Hyatt to do? Write his own shadow code when he already has code in his target OS to implement it? That would be bloody stupid and I can't blame him for taking the short cut as I would have done exactly the same thing. (Actually, I did exactly that sort of thing with ObjectiveCLIPS - lots of ObjectiveC/Apple specific code was added to a base open source library - I forked it to make it more useful - so sue me).
No, instead their response was to listen and then open it all up. [link|http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2005_06.html#008281|http://weblogs.mozil...05_06.html#008281]
So lets recap - the real problem is the ungrateful Konqueror community.
"When I said "all we want is appreciation" I didn't mean "Look at me, I am so good.". I was hinting at users who are down right rude.
Look at bugs.kde.org and you can find many Konqueror bugs where the users are telling us how incredible lazy and lame we are because we don't just copy all the shit Apple is doing "for us"."
Fucking ungrateful linux users looks more like the correct root cause to me.
I can't comment on other open source efforts at Apple but I've been in the middle of this one and its not Apple's fault.
