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Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

arstechnica.com

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Re: Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

#31

Post by jmillikin »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #25
jmillikin wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has a history of being hostile to the open-source and free-software communities. They release "shared source" code under licenses with onerous terms or encumbered with patents. In the event that an open-source project built on their technology becomes popular, Microsoft attempts to smother it (for example, see their treatment of Mono). I trust Google about as much as I trust Red Hat, Canonical, or any other…

I agree that Microsoft hasn't been trustworthy historically, but how have they smothered Mono? And a counter-example is Samba.

Mono was banned from Microsoft's development conference (see http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2005/Sep-06.html), and faced various sorts of legal threats regarding their implementation of .NET libraries not covered by the ECMA standards process (most notably ASP.NET).

Samba benefited from Microsoft's documentation because Microsoft was forced to disclose it by court order.

Re: Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

#32

Post by coldtea »

baddox wrote: post #19
hp50g wrote: post #12

This reads like: "We're not sharing our stuff anymore as it's costing too much". A the risk of sounding like a paranoid nutbag, with stuff like NaCl, SPDY, Dart etc, it sounds like Google have their own agenda.

Everything is still going to be open source. http://www.chromium.org/blink/developer-faq#TOC-Is-this-goin...

Open source doesn't mean much when it comes to standards.

It's all about who has control of the codebase. If you need to fork or kiss Google's ass to implement changes to it, then it's not really open.

To put it better, it might still be "open source" but it's not a community or a multi-company project.

Re: Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

#33

Post by jmillikin »

coldtea wrote: post #30
mikewest wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web is the common project, right? We're all working together to put together powerful and performant windows into the web, and we work together at places like the W3C and WhatWG to construct a common vision of what that means. Diversity in implementation is a great way of hammering out the exact contours of the standards that govern the common project...

> The web is the common project, right? We're all working together to put together powerful and performant windows into the web, and we work together at places like the W3C and WhatWG to construct a common vision of what that means. No, we (the companies) don't. We work to get web features that we can leverage. If we can get away with them being adopted by everybody but solely controlled by us, it's all the merrier.…

Please tell me who the "we" is in your post, so I can take great care to avoid ever working for them.

Re: Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

#34

Post by doe88 »

doe88 wrote: post #14
mikewest wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web is the common project, right? We're all working together to put together powerful and performant windows into the web, and we work together at places like the W3C and WhatWG to construct a common vision of what that means. Diversity in implementation is a great way of hammering out the exact contours of the standards that govern the common project...

This is a fallacious argument in this context, this is a pretext, that's why I used the word 'hypocrisy'. And also I really think that a so called 'diversity' of implementations of open source projects may only really be sustainable for large companies with big resources to do things on their own and know they don't need to rely on anybody. But ask yourself, now, what if Apple decided that for being competitive with…

@jmillikin

I remember they contributed back to the KHTML project by releasing a patch. Do your employer plan to release a patch back to Webkit? And you also seem to forget that back then there wasn't as many small vendors as there are today. Gecko never was much used outside of Mozilla, which is of course very different for Webkit.

Re: Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

#35

Post by coldtea »

jmillikin wrote: post #22
hp50g wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that actually matter? All these are as well: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd208104.aspx Would you consider building on top of them? No because they are not 100% vendor neutral. They serve the vendor, not the consumers of the technology.

Microsoft has a history of being hostile to the open-source and free-software communities. They release "shared source" code under licenses with onerous terms or encumbered with patents. In the event that an open-source project built on their technology becomes popular, Microsoft attempts to smother it (for example, see their treatment of Mono). I trust Google about as much as I trust Red Hat, Canonical, or any other…

>In the event that an open-source project built on their technology becomes popular, Microsoft attempts to smother it (for example, see their treatment of Mono).

That was in the past -- and probably from some over-jealous layer types at that point in .NETs development.

Since then Microsoft has even been sponsoring Mono/Xamarin events.

Re: Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

#36

Post by hahainternet »

coldtea wrote: post #32
baddox wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is still going to be open source. http://www.chromium.org/blink/developer-faq#TOC-Is-this-goin...

Open source doesn't mean much when it comes to standards. It's all about who has control of the codebase. If you need to fork or kiss Google's ass to implement changes to it, then it's not really open. To put it better, it might still be "open source" but it's not a community or a multi-company project.

> It's all about who has control of the codebase. If you need to fork or kiss Google's ass to implement changes to it, then it's not really open.

So any repositories that don't have public commits enabled are 'not really open'? A ludicrous suggestion.

Re: Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

#37

Post by [deleted] »

coldtea wrote: post #30
mikewest wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web is the common project, right? We're all working together to put together powerful and performant windows into the web, and we work together at places like the W3C and WhatWG to construct a common vision of what that means. Diversity in implementation is a great way of hammering out the exact contours of the standards that govern the common project...

> The web is the common project, right? We're all working together to put together powerful and performant windows into the web, and we work together at places like the W3C and WhatWG to construct a common vision of what that means. No, we (the companies) don't. We work to get web features that we can leverage. If we can get away with them being adopted by everybody but solely controlled by us, it's all the merrier.…

[deleted]

Re: Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

#38

Post by Sanddancer »

hp50g wrote: post #12

This reads like: "We're not sharing our stuff anymore as it's costing too much". A the risk of sounding like a paranoid nutbag, with stuff like NaCl, SPDY, Dart etc, it sounds like Google have their own agenda.

Google forked because of Apple's agenda of ramming everything but the kitchen sink into WebKit, to the detriment of everyone else. By making the boundaries between the various parts of a browser engine -- scripting engine, layout engine, window control -- more explicit, one can more easily experiment with one part without it being a house of cards.

Re: Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

#39

Post by skeletonjelly »

jmillikin wrote: post #31
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that Microsoft hasn't been trustworthy historically, but how have they smothered Mono? And a counter-example is Samba.

Mono was banned from Microsoft's development conference (see http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2005/Sep-06.html ), and faced various sorts of legal threats regarding their implementation of .NET libraries not covered by the ECMA standards process (most notably ASP.NET). Samba benefited from Microsoft's documentation because Microsoft was forced to disclose it by court order.

You're living in the past maan.

Re: Google going its own way, forking WebKit rendering engine

#40

Post by coldtea »

coldtea wrote: post #32
baddox wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is still going to be open source. http://www.chromium.org/blink/developer-faq#TOC-Is-this-goin...

Open source doesn't mean much when it comes to standards. It's all about who has control of the codebase. If you need to fork or kiss Google's ass to implement changes to it, then it's not really open. To put it better, it might still be "open source" but it's not a community or a multi-company project.

>So any repositories that don't have public commits enabled are 'not really open'? A ludicrous suggestion.

WTF, have you even read my comment before answering?

I explicitly said that those: "might still be open source but it's not a community or a multi-company project".

And I never said anything about "public commits" being necessary for something being open, if by that you mean anybody to be able commit arbitrarily.

Restricted commit access is perfectly fine. What I said is not "really open" are projects tightly controlled by a company and mainly developed by its paid employees.

Those are not really open EVEN if they have publicly available source code. Nothing "ludicrous" about it.

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