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Comment by rjzzleep | Hacker News Reader

I guess people have forgotten, that Webkit came out of KHTML from the KDE team and that Apple was a nightmare when it came to contributing code back. They just released a huge dump of the whole thing.

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I remember this... it was just a fork. Projects get forked. It's unfortunate from some perspectives, but from other perspectives you can understand why forks happen.

When you have a long-running fork, especially one that is so active, merging it naturally becomes a nightmare. This is expected and ordinary.

The Linux kernel gets forked by Android vendors and others all the time. A lot of the changes never make it upstream, for various reasons. At least the story ends a bit better for KHTML / WebKit.

Every single Apple patch to GitHub projects is done by the same single indistinguishable user account. This isn't just "some long-running fork". It is Apple culture to actively prohibit contributions to open source projects unless 5 managers sign off on it.

They really don't like people "poaching" their employees/wildlife. Remember they illegally collided to stop other large tech firms with Apple board members from cross recruiting.

No, it’s usually just overzealous lawyers. Remember that Apple is still a pre-dot-com company and — like Microsoft — retains vestiges of those attitudes.

I think that's collusion not collision :) But probably a case of "Damn You AutoCorrect" :)

I don’t get this criticism; this is a case where open source _worked_. People complained about it. Apple cleaned up their act on it a bit, but still maintained WebKit as a fork. And Google forked WebKit when they decided they didn’t want to play in Apple’s sandbox anymore. This is how it’s actually supposed to work. It gets messy sometimes because humans are involved.

This isn't quite the same thing. Apple are really terrible at cultivating open source - more obvious than KHTML is the fiasco that resulted from Apple's half-hearted efforts to kindle a community around Darwin - but my impression is that they have been decent enough with the kind of openness that standards processes need.

I was disappointed in how the Dylan project ended up.

Were there ever really interested in Darwin being a thing? I've been following Mac closely since OSX and I've never seen it getting any limelight.

At Apple's executive level, it doesn't look like anyone ever really cared. But people were hired, like Jordan Hubbard, who were supposed to liaise with the community and it's clear that both a nontrivial number of Apple developers were optimistic about the prospects for a healthy Darwin community and that many Apple users found Apple's choices in the early years of Darwin being open sourced and then partly closed to be very disappointing.

They don't even remember how vertical integrated they were before OS X came to be, how would they remember that?

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