Comment by Delmania
11 years ago
Subtle difference: Apple and IBM have made use of free software such as FreeBSD, CUPS, Webkit, etc. Microsoft here is taking core technology and releasing it as free.
11 years ago
Subtle difference: Apple and IBM have made use of free software such as FreeBSD, CUPS, Webkit, etc. Microsoft here is taking core technology and releasing it as free.
Important. Also, Oracle has bought/absorbed free software and slowly suffocated it (lookin at you, MySQL).
InnoDB was Oracles long before Oracle bought Sun (and MySQL with it). If they wanted to hurt MySQL they had that opportunity before acquisition.
Don't forget OpenOffice.
And Ksplice.
Correction: Webkit wasn't some software Apple made use of. Apple created Webkit as we know it. What they DID use was KHTML, a far more barebones web rendering engine used in KDE, that Apple adopted, and turned into Webkit. Webkit as Apple had it (before Google stepped in) was an order of magnitude more evolved than KHTML.
KHTML was licensed under LGPL. Releasing the code was not a choice, but an obligation.
It was a choice to use KHTML.
So? Nobody forced them to pick KHTML in the first place.
How about LLVM?
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Apple has made Darwin open source. That, WebKit, and LLVM are pretty core technologies. A good portion of their technology is open. So, it's not just using free software and not giving back.
Darwin is open source but is there anyone here who has actually used it or got a bootable usable machine from it? I mean, can you even run X on it successfully? I never could (didn't try very hard mind you).
The release of Darwin isn't a massive thing I don't think.
There have been several independent distributions of Darwin. The current one is Pure Darwin. http://www.puredarwin.org
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Isn't WebKit a fork of GPLv2 code?
As with everything in technology, it's far more nuanced that that. See podcasts and articles featuring Don Melton for reasons why...
LGPL. But, it's still a core Apple technology. WebKit is far more popular than KHTML.