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A comment on Open letter from an Android developer to the Google Play team. Parent comment

Re:Open letter from an Android developer to the Google Play ... by bad_user on Monday August 19, 2019 @05:20AM (#20736192)
WebKit, you mean the source code that was forked from KHTML and because it was GPL, Apple would then do incomprehensible code dumps to comply with the law? WebKit that was forked by Google because they couldn't collaborate with Apple?

I'm glad that they ended up releasing it, but to show that as an example of open source from Apple ... indeed shows that people have short memories ;-)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Open letter from an Android developer to the Google Play ... by ninedays on Monday August 19, 2019 @05:41AM (#20736282)
> WebKit that was forked by Google because they couldn't collaborate with Apple?

You say "they couldn't collaborate" I say "Google really wanted to compete".

Remember that it was Google who decided to perform a fork because they had a different approach than Apple for how "multi-process" should be implemented. Google had an implementation that they didn't want to integrate into the Webkit branch - hence the Blink fork.[1]

Also Apple would have been happy if they could use the Google's implementation instead of using their own - they said that repeatedly [2]

You can also find more details of the story here. It looks more and more obvious that the decision to create a WebKit fork was more political than technical : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5490242

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/05/blink-goo...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5490661

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Re:Open letter from an Android developer to the Google Play ... by bad_user on Monday August 19, 2019 @05:45AM (#20736301)
I am not defending Google. Google is really shitty in terms of open source collaboration. Many of Google's OSS efforts are OSS just in license, but not in spirit.

All I'm saying is that Apple's WebKit is not a good example of OSS and if that's what you have to show for iOS, then it's a really sad state of affairs.

[ Parent | on HN ]