CUPS Purchased by Apple Inc. [LWN.net]

CUPS Purchased by Apple Inc.

Posted Jul 13, 2007 12:09 UTC (Fri) by foom (subscriber, #14868)
In reply to: CUPS Purchased by Apple Inc. by dkite
Parent article: CUPS Purchased by Apple Inc.

While Apple's behavior w.r.t. khtml at first was rather poor, you might take a look at their *current*
behavior instead. See the webkit website: http://webkit.org/

This is, essentially, a fully fledged open source project, with SVN, bugtracker, nightly builds, email
lists, the works.

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CUPS Purchased by Apple Inc.

Posted Jul 13, 2007 12:47 UTC (Fri) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]

You make my point exactly.

If we are willing to wait 3-4 years to see how things go, in the mean
time CUPS stagnates as khtml has during that time, I guess it's a good
idea.

Webkit is running in Safari, some Nokia phones, the iPhone, and on a
bunch of developer's desktops at Trolltech. Not in KDE. Probably in KDE4,
but that won't become available for quite a while yet.

Apple takeover of khtml has hurt a project severely, the damage taking
years to get over.

As I said, the time to fork is now. I see no reason to believe that Apple
is interested in the free desktop. They will act in their interest. If we
don't understand ours, then we have a far greater problem that I
imagined.

Derek

CUPS Purchased by Apple Inc.

Posted Jul 13, 2007 13:11 UTC (Fri) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

That makes little sense. Apple exercised a basic right of Open Source: their right to fork. They
didn't take over khtml -- all the existing khtml developers could have continued to develop
khtml just the way it was, if they liked. No, apple decided, for whatever reason (disagreement in
development methods, disagreement over features, or something else, I don't know) to start
their own fork.

And yes, successful forks are indeed highly disruptive, with work and energy being wasted on
both sides of the fork. This wasted energy will go on until one side of the fork "wins". And it
looks like to me that the Apple fork is going to be the winner. And in the end, the KHTML
codebase has been vastly improved.

However, this CUPS situation is a pretty much completely different; Apple is not forking CUPS (at
least as far as we know). They bought the main developer and rights to the software and is now
paying for continued development of it.

It seems to me that if they'd done that with khtml instead of forking, it could have been much
*less* disruptive...

CUPS Purchased by Apple Inc.

Posted Jul 13, 2007 18:51 UTC (Fri) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]

And I take it you are running Webkit?

I submit that no one except developers and hard-core testers will be
running Webkit for another year.

In the meantime, KDE users hope someone will build up the intestinal
fortitude to keep khtml running well enough to be useful.

If you are ok with waiting 3-4 years to see if this Cups deal works out
ok for the free desktop, great.

Webkit/khtml has not been good for anyone except Apple. I submit that
CUPS will prove to be the same.

If you are ok with letting go of such a fundamental part of the desktop
like that, great.

Remember this basic fact. It is not in Apple's interest to have a
successful free desktop. We can face that now or find out in a few years.

I can just see it. We will finally get good free graphics drivers, a
great xorg system, and all the benefits that accrue, just in time to have
to do the same thing again with printers.

If you don't think that this scenario has crossed the minds of those in
Apple boardrooms, think again. Those people are paid very well to forsee
this type of stuff.

Derek