> Apple's Open Source efforts with the Darwin project have been a failure. Apple failed to build a community around Darwin in the 7 years since its original release because it was not a corporate direction, but rather a marketing stunt. Culturally, Apple did not and does not understand what it means to be open source or to build a working community.
WebKit[0] would be a counter-example.
Maybe Darwin didn't have value beyond what Apple was doing with it.
In addition to the other reply, note that Webkit only happened when the KDE developers (whose code WebKit was originally forked from) kicked up a fuss about Apple's misleading marketing of this as a successful open source engagement. Apple were originally doing bare minimum tarball dumps (which, to be clear, KDE had no real problem with in itself - that's widely accepted as a legal way to work with LGPLed code) until they got called out.
WebKit is LGPL only because it began life as an (internal!) fork of the KDE Konqueror codebase. And the lack of community stewardship from Apple led to it being forked again into Blink/Chromium, which has largely taken over the mantle[1] of "standard open source HTML engine".
WebKit itself is hugely successful because of its use in proprietary projects basically. It's "open source" only by accident, and it seems pretty clear Apple would prefer it not be.
[1] Not that Chromium is a particularly great example of an open source project, but lots of people outside Google build it, ship it, and contribute.
I read that one of the biggest driving forces of Google forking WebKit into Blink was an increasingly large gap in the direction that the two companies wanted to take the engine, including differences on things that both parties agreed should be implemented (I seem to remember there being a difference of opinion on how to implement multi-process architecture for example), making it progressively more difficult for the two to coexist on the same codebase.
Was that not true? Certainly today WebKit and Blink are significantly different engines with very different performance profiles.
This is correct, although I wonder how much they still contribute between the projects. Apple is notoriously secretive about employee OSS contributions (and everything, natch), but individual contributors pop up contributing to all sorts of things. And WebKit isn’t as isolated as it might seem, just today I saw tweets about some big perf improvement contributions from the creator of Bun who’s definitely contributing for his own purposes.
If I had to guess, coordination between WebKit and Blink is far less centralized than it was before, but I’d be shocked if it isn’t a going concern in places they don’t have different goals. It’d be a terrible waste of energy to have subject matter experts duplicating efforts like that.
My understanding is that, apart from high profile involvement in certain projects (like LLVM), Apple engineers generally contribute “as individuals” without much to indicate they’re working for Apple. I could be wrong, but that’s how I’ve heard it.
Blink/Chromium forked because the fundamentally different process architecture, coupled with the huge cost in supporting a separate JS engine. Their big blog post bragging about code size reduction was almost entirely removing code required to support JSC and Objective-C.
Chromium/Blink will fundamentally never make any engine changes that support user privacy if that change will in anyway hurt their ad business. So the "standard open source HTML engine" now means the engine that supports the ad industry over users.
Apple seems pretty keen to promote WebKit as a bona fide open source project these days, even touting its use beyond Safari entirely as well as the degree of outside (of Apple) contribution. https://webkit.org/blog/12733/happy-birthday-wpe-webkit/
More marketing stunts? Perhaps. But I'm all for marketing stunts to promote public open source collaboration. Now we'll just continue to hold them to it.
>Not that Chromium is a particularly great example of an open source project
Chromium isn’t an open source project at all. It’s a company project that releases open source code, but all the decisions are made by the company, not by any community.
I disagree that this could not be considered open source. Chromium could be forked at any time by anyone, and then developed freely from there. That’s as much as you can reasonably expect from any project you’re not paying for, IMO.
You can fork - the source is technically open - and you could form an open source project around it, but the current project isn’t.
And you could expect a whole lot more. To me Open Source is less about being able to fork, and more about not being dependent on some particular company.
WebKit[0] would be a counter-example.
Maybe Darwin didn't have value beyond what Apple was doing with it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit