On 13/07/2007, at 10:00 AM, Adam Hewitt wrote:
The fact that it is being released under GPLv2 means that it *is*
still open
source. Just because Apple bought the source code does not mean
that it is
no longer open source.
There are two trains of thought on why Apple did this.
1. They weren't happy with the pace of development and decided to
hire CUPS' main developer to add the features they want.
or, the more likely
2. Apple (like many other businesses) is worried that GPLv3 will
cause too many headaches so they bought the software and developer so
they can control what license it gets released under. This opinion is
reenforced by the face that they make a specific mention of GPLv2 as
the forward looking license.
What it does mean is that there is the potential for yet another
source
branch with the current code being developed open source and Apple
also
developing from the current code base as proprietary software.
Not really... if Apple keeps it under the GPLv2, there is no driving
reason to fork it.
Safari is a prime example of this as they took a snapshot of
Konqueror, made
it close source and rewrote the parts they needed to to get it into
the
software we see today. Of course they still give some code back to the
Konqueror developers, but how much is another question.
Not quite right.
Apple took a snap-shot of KHTML (Konqueror is to KHTML as Safari is
to WebKit) and developed it to their needs. They released that code
back to KHTML. As it turned out, Apple did more work than the KHTML
guys so Apple then started WebKit and released the source to that.
At this time, WebKit is open source and is far more advanced than KHTML.
http://webkit.org
- Matt
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