The Unforking of KDE's KHTML and Webkit Begins 104
Jiilik Oiolosse writes to tell us Ars Technica is reporting that after years of existing seperately, KHTML and Webkit are finally coming back together. "In open source terms, this may be as big of a deal as the gcc and egcs merger of yonder days. KHTML and Webkit are definitely coming of age. The KDE developers, responsible for the original creation of KHTML, are dedicated to seeing this unforking happen and are taking a leading role in that effort."
Impact on Apple (Score:2, Insightful)
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Hehehehe, it's posts like these that remind me why I added you to my friend list.
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Frankly if I had mod points I would have modded both of your posts down, and I couldn't care less about the GPLv2/GPLv3 debate or its outcome. Your first post didn't say anything worth being modded up, and I don't know what that "have you stopped beating your wife?" comment was about but it smells like flamebait to me.
And this one? Aside from worthless insulting of some anonymous moderator, you bust out some fantastic "ZOMG! ANTI-GPLV3 CONSPIRACY!!!" nonsense that simply deserves to get buried. And yo
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I don't know what that "have you stopped beating your wife?" comment was about but it smells like flamebait to me.
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They are not free to change the licencing to "V3 or later" and exclude the V2 option. Under clause 1 of GPL (v2 - but v3 is similar) the requirement is: "keep intact all the notices that refer to this License".
Only the copyright holder can change the "version 2 of the License..." line.
At least, that is my understanding - IANAL etc.
Re:Impact on Apple (Score:5, Informative)
In fact, you can go and download the nightly build of WebKit and use it with Safari (Safari is just a wrapper that provides the gui).
http://nightly.webkit.org/ [webkit.org]
I hope you are right (Score:2, Insightful)
Can you get Windows Binaries? (Score:3, Insightful)
The nightlies l
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I had my doubts, but now that I've looked at Apple's entirely unbiased official site I'm convinced! :P
Seriously, do your research first. Safari kindof cheats (and by kindof, I mean majorly) with onload, see this article for example [howtocreate.co.uk]. Quote, "Well, its results are almost certainly wrong, and it will appear a lot faster than it really is, if JavaScript is used to time it. The results are completely unreliable." The au
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That is with an awful lots of tabs thought which is the situation I use it in, Safari is much faster now after installing pit helmet (ad/banner blocker) thought, because flash in OS X is dead slow and a few pages with flash will eat up all your CPU and most of your RAM. Flash suck.
Re:Can you get Windows Binaries? (Score:4, Informative)
With that said, the nightlies can be buggy, leak, crash, etc. After all, it's just what the devs checked in the previous day and it hasn't really been fully tested.
I was just trying to make the point that the guts of Safari is open source, and that is where Apple puts it, it doesn't have a separate branch that it works on.
Re:Impact on Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh? How do you get that from a story about Apple providing such an attractive fork that everyone, including the original authors, is switching to it?
The piece you quoted refers to a squabble about changes to Webkit being difficult to port to KHTML. Which, as the article notes, has been long resolved to everyone's satisfaction.
An explanation (Score:4, Insightful)
You are missing some of the context. WebKit is being heavily developed and is receiving contributions from many source, though what is most notable is the fact that WebKit has an abstraction layer, whereas KHTML does not. This abstraction layer allows WebKit to be adapted to many underlying architectures and this is why Webkit is getting the attention. Because of the original license nothing is stopping the KHTML developers from taking the WebKit source and making a fork (KHTML -> Webkit -> KHTML NG), but while everyone is benefiting there is little need to do this.
What is also interesting are some of the players that are contributing to WebKit, since there are big corporations in there too, including Adobe and Nokia. There are of course many unaffiliated developers that should not be forgotten, of course.
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With our powers combined (Score:4, Funny)
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"With your power combined" is from Captain Planet.
I thinks this bridges the generation gap between Voltron and
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I somehow feel like less of a person for going through wikipedia for these tidbits. Maybe if I just change the date of Captain Planet's pilot episode to 1951 I can win this one.. hrm..
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqdBBZweKuQ [youtube.com]
Start watching at about 5:00
How is it? (Score:2)
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It got so bad, FSF had to disavow all knowledge of any GCC 3.0 compiler and jump to 3.1 immediately, since invari
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Re:How is it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Fortunately, in this case the reference is actually relevant to the process and the discussion. In the GCC story, it was completely unrelated to a license-based fork of GCC.
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The phrase "GCC fork" is a well-known fnord.
Unforking? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Unforking? (Score:5, Funny)
Spork is old news (Score:1, Funny)
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I suppose you did have to reference the karma Sutra
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There is no spoon
Sincerely,
The KHTML Team
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Webkit wins (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Webkit wins (Score:5, Insightful)
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i dunno, i think it's important not to take one's self overly seriously. creating technology should fun have as an element, and it's hard to have fun when you're serious all the time.
that s
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Re:Webkit wins (Score:5, Informative)
i suppose i could be a bit more helpful and comment on this as well..
> Webkit is going to be adopted in KDE as a Kpart,
what's happened is that the Qt rendering layer has been added to the main webkit repository and several people at Trolltech and from the KDE community are working on webkit and the Qt based rendering in that repository.
this opens the way for webkit to show up in kde, including the kpart.
hopefully more of the khtml forks will follow suit and join mainline dev, but this certainly does start to bring together two of the bigger and more knowledgeable teams when it comes to khtml/webkit.
> features in KHTML that
> aren't in Webkit are being added to Webkit
as many as possible, yes.
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Re:Webkit wins (Score:5, Interesting)
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Or you can simply get the info straight from the source at Trolltech. [trolltech.com]
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Four standard browsers. (Score:3, Interesting)
The Gekko family.
Opera.
and the IE family of browsers.
All this would be great if they would all follow the standards!
Okay it would be great if IE followed the standards instead of making them up as they go. IE7 is better but far from perfect.
I wounder if there is any chance that Firefox will move to Webkit in the future? I know it is unlikely but one does wonder.
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There used to be such an effort, called Swift. When Safari for Windows was announced, the Swift developer(s?) announced that they'd continue development, switch to win32 WebKit builds and provide a native Windows user experience with a WebKit renderer. Now swift.ws is gone. I seem to rec
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Since I've talked to the Swift developer (singular), I can say that Swift is technically still alive (or at least it was a few weeks ago, even if every link he ever sent me is now dead). I believe that he said that he expected that Swift 0.4 to be available by the time Safari 3 gets out of beta.
I don't know where he plans on hosting it, but because of his comment about version 0.4 it seems that Safari being released on Windows did not deter him from releasing his browser. For a low version number release
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Debate in a Glasgow pub? (Score:2, Funny)
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As big as GCC? (Score:4, Interesting)
As big as GCC? I'll need Wikipedia's help just to know what Webkit is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webkit [wikipedia.org]
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Developers abandon KHTML for the WebKit fork (Score:2, Informative)
From TFA:
While there are still a few reservations, the consensus is to develop a Webkit KPart for embedding into Konqueror at the earliest opportunity and to take a more active role in the development of Webkit itself. This was hinted at earlier in an Ars interview with Lars Knoll, but now it is more or less the official word.
Now, KHTML won't be deleted right
Not really. (Score:2)
But it is quite similar to gcc/egcs, in that the egcs fork got far enough ahead that the gcc people adopted it and "abandoned" their own new gcc version. I strongly suspect, however, that anything gcc had that egcs didn't was ported over before egcs was blessed as the new gcc.
Strange, this sounds like good news (Score:1)
thats the end of the world as we know it (Score:2, Insightful)
Three very big development 'companies' are working together on *one* web engine with *one* code base.
Apple. Trolltech. KDE/The Open Source community. Maybe Nokia too, sometimes in the future.
Never thought that that would happen.
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This will only be applicable to GPL programs (Score:1)