"Many KHTML developers have raised concerns about project governance,
potentially conflicting goals, and the appearance that WebKit is
driven purely by Apple's corporate agenda."
he announced two new policy sets for webkit aimed to help address these issues: the committer and reviewer policy and the webkit goals statement.
Maciej then said:
"I don't know if this addresses all KHTML and KDE contributor concerns
about the possibility of a full re-merge with WebKit. But I hope these
moves will make a good starting point for additional discussion. I am
open to additional discussion about ways to enable closer collaboration."
this is exactly the sort of steps Apple needs to continue to make to help bridge the unfortunate divide that had grown from years of doing things in a way that actively discouraged community involvement. i'm sure that some kde devs will still have open issues with the process even with these new steps, but it is important for us to recognize these steps as they happen and encourage Apple, and the other business interests around webkit, to a better and more truly open strategy.
also, if you missed it, tronical recently blogged about the recent progress in the QtWebKit efforts. the interesting bit there is that Trolltech is using a public git repository at code.staikos.net (that's one of George "pmax" Staikos' systems) so that all contributors can have push access to the source repo.
what's interesting is that despite this being a project that has paid developers working on it from inside Trolltech and despite QtWebKit being something that will be shipping with Qt starting in 4.4, they are developing in a third-party hosted repository that is publicly open.
so it is indeed possible for process to improve. it takes engagement and a lot of patience, maybe a little bit of silly optimism as well ;) but it is doable.
we can expect more of these sorts of announcements (though unrelated to webkit stuff) in the comming weeks as well, so stay tuned all you party people. =)
2 comments:
This is integral and such a good step. While our open-source workflow is our greatest asset, it also seems to spawn endless arguments which are ultimately inconsequential unless the people arguing are actually attempting to amend the situation rather than just flaming each other with their opinions, as they often seem to.
I'm glad Apple has put its best hand forward in this effort. While I still don't find them morally correct overall as a corporation (and it's pretty much hard to with any large corporation, I've come to terms with that), I think this is an awesome step. I hope they adopt the same attitude with much of their other technologies.
I'm not really sure how the Apple infrastructure works. Is development policy mandated throughout the company by the administration or do the smaller teams make policy decisions based on their familiarity with their technologies? Or does it all go through a review board of directors that ask the team to rework parts that are too compliant with existing standards? :)
It was about time Apple got back on the open source trail. This is but one of many doors that need to be opened though, so let's hope they stay on the right track.
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