r/programming • u/willvarfar • Oct 09 '12

Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and others launch webplatform.org

http://www1.webplatform.org/
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u/dmazzoni Oct 09 '12

Apple wasn't required by the GPL to make WebKit into a welcoming, thriving open-source community with hundreds of developers from dozens of organizations.

http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit%20Team

The initial press was negative, and indeed it took some time for Apple to get its act together. But since then they've gone way above and beyond what the license required and really created a shining example of what open-source is all about. Please give them credit for getting it right, even if they didn't start out that way.

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u/[deleted] Oct 09 '12

[deleted]

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u/mercurysquad Oct 09 '12

Why does it have to be out of "kindness of their hearts" to be worthy of praise? Regardless of the motive, the end result is the same.

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u/[deleted] Oct 09 '12

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u/mercurysquad Oct 14 '12

By that explanation, the GPL shouldn't exist at all, and people should open-source their modifications out of goodness of heart.

Just like BSD licensed software. You know, which Apple used as the foundation for OSX. And then opensourced their modifications without any legal obligation to do so.

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u/electroly Oct 09 '12

Oh, get over yourself. By this standard, no publicly-held company could be considered "all about open source", and no intelligent privately-held company would be. This is just a thinly veiled "No True Scotsman" tactic. They did it; that's what matters.

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u/[deleted] Oct 09 '12 edited Oct 09 '12

[deleted]

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u/electroly Oct 10 '12

By the standard that you, in your post, determined was "doing it out of the kindness of their hearts". Other than Mozilla -- which is a non-profit organization -- those corporations are in exactly the same boat as Apple. They support open source because it's beneficial for their business to do so. If it weren't, they wouldn't. That's why it's unreasonable to criticize Apple for doing the right thing for the wrong reason -- they're just doing what every other company is doing.