Is Apple out of compliance with the license? Perhaps. Is this on my list of the ten thousand things I'm most concerned about? No.
And as for your assertion about Microsoft suing Apple in a heartbeat over a similar compliance issue, I think you don't know what you're talking about. Microsoft, to the best of my knowledge, hasn't sued anyone over the hundreds of MS patents they claim Linux violates. It took Apple a few years to get around to suing Samsung.
In other words, Companies' legal teams are usually subject to adult supervision by their CxOs. They don't just go around suing willy-nilly. Many lawyers see conflicts that lead to lawsuits as failures.
Reality is so surprisingly messy.
To put another way: if I were found to be pirating Mac OS X, Apple would be in the right to sue me for intellectual property violation. If I found them to be using my code outside of the license I provided it to them (and the rest of the world) with, I should be in the right to sue them for intellectual property violation. Is this not correct?
(EDIT: fixed problematic grammar)
The two parties eventually settled[2].
[1] http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/02/microsoft-sues...
[2] http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/03/microsoft-and-...
http://groups.google.com/group/android-building/browse_threa...
If Apple wants to own Webkit, then answer is simple: require a copyright assignment letter with each patch. Then they can relicense the code whenever they want.
Apple forked Webkit from KHTML. Google contributes to Webkit.
But that's completely besides the point. I just cannot imagine someone working on the same project and ready to sue fellow developer's company just because they did not release the source on the same day.
Then they can relicense the code whenever they want.
In the case of Webkit, Apple does not require copyright assignment. The code was not originally theirs - their version of Webkit is a fork of KHTML, and so the copyright from KHTML is in force. They have to follow the LGPL, because otherwise they have no legal right to use the code in their products.
That's all I'm saying: the question was "who has a legal claim over Webkit", and my answer was "everyone who's contributed".
The LGPL allows Apple to keep the rest of their stack that links against Webkit proprietary. However, they have to release their changes to Webkit.
Here is the exact wording from the LGPL v2:
These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Library, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Library, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
Quite right, but for this point of pedantry: Apple's fork of KHTML is known as WebCore. That part is LGPL. WebKit (the encompassing project) is BSD and always has been. Safari (the browser) is proprietary.
As far as I can tell, Apple's changes to WebCore are in the public repo. e.g.
http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/Source/WebCore/renderin... Revision 85964, 48.1 KB (checked in by hyatt@apple.com, 63 minutes ago)
Just to clarify, that is how GPL licensed software works. There are a lot of different open source licenses that do not require anything.
Some things are easy because the license specifically permits it: you can GPL a BSD-licensed project, for example. In that case, the agreement from the copyright holders comes in the form of the terms of the license.
But I do believe it's supposed to be available from the day
the binaries are out.
"Accompany it" is the key phrase. The source needs to be released at the same time as the binaries.
Section 6 states: " As an exception to the Sections above, you may also compile or link a "work that uses the Library" with the Library to produce a work containing portions of the Library, and distribute that work under terms of your choice, provided that the terms permit modification of the work for the customer's own use and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications.
You must give prominent notice with each copy of the work that the Library is used in it and that the Library and its use are covered by this License. You must supply a copy of this License. If the work during execution displays copyright notices, you must include the copyright notice for the Library among them, as well as a reference directing the user to the copy of this License. Also, you must do one of these things:"
And 6B specifically says: "b) Accompany the work with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give the same user the materials specified in Subsection 6a, above, for a charge no more than the cost of performing this distribution."
So, since Apple is not distributing just the library binary on its own, but rather as part of Safari, Section 6 excepts Section 4. And all they must do, according to 6B, is accompany the work with a written offer (which it does, see Settings/General/Legal) to provide the source. Since no one has specified that they've written to Apple and been denied, they are not in violation of the license.
In the case of Apple, they have made modifications to the library itself. They are then using the library, with modification, in Safari. Safari can be released under any license as outlined in section 5/6 but not the modifications. Those need to be released.
So the answers for "currently" and "cumulatively" differ at least by this metric. And the metric itself is questionable, as the blog post says.