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Comment by donmelton | Hacker News Reader

Surprise, I would hope. :) And lack of recognition, I suppose.

Don, i am trying to understand why you (not you in person but Apple) went the open source route for safari but not for itunes etc.

Can it be that, at that moment when you made the decision, web sites 'made for internet explorer', were too many. And you wanted the rendering engine on Mac to be widespread by getting from and giving to an open source project.

I can't comment on iTunes.

Remember, Safari is not open source. Only WebKit is.

Maybe because a major component of iTunes is a DRM platform.

1. iTunes started out as a music player. The iTunes Music Store came later. You can debate whether or not Steve was planning the iTunes Music Store from the beginning, but that's neither here nor there.

2. iTunes, at least in the beginning, was just a wrapper around the QuickTime framework.

"2. iTunes, at least in the beginning, was just a wrapper around the QuickTime framework."

There's more to it than that, but this touches on something; I really wish that something akin to QuickTime was available cross-platform. Yeah, it's crufty and strange warts that reveal Ugly Things are all over the place, but man, having a good AV API would make a lot of things better.

ffmpeg is a very impressive achievement, but it's not the same thing.

How does gstreamer compare?

http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/

Same reason that most companies that go open-source do so: because they were innovating from underneath, entering a market with much more dominant players. Would Android be open-source if the iPhone hadn't been so dominant at the time?

This is a silly question. iTunes makes tons of money while Safari is an OS X feature.

The only open source part of Safari is WebKit, which is a fork of KHTML, which was already open source. Seems obvious to me.

Most likely because KHTML license was (still is) LGPL, which allows the creation of proprietary products with it (Safari) but requires all source code changes to be published.

Had KHTML been licensed under a BSD or MIT license, the browser world could potentially be very different from what it currently is.

iTunes started out as a third-party playlist manager whose name escapes me (I even owned a copy). It's perfectly possible that it included licensed code that couldn't be open-sourced even if Apple wanted to do so.

Next, Apple was only able to negotiate licensing deals for music (and later video) content from the various rights holders after agreeing to various strictures including sufficently restrictive DRM and functional restrictions such as allowing music to be copied only from computer to iPod and not from multiple computers to a single iPod.

Apple didn't try to stop third parties from working around some of these restrictions but it couldn't be seen to be allowing them to be circumvented willy-nilly and open-sourcing iTunes would immediately lead to a "rip everything to MP3" and "grab everything from all attached devices" features.

SoundJam.

Here's a great story from Cabel at Panic about how Apple approached them to purchase Panic so they could turn Audion into iTunes. Instead, they went with SoundJam:

http://panic.com/extras/audionstory/

Great story, and I'm a huge fan of Coda, that does a little of everything pretty well.

Apart from the legal reasons that may have forced them to do so, they also got other people contributing to the codebase and fixing bugs. Other companies can also use the component, which is a great thing for a rendering engine - it will get more popular and websites will have to test and optimize for it.

Regarding iTunes, Apple wouldn't want anyone to release a competing program. You could probably outsource some common libraries/components, not sure if this is done. But anything specific will not be used or improved upon by others anyway, so there would be no benefit in opensourcing it.

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