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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

I'm old enough to remember Apple suing Microsoft for "copying their look and feel". Open source is something Apple only does strategically - when they have to or it suits them - it is not part of the company's ethos.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso....

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> Open source is something Apple only does strategically - when they have to or it suits them - it is not part of the company's ethos.

What Fortune 500 (or even 5000) systematically open sources every piece of technology? Every company I can think of -- Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Amazon, LinkedIn, AOL, Craigslist, Oracle, -- selectively decides what to open source.

I'm not saying that's right or wrong, but Apple is far from alone in doing so.

None of them are 100% open or closed, but clearly some are more open than others.

more open? what a funny joke i ever heard. please define the meaning of the more, and at least tell who is the more open one.

Red Hat.

Yeh, I agree. I was surprised when they open sourced webkit. But like you said, it's strategic. I don't think they care that much about the browser. Their emphasis is on apps running in their ecosystem.

They didn't have a choice about webkit; it was a fork of KHTML, which was a part of KDE (and available under the terms of the GPL).

Actually, WebKit was a fork of KHTML, correct, but it is licensed under the terms of LGPL. One extra letter, but a world of difference. This is why they had to open source KHTML, but they could get away with not open sourcing Safari (if KHTML was licensed under the GPL, any app that linked against the library would need to be licensed under the GPL, too.)

Let's not forget that webkit when it was released was little more then a code dump - one big patch that had to be applied to KHTML.

Also "they didn't have a choice" sort of ignores that they did have the choice of not using khtml and wouldn't have, if its license could've been problematic for them.

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