On Feb 23, 2006, at 10:38 AM, Amanda Walker wrote:
On Feb 22, 2006, at 9:01 PM, Rob Braun wrote:
Do people actually do anything with the
source, or just have an obsessive compulsive disorder to
continually check for it?
On several occasions, access to the source (including xnu, which
I'm hoping will show up) has been the only way I've been able to
track down the info I've needed to rev hardware device drivers for
new versions of MacOS X.
Profit motive, not OCD, I assure you ;-).
Second that. Especially because kernel documentation is nonexistent,
the source is necessary for driver development. (Although I've long
wondered whether making the source available was just an excuse to
avoid providing adequate kernel documentation.)
Also, to add to Dave Leimbach's point:
Point is, we more technically savvy geeks even had *fun* with this
stuff when it was more enabled. Now the only project we've got
that's even close to like this anymore is Webkit, and I suspect
that's because Apple really does need to get along with the KDE
hackers for this to continue. Perhaps it's more of a political
strength or a goodwill thing because they've chosen to work closely
with that community (and have received bad press in the past about
it too).
Apple could've ignored the complaints of the KDE hackers and
proceeded along their own solitary path, much as they did with the
kernel. But they chose differently, and they're reaping the rewards:
We’ve received contributions in every area of WebKit. Here are just
a few of the improvements made by non-Apple contributors:
The entire webkit.org infrastructure, including nightly builds and
the buildbot.
JavaScriptCore that matches up with KJS.
Many fixes that were formerly only in KHTML and KJS in the KDE
source tree.
SVG support in WebKit.
Improved structure of DOM and auto-generated bindings inspired by
KDOM.
Vast text layout and rendering improvements, including excellent
right-to-left support.
A tremendous number of bug fixes that were easy because of
reductions, excellent test cases, and pinpointed version numbers
for regressions.
Chris
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