site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-dev@lists.apple.com On Feb 23, 2006, at 10:38 AM, Amanda Walker wrote: Do people actually do anything with the source, or just have an obsessive compulsive disorder to continually check for it? Also, to add to Dave Leimbach's point: Chris _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-dev mailing list (Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-dev/site_archiver%40lists.appl... On Feb 22, 2006, at 9:01 PM, Rob Braun wrote: 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.) 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. This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com