Thought blog

Not sure how many of you know that Apple’s Safari Browser was created from the Open Source project KHTML.

Today there is an article at News.com that talks about how the relationship between Apple and KHTML has gone bad. I subscribe to Ben Goodger’s blog who is the lead engineer on the Firefox project. I was very surprised on his response to the News.com story. He was actually defending the Apple Safari Team!

Here is a comment from the KHTML team:

“In open source, everything’s supposed to be done the right way, but sometimes the less correct way is faster,” Rusin said. “In fixing one problem, they were breaking a whole bunch of other things. Apple developers were focused on fixing bugs in such a way that we could not merge them back into KHTML. Those fixes were never an option for us.”

Now here is the response from Ben Goodger

“Certainly, every project is free to be run the way it wants to be run - but there are a couple of givens here if you’re trying to make software that changes the world:

No software is ever perfect.
In order to have the most positive impact, you need to take advantage of opportunity especially when it comes to release time. This means you may have to cut corners in some areas in order to ship on time. Smart money cuts corners in areas that people are less likely to be concerned about.
There needs to be a strong focus on meeting the needs of the target audience.”