On 01/22/2013 09:11 PM, Henri Sivonen wrote:
2) The way WebKit has been used suggests that proprietary-minded entities that want to embed a Web engine aren't really that interested in contributing to the engineering of the Web-exposed capabilities of the engine. (That is, Apple and more recently Google are the companies that do the most of the core engine engineering in the case of WebKit. The large number of other companies that use WebKit tend to get a free ride when it comes to the core features of the engine and they focus their engineering efforts on porting the engine to their environment.) That is, perhaps the idea that proprietary-minded embedders would improve the guts of Gecko was wishful thinking all along.
I just wanted to correct this point; there are efforts by embedders in East Asia to improve core WebKit capabilities, because the layout engine doesn't serve their needs. I've also encountered a Gecko embedder who patched our layout engine, because they needed something fixed for their use cases. Which brings up the point that, if the existing product is sufficient, an embedder won't put any effort into the core. But if their needs are not met, they will work on it. I think whether the patches get reintegrated into the main depends mostly on the ease or difficulty of upstreaming patch. Licensing aside, there are definite benefits (maintainability) to not maintaining a fork. ~fantasai _______________________________________________ legal mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/legal
