Comments on: Apple thanks open-source contributors

By: Guss

Guss — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 09:16:01 +0000

I think the issue here is not about spurring more development, its about chilling development in areas Apple does not find useful for their product range.

I had never thought that the people who receive gifts should reject them, but I’m worried about two things:

a) Will developers who did not receive gifts get disenchanted with the FL/OSS development model ? I’m not sure how Apple decided who gets gifts, but if it was about some numerical quantity – such as number of commits – then I’m sure the person in the 13th place, maybe just a few commits short of a Macbook Pro would feel a bit down for it.

b) Would OSS developers who work on non-Apple benefiting projects stop working on said projects and flock to Apple funded OSS software ?

I’m not saying that Apple should stop giving back monetary compensation to the community – I just think that in every good deed there is the potential for a negative backlash and that Apple can also give back to the community in a way that does not benefit only a select number of people, but the Mac OS-X FL/OSS community in general, or the Darwin community in general, or possibly even the entire FL/OSS community in general.

By: melgross

melgross — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 16:41:27 +0000

Gus, there ARE no issues that have to be thought about here.

I doubt that any of htese people are up in arms about recieving these gifts.

Also, Apple can choose whomever they think has contributed the most to the project. You may find a political fault in that, but I don’t.

If this spurs more development, so much the better.

By: Guss

Guss — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 00:25:05 +0000

כן, אבל זו העונה להיות פסימי

By: אמא

אמא — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 16:17:59 +0000

עודד למה אתה כלכך פסימי אתה יכול לעשות הרבה דברים כמו שאלעד כתב לך רק תחליט קח עצמך בידים אל תעבוד כל כך הרבה וקשה והכל יראה אחרת צריך עוד כמה דברים חוץ מלאכול לעבוד ולישון

By: Guss

Guss — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 21:53:39 +0000

Oh. I didn’t see a list of contributors that were acknowledged by Apple and I foolishly assumed that only people who contributed directly to Webkit were included. I was using George Staikos as an example for KHTML developers that were not directly contributing to Webkit.

If Apple also rewarded KHTML developers then I have no qualms with them

Basically I’m saying that its nice and all that Apple is giving physical rewards to some of its developers, but it also raises some issues which need to be thought about.

By: John Tokash » Rewarding Open Source Developers - How can we help?

John Tokash » Rewarding Open Source Developers - How can we help? — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 19:03:53 +0000

[...] I did a few quick searches to see who else is doing this kind of thing (large companies rewarding open source dev) – it’s happened before, but not often enough. Sansblog talks about why that is (probably). It’s hard to reward a group of people without upsetting the people who were passed over. [...]

By: Darin Adler

Darin Adler — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 16:17:52 +0000

George Staikos is one of the 12 contributors I mentioned.

By: Eran

Eran — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 14:28:40 +0000

Workaround this. How come intelligent people, or at least I think they are (How does Boojie hold up?), still refuse to see the benefits of using an alternative browser to Xploder? I’m not saying “USE FIREFOX, OR ELSE!” but almost anything is better than Exploder.