Tuesday, January 7, 2003 |
02:18 - Hi! You don't know me, but...
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kfm-devel&m=104197092318639&w=2
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Hee. Kris forwards me this e-mail, evidently sent to the developers of the KDE/KHTML rendering engine, then reposted to the KDE developer list, by the chief engineer on the Safari project.
I'm the engineering manager of Safari, Apple Computer's new web browser built upon KHTML and KJS. I'm sending you this email to thank you for making such a great open source project and introduce myself and my development team. I also wish to explain why and how we've used your excellent technology. It's important that you know we're committed to open source and contributing our changes, now and in the future, back to you, the original developers. Hopefully this will begin a dialogue among ourselves for the benefit of both of our projects.
Phew. Imagine getting that in your inbox, eh? Strikes me as a bit presumptuous and weird-- somehow there seems to be something a bit sneaky about waiting until you've released a Public Beta of your product before introducing yourself to the developers whose code you'll be using, even if you're pledging at the same time to re-release the source with its changes and additions back into the community. It's how open-source works (nobody has to disclose any of these projects to anybody else, as long as it's compliant with the license in question); but it must be awkward for the KDE guys to have to live with Apple's strict policy of not releasing any official word about future products until the day they're officially unveiled. (Hence the secrecy, and presumably the reason why the guy chose today to send this e-mail, dispatching it-- as he says-- from the MacWorld Expo show floor; he couldn't even wait until he got back to the campus. Must have been aching to send it...! Or else company policy was to send the message the instant it was NDA-ishly feasible to do so. But if that's the case, I doubt they'd have been relying on the guy to post it from the Expo floor, instead of making sure it went through actual official channels from within the company...)
Ah, speculation. Why is there always so much more of it after the keynote than before?
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