

Apple's Open Source Releases - playhard
http://www.opensource.apple.com/

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cbf
I don't see what is noteworthy about this. It's not a new site so why the
interest?

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jws
I think perhaps because the WebCore for iOS 4.3.3 is in there. There was a
"squeaky wheel" episode a week or so ago about Apple not releasing all of the
source code for LGPL projects in a timely manner, this may be the "grease".

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saurik
Apple still has not released the requisite source code for WebCore (they
redact code from it for their WAK* classes that they are not allowed to by the
license, and which stymies work on iOS WebCore modifications).

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tzs
Who wrote the WAK* classes?

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saurik
Given that these classes have been maintained at Apple over the course of
multiple years, I'd imagine multiple engineers were involved in it's
construction. If your intention is to track them down personally and harrass
thrm, I'd rather this be taken up as a matter of corporate policy ;P.
(Seriously, though: why does this matter?)

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tzs
If they were written by Apple employees, then Apple likely owns the copyright
on them, and the claim that Apple is required by some license to release their
source is then in doubt.

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saurik
I'm sorry, are you serious? Apple chose, of their own volition, to modify,
compile, and then distribute a derivative version of WebCore, a project
clearly licensed under the LGPL. In order to be compliant with this license,
all new/modified code statically linked to the code they took must be cleanly
separated from the rest of the binary in a fashion that would allow a working
replacement to be compiled and used in its place. So, whether they want to
cough up the code for WAK* or "just" give us un-linked clean object files so I
can link their work together myself, as it stands they are simply violating
this license, and the only thing "in doubt" is their right to use and modify
WebCore.

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jws
Out of curiosity… Why would someone use a locally modified WebCore in iOS?

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saurik
Normally, developers are able to get away with monkey-patching the compiled
code in memory; but, in some cases, you simply need drastically different
settings. A while back (important, as Apple now added this feature... at least
I think) some developers managed to sort-of-almost recompile WebCore (with
some horribly reverse engineered hack for the redacted parts) in order to add
RTL (right-to-left text rendering) support: their goal was to get Hebrew
better supported (a goal that was mostly successful, and was used by a large
number of people in Israel, with nearly everyone in Israel using it).

Even when you take the monkey-patching route I generally prefer (as it allows
you to more easily stack patches from multiple developers/vendors),
modifications to a C++ library like WebCore are much much harder if you don't
have the original source code. In my case, I add a new <script language="">
handler for "text/cycript", a dialect of JavaScript that allows inline
Objective-C syntax (similar to Objective-J) that bridges to native code, so it
can be used by people developing HTML desktop widgets.

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cubicle67
list of 200+ os projects used within OSX <http://www.apple.com/opensource/>

