- Kocsen Chung kocsen/kocsenc@gmail.com
- Andrew Schott snapschott/afs7827@rit.edu
- Will Paul dropofwill/whp3652@rit.edu
We picked WebKit because it is a huge piece of software. The web runs the world, and the world runs on WebKit. WebKit is the biggest (as of today) player in this market. It is also quite a unique culture since it is heavily tied with Apple and Kocsen worked on the WebKit team.
- Is the subject of your profile a corporate entity?
- What type?
- When was it founded?
1977
- By whom?
Steve Jobs, Kevin Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne.
- Original founder(s) still active?
No.
- Publicly Traded? Since when? Initial Stock Price? Current stock price?
Publicly traded, since 1980 at $22 per share with 800k shares total.
- Has the company made any acquisitions? If yes, which companies, and what were their core products?
Yes, 63 to date. Some notable ones:
- NeXT ($400,000,000, became part of OSX and iOS)
- AuthenTec ($356,000,000, lead to TouchID)
- Zayante ($13,000,000, lead to FireWire).
- Has the company made any investments in other companies? If yes, which ones.
Only 2, Akamai Technologies (web site support services) and Imagination Technologies (chip design).
- Number of Employees?
About 98,000
- Where is HQ?
Cupertino, California, U.S.
- Does it have any other offices or locations?
Several headquarters across the world with smaller offices and retail stores throughout.
- Website?
- Wikipedia?
- Does your organization file any annual reports? Please include links to any relevant documents (i.e. 990, Annual Report, Year in Review, etc...)
They have a minimal social media presence.
Facebook: 56 likes
Twitter: 5,863 Followers
IRC Channel: freenode #webkit
SVN Repository Link: http://svn.webkit.org/repository/webkit/trunk
Mailing List Archive: webkit-help@lists.webkit.org - for general help
Blog/Website: Blog - https://www.webkit.org/blog/ Website - https://www.webkit.org/
WebKit has irregular and sparse meetups/conferences for the community, but has one large annual contributors meeting usually in Cupertino, CA.
WebKit code started in 98, with KDE HTML layout engine. After some discussions, Apple ended up announcing Safari in 2003 which used JavaScriptCore. Eventually KHTML & WebCore didn’t stay on the same page so Apple decided to fork into WebKit. Dave Hyatt announced in 2005 that Apple would open source WebKit.
LGPL - JavaScriptCore & WebCore BSD2 - Everything Else Reviews Mailing Lists and The Bug review process Apple has a very clear bug lifecycle. They use mailing lists to take care of code reviews and a lot of the communication surrounding the community.
###Getting commit/review access There are a total of around 250 official committers and reviewers of the webkit project. See them all here.
To be a committer, you should follow and trust the project. A Committer gets nominated once they have around 10-20 good patches. They also have to show that they are not a potato and understand the policies and the collaboration behind the project.
To be a reviewer you should have a very good judgement and understanding of project policies and vision. You should at least submitted 80 good patches and should be an active member of the community. 3 Reviewers must second the acceptance/nomination of a new reviewer.
You can become inactive and get committer/reviewer status revoked.
WebKit is very mature. So they do have very extensive documentation and strict code guidelines. https://www.webkit.org/coding/coding-style.html
WebKit is strong and huge, no bus or raptor can stop it. As long as it has major corporations relying on it for a key part of their infrastructure we don't see it going anywhere.
All in all, WebKit is a huge open source community. I would call it a very set and mature codebase. Below is a nice overview of the statistics. It has no fear of suddenly stopping and powers a lot of the web out there. It has an interesting aspect to it since a private company like Apple is behind it all but it seems to work.
Section adapted from EFF Worksheet
WebKit was and is used in a number applications including, but not limited to:
- Apple Safari
- Blackberry’s OS
- Amazon Kindle
And in the past by:
- Opera
- Google Chrome
There has not been a lot of controversy around the copyright itself, but there has been some internal conflict that lead to the Blink fork. For example: one engineer made a comment on the mailing list entitle WebKit Wishes prior to the fork that said:
I’ve worked at both Apple and Google. The WebKit community is full of brilliant engineers. Yet I frequently feel a lack of trust in my (or others) judgement, or witness hot-headed remarks on bugs, lists or IRC. I don’t think it’s that people don’t trust me after nearly 8 years (!?) on this project, but rather that we forget, or fail to communicate trust among ourselves. Social problems are perhaps harder to solve for us technical types, but I worry that for many of us it’s just become “us” and “them” and we’ve stopped trying. - emphasis ours
Apple primarily makes money through merging the open source rendering/javascript engine that is WebKit into their proprietary browser Safari, which only runs on their OS, which only runs on their hardware. So at the end of the day it makes sense for their current revenue model as a company as a whole, they are very much a hardware company.
The benefit for making this open source is that 1) it was already open source when they got their hands on it, so it was a good starting place, 2) it allowed major corporations to not reinvent the wheel (especially pre-blink fork), with major contributions from not just Apple, but Google, Nokia, Blackberry, Amazon, Adobe, and many more.