Apple Gifts Top WebKit Contributors with MacBooks

soundofthemoon writes "Just nine months ago, Apple started the WebKit Open Source Project. In that time, contributors have added some significant improvements to WebKit (and thus Apple's Safari browser). Today Apple gave their open source contributors a big thank-you, including rewarding the top contributors with some nifty goodies: 'As a thank you, we are giving MacBook Pro computers to twelve of our top contributors. We've also invited five of them to attend Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference 2006 on Apple's dime.' Looks like donating your time isn't a thankless job anymore."

Re:Good for Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Except the MacBook is the first Apple notebook with an Intel chip, genius.

Re:Good for Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

I see they've found a way to unload all those pre-Intel Macs sitting in their warehouse.

As a thank you, we are giving MacBook Pro computers to twelve of our top contributors.

They are giving them intel versions.

Re:Verbing nouns: Gah.

[Bungopolis]

tr.v. gifted, gifting, gifts

1. To present something as a gift to.
2. To endow with.

Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition via http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=gifts [reference.com]

Apple has done this before

[sagefire.org]

Apple has supported GIMP-print [sourceforge.net] this way for a while now. Granted, they weren't giving them laptops. But, people working on GIMP-print got iMacs and were given special discounts on buying other macs for personal use.

It's a great model. Hopefully, they will continue to do it for years to come.

Not quite the same

[necro2607]

Well, it's not quite the same thing. These developers were rewards *after* doing a lot of work. They did the work without any knowledge of any potential "reward". That's what makes this situation a little different. :)

Re:Something To eBay

[v1]

2) Apple doesn't ever talk about battery life for a reaon...

I thought they said at the keynote that battery life was doubled for the macbooks ?

Re:Something To eBay

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeech.

Talk about a crappy gift:

1) Run 90% of your software at a crawl through emulation
2) Apple doesn't ever talk about battery life for a reaon...
3) The stupidest name for a Mac, ever.
4) Great SPEC numbers, shitty real world performance - ie. par for Intel

Can't resist this one...

1) The rate at which software is being released Universal is astonishing.
http://guide.apple.com/action.lasso?-database=MacO SGuide&-layout=cgi_search&-response=/ussearch/hitl ist_universal.html&-op=bw&binaries=Universal&-maxR ecords=20&-search [apple.com]
2) It was stated at the MacWorld keynote where the MacBook Pros (great name!) were released that battery life would be about the same. Even if you don't believe Apple's wild claim that the MacBook Pros will sport roughly four times the performance of the PowerBook G4, maintaining the same battery life while just *doubling* performance is pretty darn good.
Oh yeah... and http://www.apple.com/batteries/ [apple.com]
3) Subjective judgment. I happen to like the name, and I applaud Apple's move to put the word Mac in the names of their hardware. It speaks to their commitment to the platform.
4) Try one. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. I know I was.

BrowserCam

[Colol]

BrowserCam [browsercam.com] has actually evolved beyond its old "here's a screenshot of how your page renders" strategy. You can now, for a fairly reasonable fee (especially if you go the group buy approach), access their systems live via VNC.

Granted, you'll have to deal with the latency of VNC over the Internet, but it is a solution for people who need more interactivity than old-school BrowserCam but don't want to purchase and maintain another system themselves.

Re:That's what they'd like you to think

[1729]

If you are doing OSS for direct financial reward, you'll be disappointed.

That's just not true. Take a look at the developer lists for major OSS projects, such as gcc. There are a lot of people working on these projects for Red Hat, IBM, SUSE, Apple, various academic and government agencies, etc. Plenty of people (myself included) are paid well for OSS work.

Not the First Time for Apple

[cshotton]

Apple has been rewarding the open source and shareware community for a long time. In September of 1994, I was one of the recipients of Apple's first "Cool Tools" award. They identified all of the open source, public domain, and shareware authors that were making the Mac one of the best Internet-capable computers of the time. Here's a link to an old TidBITS article [tidbits.com] about the award. All the winners got PowerMac 7100s which helped get most of the Cool Tools ported to PowerPC. Maybe a bit self-serving of Apple, but they were setting the standard for recognizing good work in their third party developer community over 12 years ago. And I got MacHTTP ported to PPC in about 2 days because of it!

Re:Verbing nouns: Gah.

[soundofthemoon]

My intended headline was "Apple Rewards Top WebKit Contributors with MacBooks". But that was over the 50 character limit for headlines, so I had to tweak my word choice to fit within the limit. It's ugly, I'm embarrassed, but I chose that option over leaving out the word "Top" because I felt it was more important to distinguish that not all contributors were rewarded. I blame the editors!

Re:Agreed, if they could only...

[Acronym]

You need the latest Eclipse milestone (2.2M4 I think) and a recompiled SWT - then it works fine.

Re:Safari for Windows?

[Phroggy]

I suspect that the Windows version of iTunes uses a port of WebKit to render the iTMS although I can't verify that.

You suspect incorrectly. The Mac version of iTunes doesn't use WebKit either. The iTunes Music Store does use HTTP, but it does not use HTML. This [edgesuite.net] might interest you; that's linked from here [apple.com].