This is unfortunate that things have gotten to this point with Apple and the Open Source community, but this is what happens when real communication breaks down.

Apple’s relationship with the open source community has come under renewed attack after reports on the Web that KHTML developers are unhappy with the way the direction that Apple has taken with Safari.

KHTML is an open source rendering engine - the software that takes the HTML and Javascript code that makes up Web pages and turns it into something readable on a computer screen. Apple chose it, rather than the Mozilla Gecko engine, when it decided to develop its own browser, namely Safari, which was released in January 2003.

Matters have come to a head with changes and bug fixes that Apple has recently made to ensure that Safari passes the Acid2 test for browser standards compliance. The open source community has complained (see So, when will KHTML merge all the WebCore changes? and Safari and KHTML again) that Apple has not made it easy or at least possible for its patches to be applied to the original KHTML source code. However, Safari developer Dave Hyatt said in Apple’s defence that many of the patches were to its OS X WebCore software. [Read the rest]