HACKER Q&A
📣 greggman2

Is Webkit Open Source?


I've reported several bugs in WebKit and they get marked with a rdar link (Apple's internal, non public bug system). The bugs reported are not related to security. One was an SVG rendering bug. Another was a canvas CSS issue. Another was an audio tag redirect issue. Another was a simple WebGL issue.

I suppose technically there is no definition of "open source" that requires the process itself to be open, only the source and the license. Still, it's frustrating to see such issues set sucked into an invisible black hole that doesn't feel like an I'd expect for open source community developed project. How is the community supposed to participate if issues, their progress and status are hidden in a private bug tracker?

AFAICT this rarely happens on Chromium or Firefox. If the bug is a security issue bugs might be hidden from some until fixed. At most they might reference a crash report that is not publicly available for obvious reasons.

Are other mostly Apple run "open source" projects similar? LLVM? Clang? Swift? Where a large percentage of issues are handled in secret?

  👤 johncoltrane Accepted Answer ✓
There is, actually, a definition of "open source": https://opensource.org/osd, which says nothing about how bug reports should be handled.

IANAL and I frankly am not interested enough to test WebKit's compliance with the OSD but I'm pretty sure handling bug reports privately is not a prerequisite.

There was a time when "free software" was about who can do what with a given code base and "open source" was merely a development methodology but the lines have been blurred. Back then, WebKit could have been considered "free software" (code available, adequate licensing), maybe, but probably not "open source" (transparency, development in the open).