this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2023
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Please no... For the love of Foss, no. Apple would start making private changes to the ActivityPub protocol to support mundane things like images and polls in their own way while images and polls from other instances wouldn't load properly and would be in a green bubble.
Ahhh, in true capitalistic fashion: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Everyone learned from Microsoft.
ehh when have we seen EEE happen to anything FOSS though?
Keep a sensor net on how the Linux subsystem in Windows evolves in the next couple of years.
I mean, instances could just defederate if it was annoying though.
Personally I would block any corporate instances on principle. It's a community project and not a shopping mall. But I don't make decisions for lemmy.ml alone.
Four of five times, you're right about Apple's M.O. But every once in awhile they surprise me like with their WebKit activity.
History lesson
WebKit is only open source because its a fork of KHTML, originally developed by the KDE project ^[0]^ for the Konqueror browser ^[1]^. KHTLM was developed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) ^[2]^, which limits companies from taking the hard work of open source projects and claiming them as their own without giving back to the community.
If Apple's surprising you with the "open code" released under the WebKit project, it's because they're legally requried to. We can thank the Free Software Foundation's LGPL for that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konqueror
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License
No doubt. I was careful not to give Apple credit for WebKit's open source status, but nonetheless it remains surprising to me that Apple participates in open source software all.
Good point. Are there any protections to prevent that? I believe if they use Mastodon, they have to publish the source code. I believe Activity Pub would be the same, assuming it has a good license. But they could always use their own code without touching the open source implementation.
The ultimate protection shared by ActivityPub and all the platforms currently on it is that they are completely open. Which means they can't be taken down unless no one wants to run them anymore. Even if the whole ecosystem follows some corporate manipulation to get screwed down the line, we can always pick up again from where everything is right now and continue using all of this as though nothing happened.