Straws in the Wind

Alongside all the high-profile wins for free software, there are what might be called guerilla gains happening in the background – small conceptual victories that point to greater things. Here's two....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Android: Kitted Out with WebKit

Well spotted by GigaOM: one of the key components of Android is WebKit:

WebKit is an open source web browser engine. WebKit is also the name of the Mac OS X system framework version of the engine that's used by Safari, Dashboard, Mail, and many other OS X applications. WebKit's HTML and JavaScript code began as a branch of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE.

As Om notes, this is a significant vote of confidence for WebKit, and a reminder that most other browsers - even rather popular open source ones like Firefox - are behind in this particular race. Also, rather a pat on the back for KDE....

Which Future for Adobe's Apollo?

I have mixed feelings about Adobe's new Apollo:

Apollo is a cross-OS runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop RIA’s [Rich Internet Applications].

On the one hand, it has the F-word in there, and as readers of this blog may know, I am totally allergic to Flash. On the other hand, this seems promising:

We spent a considerable amount of time researching a number of HTML rendering engines for use in Apollo. We had four main criteria, all of which WebKit met:

* Open project that we could contribute to
* Proven technology, that web developers and end users are familiar with
* Minimum effect on Apollo runtime size
* Proven ability to run on mobile devices

While the final decision was difficult, we felt that WebKit is the best match for Apollo at this time.

We shall see (now, if only the Delphic oracle were still around....)