It's unfortunate Apple wants to keep its toys to itself all the time. Airplay, Facetime, iMessage, they keep coming up with these great communication protocols but instead of opening them up to 3rd party implementations, they use them to lock you further into their ecosystem. Open alternatives that are device/vendor agnostic are quite welcome. It's too bad that often times though, Apple simply refuses to implement these (though often they also do) basically causing fragmentation in the market.
It's really sad that in 2012, we're still stuck with format wars/protocol wars where the devices you choose prevent other choices of devices on the market. We built something like the Internet in the '60s, anyone can talk over it using IP as a routing protocol and TCP or UDP on the transport layer. Tim Berner's Lee made HTTP a reality in the '90s and now tons of devices, of all shapes and sizes, can render content written in HTML. If all these advances had followed the closed eco-system model Microsoft pushed back then or that Apple is pushing now, we wouldn't have this great communication/entertainment/education platform we have today.
Apple didn't open source webkit out of the goodness of their heart. They had to because of the license (LGPL) on the KHTML code which is the basis of Webkit. Webkit is not an Apple born project, it was born and raised by the KDE project. Apple forked their code base to make WebKit.
It's really sad that in 2012, we're still stuck with format wars/protocol wars where the devices you choose prevent other choices of devices on the market. We built something like the Internet in the '60s, anyone can talk over it using IP as a routing protocol and TCP or UDP on the transport layer. Tim Berner's Lee made HTTP a reality in the '90s and now tons of devices, of all shapes and sizes, can render content written in HTML. If all these advances had followed the closed eco-system model Microsoft pushed back then or that Apple is pushing now, we wouldn't have this great communication/entertainment/education platform we have today.
It isn't like Apple doesn't understand this concept. They did it with with webkit.
Apple didn't open source webkit out of the goodness of their heart. They had to because of the license (LGPL) on the KHTML code which is the basis of Webkit. Webkit is not an Apple born project, it was born and raised by the KDE project. Apple forked their code base to make WebKit.