Why Slashdot owes Apple an apology

Sam Varghese
Monday, 03 March 2008 20:23

Opinion and Analysis

The Firefox developer did not sensationalise his finding. He went into detail of what he had found and how he effected a fix. In short, he found a publicly documented way of achieving what the Safari developers had.

Responding to Vukicevic's post, David Hyatt, a former Firefox developer who now works for Apple, wrote , in part: "Many of the private methods that WebKit uses are private for a reason. Either they expose internal structures that can’t be depended on, or they are part of something inside a framework that may not be fully formed."

Does that mean that the Apple developers are behaving in a manner reminiscent of Microsoft. In one word, no.

Apple has long realised that though it is a company that sells proprietary software, it gains little by following many dubious practices that have taken Microsoft to the top as far as marketshare is concerned. It is aware that trying to emulate Microsoft in these methods will make it an object of hatred and it would prefer to avoid that.

To come back to the sensationalisation of this bit of information, one would expect that in a situation like this the website which posted it would apologise to Apple and post something publicly to indicate that it had done so.

Unfortunately, one of the hallmarks of people who style themselves as journalists these days - and give those of us in the real profession a bad name - is that they are never willing to say they are wrong.

Slashdot, it is well known, has a tilt towards Linux and its country cousins. And given that it is a commercial site - despite the misleading .org suffix in its domain name - the people there are aware that anything negative about the Mac will invite users of OS X to rise up in defence. It's a very simple equation: more clicks, more traffic, more moolah.

But when you are wrong about something, it is better to say a simple word - one which politicians in Australia used recently with amazing effect. That word is "sorry." And a few more words wouldn't help in this case: "We screwed up badly."

'Twould be interesting to see what Jeff 'Hemos' Bates, the chief of the site, has to say about this kind of monumental stuff-up.