Mozilla didn’t reverse engineer OS X

I know this may come as a shock to many diggers (as that seems to be where the inaccurate story was popularized), and I know they’ll bury this story because it doesn’t play up to their fanciful notion that Mozilla is a rogue crew of hackers subverting Steve Jobs control on the Mac OS X platform, but Mozilla didn’t reverse engineer shit. If you belive a random unsourced blogger, I’ve got some WMDs in Iraq for you to tell congress about. Let’s go into detail, with sources this time!

Let’s look at Bug 412486, the Mozilla bug for adding support for multi-touch trackpad gestures. In particular, let’s check out comment 3:

Comment #3 From Samuel Sidler (:ss | :sps) 2008-02-05 10:26:52 PST

See also: http://cocoadex.com/2008/02/nsevent-modifications-swipe-ro.html

Check it out, a post on Cocoadex from February, 2008, shortly after the new macbooks with multi touch were released. Pay attention to the bolded portion especially of this quote:

So, I’m sure you’ve heard of the Macbook Air and it’s revolutionary multi-touch trackpad, borrowed from the iPhone technology. The basic gist of it is that it provides application specific gestures that can be triggered by performing some gestures on the new trackpad. With that in mind, every Cocoa developer should be asking themselves this question: What has Apple done to NSEvent [and friends] to facilitate gestures in their own applications and how can I do it in mine?

With the help of my local Apple Store’s Macbook Air, and some NSEvent knowledge, I’m going to answer exactly that.

Yes, he went to the Apple Store and did his own digging to find out how to code multi touch support shortly after the new Air came out. Unfortunately, Elliot of Cocoadex does not work for Mozilla nor on Firefox. To make super sure that I was getting this correct, I contacted Tom Dyas, the person the bug is assigned to and the author of the patch adding multitouch support. He responded early this morning:

Nobody from Mozilla had to reverse engineer the undocumented API as the information had already been discovered by someone in the Mac OS blogging world. Go to
http://cocoadex.com/2008/02/nsevent-modifications-swipe-ro.html for the blog article that had the information. This is the same link that is listed in Bug 412486 and in comments in the patch itself.

I know this won’t quell the massive spread of this complete lie, but did you know who Edward Lee was and why TG Daily didn’t link to their source? Because Edward Lee said nothing of the sort about Mozilla REing it! Here’s what he actually said:

From what I quickly gathered, the gestures interface was reverse engineered from some private Apple API, so things might change at any time!

He doesn’t know for sure (he’s right, though), but he definitely didn’t say Mozilla did the reverse engineering.

TG Daily is taking facts, turning them into lies, and then not citing sources to hide this. I’m really not surprised, and what’s even less surprising is how the lie spreads. A good reporter would do a LITTLE bit of research, it took me barely any and I only e-mailed Tom Dyers to make absolutely sure I was getting it right. He didn’t take long to respond at all, only a few hours. I hope this inspires other journalists to do more investigation before posting.

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