According to Ken Kocienda's book (he was one of the original developers of Safari), that email is a post-hoc rationalization. The "evaluation" was literally him and another guy trying to build Mozilla for weeks and failing, and then someone else joining the team and quickly building Konqueror instead.

If the people evaluating your code can't get it to build, I'd say that's a good sign that your code isn't ready to be taken up by others.

> According to Ken Kocienda's book (he was one of the original developers of Safari), that email is a post-hoc rationalization.

Kocienda's book doesn't say that Melton's email is a post-hoc rationalization. It doesn't say anything about that email on a meta level. It merely gives a straightforward account of the project's history from Kocienda's perspective. There is zero contradiction between this, the message from Melton on the KDE mailing list, or the other historical accounts (e.g. on Wikipedia) that cite Melton.

The official story from Melton has always been that they originally tried to start with Mozilla, found it too difficult to work with, so they abandoned it and adopted KDE folks' work as the basis for their Mac-native browser.

The most relevant passage from that email:

> When we were evaluating technologies over a year ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other open source projects.

(GeekyBear's "Well, no" here is definitely wrong if the particulars from Kocienda's account are in fact accurate, but that's simply poor synthesis on some HNer's part and doesn't make Melton's version a retcon. The accounts we have from those involved are consistent.)