Comment by dataflow
8 months ago
Would you mind elaborating? How did KDE's use of GPL prevent Chromium from being closed-source? What about Google Chrome?
8 months ago
Would you mind elaborating? How did KDE's use of GPL prevent Chromium from being closed-source? What about Google Chrome?
WebKit, the rendering engine that originally powered Chromium began its life as a fork of KHTML a GPL-licensed rendering engine produced by the KDE project for their Konqueror browser.
That part I know, but how are you saying that prevented Chromium from being closed-source, and why didn't the same apply to Google Chrome?
The rendering engine: Chromium had to be kept "libre", because khtml/Webkit was LGPL.
The browser: Chrome. could be kept closed because the LGPL allow the integration of libre libraries in closed products as long as the library itself remains "libre". In this case the library is the renering engine: Chromium.
As a counter example MacOS was built on top of decades of work on the BSD operating system and Apple is under no obligation to give the code back to the BSD project... and it doesn't.
So the most valuable company in the planet took from the community and it doesn't bother to give back.
For some of us that is unacceptabme.
7 replies →
Note that it began its life at Apple, not Google. They forked KHTML first as far as i know.
It didn’t: that’s the joke.
You are not aware that chromium is open source?
I’m aware. The context of dataflow’s original inquiry is of some mechanism to prevent a large corporation forking a codebase and running away with users; Google didn’t need to close the Chromium source to pull that off.