Comment by ForHackernews
8 months ago
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.
8 months ago
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.
Your logic seems faulty.
Let me see if I have this right:
>For some of us that is unacceptabme.
1. So, Apple, creator of macOS, "the most valuable company on the planet", followed the rules of the BSD licence,and that is unacceptable?
But, Google, a company that is also highly valuable, and the creator of Chrome, also followed the rules of the LGPL licence, but that is acceptable?
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The parent said GPL, which is what got me confused. LGPL makes more sense.
Although... this still doesn't explain why the other parts of the browser besides the rendering engine are open source? i.e. if the license was the reason, then presumably Google would've made the rest of the browser closed source, but that wasn't the case for most parts.
Note that it began its life at Apple, not Google. They forked KHTML first as far as i know.