Comment by abirch
1 year ago
There court hasn't set a remedy to its verdict yet. From the article
The proposal, filed Friday afternoon, says that Google must “promptly and fully divest Chrome, along with any assets or services necessary to successfully complete the divestiture, to a buyer approved by the Plaintiffs in their sole discretion, subject to terms that the Court and Plaintiffs approve.” It also would require Google to stop paying partners for preferential treatment of its search engine.
Think of it like MySQL and then MariaDB. So if Google sells Chromium to say Saleforce (they seem to buy everything) then Chrome is no longer Google's. Google would have complied with the verdict.
What does it mean to sell Chromium? Chromium code is Copyright The Chromium Authors. It contains a substantial amount of code not written by Google, which isn't Google's to sell.
I suppose Google could sell the rights to their parts of the codebase, possibly the rights to future Googler contributions, admin rights to the repo, domains, trademarks, CI, hardware labs, and maybe some other things I'm forgetting... but in terms of the tech being developed and shipped, there isn't really anything substantive to sell.