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WebKit was a fork of KDE's KHTML engine, and so had to be open source from the outset. IIRC, in the early days Apple was not on good terms with KHTML upstream a
by ajdlinux 11y ago
WebKit was a fork of KDE's KHTML engine, and so had to be open source from the outset. IIRC, in the early days Apple was not on good terms with KHTML upstream and weren't exactly model participants in the open source community.
- DiThi 11y agoThey basically started the development of WebKit in secret based on KHTML despite having to release the source when they released Safari. The result was two codebases too different to merge, and the improvements couldn't go "back to the community" without discarding many other improvements, not to mention the work needed to integrate it into KDE.
- tzs 11y ago> WebKit was a fork of KDE's KHTML engine, and so had to be open source from the outset. Parts of it had to be open source. Apple could have made a lot of WebKit closed if they had wanted to since KHTML is LGPL, not GPL, and much of Apple's additions could have been kept as separate modules.
- coldtea 11y ago>WebKit was a fork of KDE's KHTML engine, and so had to be open source from the outset. On the other hand it didn't have to be a fork. They could have gone for the NIH way, and make their own totally controller rendering engine. Especially given that Apple's WebKit additions totally dwarfed KHTML.