Nobody else ships codecs baked into their rendering engine because that's a fucking stupid thing to do, something you'd only do if you wanted to prevent users f

Nobody else ships codecs baked into their rendering engine because that's a fucking stupid thing to do, something you'd only do if you wanted to prevent users from using other codecs without forking the entire project. Everyone else links against an intermediary framework (QT, ffmpeg, gstreamer) and lets that dictate codec support. Chrome/Chromium does ship with a minimal libavcodec, but you can swap it out with a symlink to your system's full ffmpeg. GCC was the canonical 'cathedral' project, controlled absolutely by Stallman through the FSF, a reign interrupted by the EGCS folks who had the gall to want a working compiler. Mozilla may play up their whole 'community' angle, but they aren't very 'bazaar' at all in reality. Patches are unwelcome. A bunch of independent parties, most of them corporate enemies, contribute to the core WebKit project on a first-class basis. There have never been corporate contributors to Gecko, and they've repeatedly fucked over all the open source projects that used Gecko directly, to the point that only one is left (Camino). They don't even really support non-Firefox apps on top of XULrunner, including the ones they wrote themselves!