I'm a bit confused about where you're coming from here. They could certainly have attempted to license v8 but since the bulk of what they have going on are exte

I'm a bit confused about where you're coming from here. They could certainly have attempted to license v8 but since the bulk of what they have going on are extension of the already open sourced WebKit rendering engine that would have been difficult. Now they certainly could have written their own rendering engine, but if time has shown anything it's that this is not easy task (look at the lag time between release to market and efficient rendering for any of the big engines). And in this case it would have likely meant the death of the project to step out with an inefficient root rendering engine. Okay... so let's assume the above. They are forced to open source the components that link in with Web Kit, but they keep the Javascript VM closed and license that. We now get to throw into contention that there is any significant cash flow available to license. I think that's certainly suspect. So finally let's think about why google might not care. This isn't about making a money move. Much like releasing IE back in the 90's wasn't a money move for MS. It is however a platform move. Google has a number of very resource intensive javascript applications, a number of which are common for people to have open at the same time. That requires have a better framework for dealing with these kinds of tasks. Chrome is an attempt to provide that. It's not even clear if this is a serious browser bid, or more of a road map for other browser vendors to emulate. In the end it doesn't matter. Google's revenue stream requires eyeballs, lots of them. And the eyeballs are asking for better performance, Chrome is a means to that end.