I'm not sure if they can without rewriting the whole thing, the original (WebKit/KHTML) code base being GPL. On the other hand, the Google lawyers seem to have

I'm not sure if they can without rewriting the whole thing, the original (WebKit/KHTML) code base being GPL. On the other hand, the Google lawyers seem to have found an excuse to link some proprietary code into Chome (that's not part of Chromium). Does anybody know what that excuse is, and if it provides a loophole large enough to close off Chrome development?