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It's a good point but also not that cut and dry. Chrome started as Webkit, which forked from KHTML, which was part of the very open source KDE. Has Google bene
by bjt 3y ago
It's a good point but also not that cut and dry. Chrome started as Webkit, which forked from KHTML, which was part of the very open source KDE.
Has Google benefitted more from other people's open source contributions, or have we benefitted more from Google's open source contributions? The answer is not obvious to me.
- yunohn 3y agoGoogle impacts infinitely more lives than KDE does…
- mcherm 3y agoI think your math is wrong. If (as was stated) Google's Chrome is based on KDE, than any user of Google Chrome is necessarily impacted by KDE. Meanwhile there could in theory be some user of KDE who has never used Chrome. So the set of lives affected by KDE is the same or larger than the set affected by Chrome.
- Kwpolska 3y agoYour argument works only if we consider being affected by something to be very broadly applicable and unconditionally transitive. Someone who uses Chrome from version 100 onwards might be using something with traces of KDE code, but those traces are probably so small after all these years and forks that I wouldn't count them.
- stephenr 3y agoThis is very true. KDE never ran any PII data collection programs targeting 70% of browser users, for the sake of selling ads. Oh you meant impacts positively? No. Chrome is a blight on humanity.
- fidotron 3y agoYeah they made v8 which beget node and npm.
- hooby 3y agoI honestly don't see how "who benefited more" matters to the question of whether it's bottom-line worthwhile for Google to give Chrome away for free.
- nottorp 3y ago> Chrome started as Webkit, which forked from KHTML, which was part of the very open source KDE. Safari started as Webkit which forked from KHTML which was part of KDE. The various forks of webkit incl Chrome came later. If Chrome was ever based on webkit, iForget.