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Yeh, I agree. I was surprised when they open sourced webkit. But like you said, it's strategic. I don't think they care that much about the browser. Their em
by andrewtbham 12y ago
Yeh, I agree. I was surprised when they open sourced webkit. But like you said, it's strategic. I don't think they care that much about the browser. Their emphasis is on apps running in their ecosystem.
- tsuraan 12y agoThey didn't have a choice about webkit; it was a fork of KHTML, which was a part of KDE (and available under the terms of the GPL).
- timgws 12y agoActually, WebKit was a fork of KHTML, correct, but it is licensed under the terms of LGPL. One extra letter, but a world of difference. This is why they had to open source KHTML, but they could get away with not open sourcing Safari (if KHTML was licensed under the GPL, any app that linked against the library would need to be licensed under the GPL, too.) Let's not forget that webkit when it was released was little more then a code dump - one big patch that had to be applied to KHTML.
- eduo 12y agoAlso "they didn't have a choice" sort of ignores that they did have the choice of not using khtml and wouldn't have, if its license could've been problematic for them.