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by m0th87 5849 days ago
I don't mean to discredit Apple's contributions, but your comments seem to suggest to me that WebKit remains open source for benevolent reasons.

They built the project on KHTML so they wouldn't have to start from scratch. And because KHTML is under the LGPL, WebKit will have to remain open source unless they removed all KHTML-related code, which I'm sure is not worth the investment.

1 comments

WebKit was closed from 2002-2005 (except for the LGPL components). WebCore and JavaScriptCore are LGPL, everything else is BSD.

http://dot.kde.org/2005/06/07/apple-opens-webkit-cvs-and-bug...

This isn't to suggest Apple is benevolent. There are plenty of good strategic and practical reasons for this decision.