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by Karellen 1834 days ago
> The Chrome team set out to build a better browser and even open sourced the core, Chromium.

I think that rewrites history a bit. They started with a Free Software browser - Konqueror/KHTML - and were required to release changes under a compatible license.

We should be thankful that Konqueror/KHTML was released under a Free Software license, rather than a permissive open source license that would have allowed Google to deny us the rights that they had been granted by their upstream.
2 comments
anjbe 1834 days ago
> We should be thankful that Konqueror/KHTML was released under a Free Software license, rather than a permissive open source license

Your wording suggests that permissive licenses are not “Free Software” licenses, which is incorrect. Even the FSF acknowledges that permissive licenses like BSD, ISC, MIT, and Apache are free.

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Karellen 1833 days ago
My bad, I should have said "Copyleft" rather than "Free". Thanks for the correction.
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zepto 1834 days ago
I think that rewrites history a bit. They started with a Free Software browser - WebKit…
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funcDropShadow 1834 days ago
And WebKit was a more or less friendly fork of KHTML/Konqueror.
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zepto 1834 days ago
It was a fork - so what Google started with was not actually KHTML and the amount of work done after the fork before Google started using it was much greater than that done before.
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