[eekee]

There's one thing I can't stand in many of these comments: The blithe assumption that just because something is open-source, it -- and any fork of it -- could be maintained. I can't emphasise enough how wrong this is.

Look aorund you in the open-source world. Do you see dozens of forks of every worthwhile project? Hardly! The greatest diversity is probably that between Linux distributions, and for the most part they're only trying to make all the packages play nicely with each other.

Maintaining any software that's even half as complex as webkit, (or half as complex as any modern browser engine needs to be,) requires a ridiculous amount of work. Each fork would need to be supported by many people, each of which would have to be convinced that the ideas of one innovator are worth supporting. Then what happens is the really worthwhile ideas are often very hard to explain, while ideas which can be made to sound wonderful and which attract much help may be of very poor quality.