this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2023
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History lesson
WebKit is only open source because its a fork of KHTML, originally developed by the KDE project ^[0]^ for the Konqueror browser ^[1]^. KHTLM was developed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) ^[2]^, which limits companies from taking the hard work of open source projects and claiming them as their own without giving back to the community.
If Apple's surprising you with the "open code" released under the WebKit project, it's because they're legally requried to. We can thank the Free Software Foundation's LGPL for that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konqueror
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License
No doubt. I was careful not to give Apple credit for WebKit's open source status, but nonetheless it remains surprising to me that Apple participates in open source software all.