First of all Chromium is made up of third party projects (such as
WebKit) plus the code built by Google.  The major Google developed
components being the multi process architecture, sandboxing and V8.
Google have been very clear that the first beta version of their code
was designed and built targeting XP/Vista x86.  Internally this
version uses Microsoft APIs only available on XP and above.  That is
their choice.  They put the time and effort into doing this.  Of
course WebKit already works on many platforms.

Google have stated that they will make Chromium work on OSX and Linux,
which means they will have to design and code components such as multi
process architecture and sandboxing to work on these platforms too.
Obviously they will not be using Microsoft APIs in those ports.  You
can also expect that as this porting effort completes, the design of
the components will become cleaner, and we will see an abstracted
layer common to all platforms, and a platform specific layer
underneath.  At this point it may well be possible to create a Win2k
port by providing a Win2k specific layer.  However, Google have been
very clear that *they* will not do this work, and that they will not
want that port in their tree for the reasons they stated.  However,
there is absolutely nothing preventing others from doing this work and
hosting the port in their own tree.  Indeed, I would bet that Google
would be willing to accept patches that made the abstracted layer more
amenable to creating ports like this.

Those wanting ports for an alternate platform of their choice are free
to take the source and create one.  At this point in time that will be
fairly difficult because some of the libraries required by the current
Windows beta version are closed sourced.  Google are obviously working
hard to get Chromium multi platform.  Once that engineering work is
complete, the linux version will obviously not be dependent on closed
source libraries so seeing what needs to be provided in a platform
port should be easier.

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