On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 12:25 PM, Ben Barrett <[email protected]> wrote: > Sounds cool, but does this smell like StarOffice & Sun, to anyone else?? > WebKit is good, though -- just wondering whether this is really a case > of open source benefiting from proprietary code, or vice versa...
I'm wary of it. I think there's that kind of danger any time you have folks answering to stockholders in the code stewardship role on an open source project whose code base plays the crippleware role to a proprietary product. OTOH, the Chromium-unique code is BSD-licensed, so no legal barriers to recycling the code under other licenses such as the Gnu licenses. But note that Chromium comes with some third party code issued under other licenses. <http://code.google.com/chromium/terms.html#3rdparty>. The ones I'm familiar with pose no barrier to recycling under other licenses as I recall, but there are a couple that I haven't studied. I haven't investigated the Chromium Project in depth. But my nose tells me to be more interested long term in what KDE does in regard to WebKit. They've been contributing WebKit patches and there were some rumbles awhile back that KDE is moving toward deprecating KHTML in favor of WebKit. I haven't checked to see if that's true. There's no crippleware business model and no vendor brutally controlling the KDE code base that I know of. :-) So I'm guessing that a KDE branch might be the WebKit wagon that winds up with the FOSS Clydesdale hitched to it. But that's only a guess. Time will tell. Best regards, Paul -- Universal Interoperability Council <http:www.universal-interop-council.org> _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
