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   Julius Schwartzenberg (jschwart@mas.to)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Nov-2024 18:20:57 JST Julius Schwartzenberg

   • alecm

   @alecm important to be aware is that the engine is still derived from KHTML and has a copyleft license. Making it fully closed source is not legally possible at this point.

   • Embed this notice
     Julius Schwartzenberg (jschwart@mas.to)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Nov-2024 19:05:08 JST Julius Schwartzenberg

     in reply to

     • alecm

     @alecm the relevance of the license relates to who owns the copyright. In Oracle's case the copyright was fully owned by them, so they could do whatever they wanted. In the case of Chrome, copyright is assigned to various KDE developers, Apple, etc.

     There is not a single entity that can be bought so that one would own all the copyright on the entire codebase that makes up Chrome.

   • Embed this notice
     alecm (alecm@alecmuffett.com)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Nov-2024 19:05:10 JST alecm

     in reply to

     I just commented on Mastodon: it’s precisely the situation that we had with Solaris: an entire real Unix operating system with phenomenal enterprise credentials being open-sourced, and Oracle walked that back. The result was to cut the trunk off of the evolving tree of software and collapse of faith in its future, leading to the eventual and utterly complete triumph of Linux everywhere.

     The licence is irrelevant.