WebKit Development continues

WebKit is being continually developed and improved thanks to the WebKit
open-source developer community — a group of hundreds of developers,
some of whom are purely volunteers and some of who work for companies
like Apple and Google that have a stake in the development of WebKit.
With so many different companies working on WebKit and on their own
WebKit browsers, things are not as harmonious as you may think. From the
very beginning, when Apple first announced WebCore, there has been a certain
amount of chaos and tension in the community.
In the early days, the relationship between the WebKit open-source community
and Apple was particularly rocky. Prior to releasing WebCore, Apple
made numerous changes to its branch of KHTML in secret. At the same time,
KHTML development was continuing in the KDE community. When Apple
finally did release WebCore, there were accusations that Apple was taking
more than it was giving back, which is generally regarded as a negative
among open-source developers.


The fact is, this is a very fast-moving area. It’s not always in the best interests
of vendors such as Apple, Google, HP/Palm, and others to fully release their
customizations of WebKit back to the open-source community (upstreaming).
This clash between the idealism of the open-source community and the profit
motives of companies that rely on the open-source project is inevitable.
Somehow, though, WebKit is managing to navigate these waters.
Over time, the relationship between KDE, the WebKit team, and Apple has
improved. One indicator of this is that even KDE has made the decision to
adopt WebKit as the browser engine for Konqueror.
According to the terms of the GNU Public License, anyone who modifies
WebKit for his or her own use is required to make the changed version freely
available as well. However, the terms of the Lesser GNU Public License that
WebKit uses has a kind of loophole: It’s permissible not to release the source
code for products you create that only link to code that’s covered under the
GNU Public License. In this way, Apple and other browser makers can keep
some of the details about their browsers a secret.