About as relevant as the parent... Not very relevant, but since the parent gives a short overview of browser engine history, we might as well point out that it started with the then-excellent khtml from the KDE project, that powers konqueror. That's little known, and a very interesting history tidbit.
Just pointing out there's a whole family of HTML engines, and Webkit wasn't the origin. It's also likely that it's the reason why Webkit is GPL, and we're able to have this discussion.
In my experience, Apple haven't exactly been very open-source friendly - I know working with them there's a rejection of any GPL dependencies, even if well separated and unmodified, or even just tools used in the build process if they're GPL3+.
I don't doubt if Apple developed a html engine from scratch it would use a different license, and the entire landscape of browsers would look very different today.
I'm the OP. I'm questioning the relevance, which is in response to the assertion that "The difference being that Chrome is open source (ok fine, Chrome is closed source but the important parts like the rendering engine are open source as Chromium)". My aim is to point out that WebKit is also open source, and that the engine being touted by the GP is actually a fork of Webkit. Its provenance in this case irrelevant.
