343
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
343 points (99.1% liked)
Technology
60130 readers
2812 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
GPL is also free for commercial use... all open source licenses are. The rendering engines used by Safari (and Chrome/Edge) are GPL.
GPL can be used for commercial purposes, but it requires all software derived from it to also be open source and GPL compatible. So no one whose commercial business relies on selling software will use GPL because their customers can copy and distribute the code.
Neither Safari nor Chrome’s rendering engine is GPL. Safari’s engine is LGPL, which means the binary library can be linked into a closed source program, but modifications to the library’s code must remain open.
Chromium is BSD, which doesn’t even require modifications to remain open. So I can take chromium’s source, change it however I want for my own browser, and never distribute that code.
If Safari’s and Chrome’s engines were GPL, Safari and Chrome would be forced to be open source, and they very much are not.
The thing is that source code is just a small part of an application. For example, Quake games are open sourced, but their assets like textures, models and music are not. Thus you can't just compile the game and call it a day. Another example is all kinds of certificates, they are never part of the source. You can compile the app, but it won't work.
Source code, GPL or otherwise, doesn't matter.