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Unless they fork it, they can only extend the project in ways that are beneficial to the community in general, and their submissions will have to be approved.
There is a lot of good that comes from participating in a large, free project like WebKit, but it isn't all roses. There is also a lot of uncertainty and loss of control that comes with it.
If you can't see how that works, I'm not really sure how else to convey it. The closest analogy is that it is like renting your house instead of owning it. You can paint the walls (if you get permission), but you can't remodel the kitchen.
They can own the house but need to open it so others see how they improved and can take over changes they find useful.
Just like with Linux distributors WebKit distributors have a release-branch for there version and full control. They can put patches on top, can maintain, do changes without anybody preventing them. More own patches not upstream means higher maintainence sovits in there interest to get patches upstream.
No WebKit-vendor builds its webkit based browser out of trunk. All have branches and maintain them and patches on top not in trunk or not yet in trunk.




Member since:
2008-09-21
Qt5 QWebKit doesn't expose all the functionality and flexibility WebKit offers.
Opera also already started on that. They just pushed patches to improve HTML columns in WebKit. So, this extending where they see need isn't theory but it already is happening successfully.