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Comment by bjt | Hacker News Reader

It's a good point but also not that cut and dry. Chrome started as Webkit, which forked from KHTML, which was part of the very open source KDE.

Has Google benefitted more from other people's open source contributions, or have we benefitted more from Google's open source contributions? The answer is not obvious to me.

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I honestly don't see how "who benefited more" matters to the question of whether it's bottom-line worthwhile for Google to give Chrome away for free.

Google impacts infinitely more lives than KDE does…

I think your math is wrong.

If (as was stated) Google's Chrome is based on KDE, than any user of Google Chrome is necessarily impacted by KDE. Meanwhile there could in theory be some user of KDE who has never used Chrome.

So the set of lives affected by KDE is the same or larger than the set affected by Chrome.

Your argument works only if we consider being affected by something to be very broadly applicable and unconditionally transitive. Someone who uses Chrome from version 100 onwards might be using something with traces of KDE code, but those traces are probably so small after all these years and forks that I wouldn't count them.

This is very true.

KDE never ran any PII data collection programs targeting 70% of browser users, for the sake of selling ads.

Oh you meant impacts positively? No. Chrome is a blight on humanity.

Yeah they made v8 which beget node and npm.

> Chrome started as Webkit, which forked from KHTML, which was part of the very open source KDE.

Safari started as Webkit which forked from KHTML which was part of KDE.

The various forks of webkit incl Chrome came later. If Chrome was ever based on webkit, iForget.

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