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> Imagine if google could just make whatever internal changes to chromium and nobody knew about it.

Chromium is BSD licensed so Google absolutely can just make it closed source.



The BSD license only applies to some code from what I can tell. Other code is still under LGPL. At least this is what this file tells me:

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/...


Yes, there's code in Chromium going back to the KDE/ Konqueror and WebKit days that's LGPL licensed. Mostly in the Blink rendering engine like you linked.


Just to clarify the relevant thing is whether Google owns the copyright to Chromium source, and it does for a huge part. It can license that code however it wants, including open source, or no license at all.

Chrome/Chromium also uses a ton of open source libraries for which Google does NOT hold the copyright, but all of them, per their license, can be linked with closed source code and distributed (i.e. they are not GPL/copyleft).


...and they do, calling it Google Chrome.




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