Actually, in the Debug podcast, it was revealed that they were going to go with Mozilla's effort and all that held them back was that KHTML was so much simpler to explain, though the simplicity was something it lost in rewrites. WebKit, regardless of original License, was likely going to be open source either way just as Darwin was even without the License requirement. The point here is that non-free uses inside OS X helped rather than hindered the development of KHTML software. By non-free I refer less to the availability of source code as to how copyright around branding forces a schism for normal folks between Chrome/Safari and WebKit/Blink projects. Few will download or trust a silver WebKit experimental build or blue Chromium over their official variants, particularly if functionality is crippled because of the lack of proprietary extensions that would normally ship or easily integrate. Sometimes FSF users simply aren't "the rest of us," which is why it's normal to have competing licenses. I hope this encourages both projects to become more active developing end-user appreciable features, though perhaps I'm more pragmatic that way.
> Actually, in the Debug podcast, it was revealed that they were going to go with Mozilla's effort and all that held them back was that KHTML was so much simpler to explain
Actually, that's completely irrelevant.
The GPL ensured that Google could benefit from Apple's decision to use KHTML.
That's exactly relevant! Your premise is that <insert entity> (in this case Apple) objects to releasing things free, and the only thing that made them do it is GPL. GPL is simply not relevant here, no one cared. Apple in turn benefited from Google's improvements of Webkit, etc. People who make decisions in companies, and indeed people in general, are perfectly able to understand the enormous benefits of cooperation. No need for any kind of force or coercion, thank you very much.
Whether there are other benefits to giving away source code is not relevant. What they might have done is not relevant. No one could ever say whether Apple and Google and Samsung would have gotten together and made a web browser in collaboration without the GPL.
The fact is that they did not do it without the GPL.
