You're right (and I'm wrong) about the detail: KHTML is GPL, so webkit is as well. Webkit wasn't chosen for its license. BUT the broader picture and complaint remains the same: because webkit isn't the legal base of Chrome. It couldn't be 'cause good old GPL got in the way again and necessitated wholesale recreation of existing software, yet one more time. Blink is the base of Chrome, and Blink is a similar replacement - not literally a fork - of the WebCore component of WebKit with a much more liberally license. That bunch-o-unnecessary-work came courtesy of a different patent-grabbing license than the one I pointed to, but this turns out to be one more example of why I should be so disappointed that Mozilla remains so attached to patent-grabbing licenses. Do that, and your work just gets replaced (wasted) by someone who owns patents, such as Google. I still think copy-left is a fine invention, I just wish that one troll Unix company hadn't panicked a good part of the open-source movement way-back-when into an ultimately futile and crazily wasteful attempt to effectively eliminate patent laws.