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this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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GPL is also free for commercial use... all open source licenses are. The rendering engines used by Safari (and Chrome/Edge) are GPL.
GPL can be used for commercial purposes, but it requires all software derived from it to also be open source and GPL compatible. So no one whose commercial business relies on selling software will use GPL because their customers can copy and distribute the code.
Neither Safari nor Chrome’s rendering engine is GPL. Safari’s engine is LGPL, which means the binary library can be linked into a closed source program, but modifications to the library’s code must remain open.
Chromium is BSD, which doesn’t even require modifications to remain open. So I can take chromium’s source, change it however I want for my own browser, and never distribute that code.
If Safari’s and Chrome’s engines were GPL, Safari and Chrome would be forced to be open source, and they very much are not.
The thing is that source code is just a small part of an application. For example, Quake games are open sourced, but their assets like textures, models and music are not. Thus you can't just compile the game and call it a day. Another example is all kinds of certificates, they are never part of the source. You can compile the app, but it won't work.
Source code, GPL or otherwise, doesn't matter.