Hector Martin

Idle thought: can you build Google Chrome's `chrome` binary from Chromium source code, verbatim? Is this documented anywhere? If not, isn't this an LGPL violation, since it embeds Blink which is LGPL-licensed?

wouldn't this only be a problem if blink links to the binary part, not the rest of the chrome code. Else opera have an even bigger problem. https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/master/LICENSE … is the licence for the whole project.

The `chrome` binary includes Blink, therefore if that binary cannot be built from Chromium code, it includes proprietary parts and everything is linked together. That file is not the license for the whole project. It's just the top-level license. Blink is licensed differently.

Blink's license is BSD-style as well, not LGPL. https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/blink/+/master/LICENSE …

Blink has multiple licenses. You must go deeper. https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/blink/+/master/Source/core/LICENSE-LGPL-2 … Blink is based on WebKit which is based on KHTML which is LGPL. And as you know, you can't magically convert LGPL licensed code into BSD.

KHTML is BSD except for JavaScriptCore and WebCore. Blink doesn't use JSC at all and according to the BUILD file it only ever loads WebCore when running the test suite (it includes an explicit note "# This includes some test targets. Don't link into production!"

KHTML is 100% LGPL, you're thinking about WebKit which used KHTML as the basis for WebCore and JavaScriptCore. WebCore is, er, the core engine. Of course it gets linked in. //third_party/blink/public:blink -> //third_party/blink/renderer/core in the Chromium source archive.