I agree completely that innovation should not be restricted to certain areas :-) And although I think that Dart isn't good for the web, I would encourage anyone who wants to e.g. try plugging a different VM into a browser engine to see what happens.

Secondly I would agree that WebKit has its own OS X-related baggage, but that just goes to show that nobody's perfect. It's not an argument for adding more. I would also agree that in the hypothetical case of Dart support being added to WebKit that Google would be expected to maintain their code, just as Apple would be expected to maintain OS X stuff.

But again, I think the original conversation was had at cross-purposes. What started as a conversation about hosting a branch of WebKit to do some innovating turned into a conversation about standards and the broader web. In the former case it's a purely technical question of where the work is done, but in the latter, I think the "participate in the web standards community" bit comes in to play. Why did Google come directly to WebKit to ask about integrating Dart instead of talking to e.g. the W3C or WHATWG?