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Apple doesn't actually control WebKit. A decent proportion of reviewers at http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit%20Team are Google employees.

The engineering argument is that the differences between Chromium's multi-process model and WebKit2 are big enough that, in order for both projects to move forward, Google needs to fork WebKit. I'm not competent to judge whether this is actually true.

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http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/WebKit2 outlines the technical differences between the architectures pretty well. Suffice it to say, the model runs deep, and has real impact on the way things like WebCore are put together.

Speaking of reviewers, it looked like there were (maybe) a handful of WebKit reviewers that meet the following criteria:

1. Not affiliated with Apple or Google.

2. Not specifically associated with a port in terms of their review areas.

To me, that says a lot about how WebKit governance works in practice.

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