"Apple is a company that doesn't do open source projects unless they have a very good reason for that"
In this case, it was to break the dependency on IE. Mozilla existed for the Mac, but the Mozilla codebase was clumsy. "KHTML and KJS allowed easier development than other available technologies by virtue of being small (fewer than 140,000 lines of code), cleanly designed and standards-compliant." (Quote from Wikipedia.)
It's then a business question of how to develop the project: proprietary/licensed (like IE and Opera), proprietary/internal (like ... AOL?), or public (like Mozilla). I think Opera was enough to give some estimate on the market size, and show there isn't all that much of a benefit to staying proprietary.
But hindsight is 20/20. I don't know why Apple went from releasing only WebCore and JavaScriptCore (the LGPL components of WebKit) to releasing all of WebKit (the rest under a BSD license, I think).
In this case, it was to break the dependency on IE. Mozilla existed for the Mac, but the Mozilla codebase was clumsy. "KHTML and KJS allowed easier development than other available technologies by virtue of being small (fewer than 140,000 lines of code), cleanly designed and standards-compliant." (Quote from Wikipedia.)
It's then a business question of how to develop the project: proprietary/licensed (like IE and Opera), proprietary/internal (like ... AOL?), or public (like Mozilla). I think Opera was enough to give some estimate on the market size, and show there isn't all that much of a benefit to staying proprietary.
But hindsight is 20/20. I don't know why Apple went from releasing only WebCore and JavaScriptCore (the LGPL components of WebKit) to releasing all of WebKit (the rest under a BSD license, I think).