(Responding out of order)

> No, Apple is no saint in this story.

Nowhere did I say or imply that Apple was a saint. All I said was that LGPL allows linking with closed code and distributing the resulting work without having to make the closed code open, and that Apple could have structured WebKit in such a way as to keep most of their code from having to be made open.

This is the main difference between GPL and LGPL, and a big reason why the FSF now discourages the use of LGPL.

> The reason webkit is known today, and not KHTML, is because Apple ignored their LGPL requirements.

> First, they didn't publish anything for years.

They published their KJS changes in June 2002, shortly before they released products using it. They published their KHTML changes shortly after Safari was announced.

> Then only obfuscated source dumps with all comments removed for many years.

Citation needed. My recollection is that they published their code in the form that they used it internally. The difficulty for the KHTML developers in incorporating Apple's code was (1) WebKit was designed to do what Apple needed, which was not necessarily what KDE needed, and so the two were diverging, and (2) Apple was making a lot of changes that touched a lot of code making it hard to break it down to individual improvements that could be incorporated independently.

Also (3) Apple had poured way more resources into this than the khtml developers had available. Since Apple kept its work secret for business reasons, that meant that, once Apple published their fork, the sheer amount of changes overwhelmed the KHTML developers (WebKit wasn’t just a port of KHTML; it broadened support for html features)

Yes, but they didn’t even attempt to get it merged, nor did they provide the changes on a per-commit level, but only as a single sourcedump with all comments etc removed.

This made integration impossible.

Apple's JavaScript implementation is based on KJS as well. Arguably, Microsoft was hostile towards open source in general at the time, while Apple simply stole open source software.

It is not theft to use open source software in accordance with its license.

Legally they might have done the minimal amount necessary to not violate the license, but morally they've been a huge dick. "We have to open source our modifications to the code base, so here you get exactly one tarball of uncommented stuff."

That hasn’t been true for many years so what exactly is the complaint?