this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2025
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I don't think Chromium actually has any GPL code in it, only LGPL (mostly from KDE because Chromium is ultimately descended from KHTML) and less restrictive ones. If it had GPL code in it, Google Chrome and Edge would also need to be FOSS, which they aren't.
Sure, but the LGPL modifies the GPL and directly refers to it, so you'd want to include both. Section 1 states:
I can absolutely see a lawyer requesting that both be included even if only the LGPL is used.
For the record, the LGPL is ~7.3K on its own as plain text. Add that to the GPL and you have >40K w/o formatting. Multiply that for each project that just changes the copyright owner part and you're in multiple MB territory.
And Chromium probably uses GPL licensed code in its build process (e.g. gcc), which would also be included in the license file if that's a standard way to build the project according to its documentation, esp. if there's a way to install it via a script or something (pretty common for Google and Mozilla projects).
This is true for the LGPLv3 but not v2.1 which, if I am not mistaken, KHTML is licensed under.
GCC in particular comes with the Runtime Library Exception to the GPL. The exception carves out runtime code from the GPL vital licensing condition, and it doesn't require software compiled by GCC to attribute back to GCC.
So there's no legal reason to copy in the GPL text into this notice on account of GCC.
Yes, do convey GPL text if you're also conveying LGPL text.
That license file doesn't describe the license governing chromium they have a separate license file for that (and it's very small, since it's an MIT/BSD style license). This license file covers all software used in the making of chromium.