Earlier quoted context omitted.
For quite a while, Apple were jerks about contributing there changes back. The patches they submitted to KHTML were huge, undocumented, and full of OSX-specific code. It tooks many months of griping by KHTML, GPL advocates and the community before Apple opened up thier KHTML fork as a CVS repo, and some time later, simply open-sourcing Webkit itself. But at the beginning, it was quite a fight to get Apple to acknowle…
This is inaccurate, KDE still uses KHTML. I've certainly seen the point argued back and forth amongst KDE developers, but all versions of KDE still use KHTML, and I assume it's still maintained somewhat. KHTML and WebKit aren't just interchangeable pieces of Konqueror, see http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3998 . thiago from #kde informs me that "the guy [who claimed that KHTML is gone] is completely wrong", "[KHTML]…
In July 2007, the Ars Technica website published an article announcing that the KDE team would move from KHTML to WebKit.[13]
( From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#cite_ref-arsunfork_12-0 )