I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but Webkit was originally a fork of KHTML, which is LGPL, so they were required/forced to release it under the same license.
And based on the their upstream contributions[1] it doesn’t look like it was a gesture of goodwill.
> I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but Webkit was originally a fork of KHTML, which is LGPL, so they were required/forced to release it under the same license
No, they were forced to release parts of it under the same license. There was a lot of original Apple code that could be separated out easily and released under any license they wanted (or kept proprietary) as long as they released them as object files so could modify and relink in the modified LGPL parts.
The parts that Apple was not required to release under LGPL they released under BSD.
The well-known fact that WebKit has an origin story in KHTML is completely irrelevant to the point being made. Apple was the one who put substantial engineering effort into making the mobile web work well, and released their work with the most open licenses they could.
And based on the their upstream contributions[1] it doesn’t look like it was a gesture of goodwill.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#Split_development