alt Hacker NewsBy "contribute back" I was referring more generally to the commons.
The chrome example actually proves my point, the KDE project, or anyone for that matter, can take the changes Google made to their code. If KHTML was MIT it's likely that wouldn't be the case
Practically though, there is no difference. The KDE project has lost control over the web browser, even though they started it. It's an all or nothing. They can take all of chrome or they can take nothing. There is no in between. If KDE and Google disagree on the direction of the web browser, Google wins. There is no control. There's no advantage to open source, other than it's free. It may as well be a closed source project for all the good it does.