Because they want to optimize it for their models and don't want to be blocked by waiting for PRs to merge or be rejected.

There's plenty of reasons to start your own fork that you have full agency of, as long as the OSS License is maintained anyone will be able to benefit from any new features they want to make use of.

▲

dannyw 4 hours ago | parent [-]

This is the beauty of open source :) KHTML -> WebKit -> Blink is a good example.

▲

bigyabai 3 hours ago | parent [-]

KHTML is dead now, though. It was basically embraced, extended and extinguished by Apple and Google, who both wanted to take away the leverage of the community.

Today, legacy KHTML maintainers are boxed-out of upstream decisions that might prevent Manifest v2 from swirling down the drain. I'd argue the story isn't very beautiful anymore.

▲

gunapologist99 24 minutes ago | parent [-]

True. Although the cruel twist is now that KDE's upstream decisions are boxing out X11/sysvinit/etc maintainers.

	▲	bigyabai 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		X11 and sysvinit are not downstream KParts libs like KHTML was. KDE has no obligation to fork or support either project.