How would that work in practice? The source code is open, anyone can pick it up and use it, thus getting any of it's features.

It's not even remotely comparable to the situation where Microsoft was leveraging their desktop market dominance bundling their _proprietary_ webbrowser.

Also in terms of competition we have an entirely different situation these days. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla all have plenty enough resources to continously enhance their browsers and keep the competition going, and of those four, three are providing the layout engines as open source, while two of them also release fully open source browsers (firefox, chromium).

It will be interesting to see how big a hole this makes in webkit's development pace, Google was the largest webkit contributor in 2012, basically twice as much code as the runner up Apple.

Also it will be interesting to see if Opera will stick to Webkit which it recently changed to, or if they will eventually hop aboard the 'Blink' train.

I for one welcome further competition in this field, particularly on the mobile front.