Open Source Browser Contributions and Licensing

Including open source components from the Chromium Projects in Edge could create new IP risks for customers, but the risks are not yet clear.

Microsoft uses open source for various features of its Edge mobile and desktop browsers. Among the components Microsoft already uses are the Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine (ANGLE), a graphics engine abstraction layer available under the Berkley Software Distribution (BSD) license, and Brotli, a general-purpose lossless compression algorithm available under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) license.

In addition, Microsoft has been making contributions to the Chromium Projects to help advance Web browsing on new ARM-based Windows devices.

Components from the Chromium Projects are licensed under a variety of open source licenses. For example, the Google-authored components of Chromium are released under the BSD license. Other components are subject to a variety of different open-source licenses, including the MIT License, the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL) and the Mozilla, GNU tri-License (MPL/GPL/LGPL).