>While Android is open, it's more of a "look but don't touch" kind of open. You're allowed to contribute to Android and allowed to use it for little hobbies, but in nearly every area, the deck is stacked against anyone trying to use Android without Google's blessing. The second you try to take Android and do something that Google doesn't approve of, it will bring the world crashing down upon you.
Google has added proprietary closed source blobs to chromium in the past and there's little reason they wouldn't do so again when they're the only game in town.
It's pretty close to being unusable as an open source code base. Look at Debian's struggles with maintaining security fixes for Chromium.
Sure, the license is open, and Chromium is therefore technically open. But it's dangerously close to not being usable in any real practical meaning of "open source".
The way things are, we do indeed stand on the precipice of a Chromium-only web with—for all practical intents and purpose—no open browser. Firefox is the last thing that stands between us and that reality. It's just a shame that they seem to be wasting hundreds of millions on admin and management instead of just throwing it all at their developers.
> Look at Debian's struggles with maintaining security fixes for Chromium.
I can't see anything about this anywhere giving any reasons; is it simply that they're released frequently and there aren't really any long-lived branches?
My understanding is that the Chromium folks handle security issues with: "version x.y.z is vulnerable, please update to (x+7).(y+25).(z+2), as it is the only supported version – the fact that the diff from x.y.z is 100 kLOC and touches mostly completely unrelated things is your problem".
This isn't sustainable open source development in any practical sense. Sure, it's technically open source, but nearly useless for anything but consumption straight from Google. I'd say that that makes it practically not open source.
Arch has been handling minor releases on Chromium just fine. If Debian is having issues, it is most likely with them trying to backport fixes into antiquated code bases.
If a year old is considered antiquated, we have some major problems in this world.
And it's kinda my whole point: code that can only be consumed wholesale as shipped might technically be open source, but if backporting fixes to a year old version is nigh on impossible, is it truly open source in practice?
No it's not. The Atari isn't one year old. Come on man, from your logic you might as well say that a one year old car should be fed hay since it's practically a horse.
Some parts of the system evolve faster than others. I am glad for Debian's relatively conservative policy for all my servers, but I want an evergreen browser on my desktop.
You're kinda proving my point: it works fine if you wholeheartedly take whatever Google gives you. Sure, that's technically open source, but is it really practically so if you can't practically adapt it?
Topics is rebranded FLOC. Everyone pushed back on it when FLOC came out, but that was publicly reviled and there was a simple toggle to turn it off (it was an experimental feature).
This is an excellent test of Google's ability to just push a very unpopular feature into Chromium derivatives.
> Non google browsers didn't only disable it, they removed it completely.
They set the toggle to false and deactivated any of the options to turn it back on. That's very different from removing a feature (or maintaining a legacy feature).
The only code they changed was UX-related and a single default.
Here we are talking about Chromium and you are going off on some rant about Android acting like Google can attack you for using open source licensed software. If you haven't used Chromium on Linux then it would be easy to assume whatever you want. Might I suggest configuring your policy list to disable whatever you want:
>While Android is open, it's more of a "look but don't touch" kind of open. You're allowed to contribute to Android and allowed to use it for little hobbies, but in nearly every area, the deck is stacked against anyone trying to use Android without Google's blessing. The second you try to take Android and do something that Google doesn't approve of, it will bring the world crashing down upon you.