Why do we keep moving the goalposts? So it not only needs to be open source but now it needs to be from a non profit? Why does manpower matter? So now all open source software needs to be developed equally by purely non-profit orgs? Malarkey.
We are getting a free and open source browser engine that anybody can fork. Microsoft forked it to create Edge, Brave uses it.
Frankly, I wish Apple would either open source Safari, release Safari on other platforms, or contribute to Firefox.
Edit:
> Chromium being open source does nothing to change that because nobody but Google has the same level of manpower
> Why do we keep moving the goalposts? So it not only needs to be open source but now it needs to be from a non profit
The goalposts were never moved. It's a thing that ardent anti-applers do not understand.
Google is a web ad agency. 80% of its profits come from web advertisement. At the same time they:
- control the browser market
- control the search market
- fully and utterly dominate web and javascript standards committees, and regularly release features based on their own specs and pretend they are standards
See how many conflicts of interest there are?
> Why does manpower matter?
Chrome releases 40 to 100 new APIs with every release (so, every two months or so)[1]. And these new APIs are immediately taken up as gospel and standard by gullible web devs who now claim that all other browsers need to implement them.
This is the question of manpower.
So is this: it is absolutely impossible to build a modern web browser [2]. Microsoft, a trillion-dollar company tried and failed, and is now repackaging Chrome, with minor changes.
> I wish Apple would either open source Safari
WebKit is as open-sourced as Chromium. Safari is as closed source as Chrome.
The goalposts haven’t moved, it’s always been bad for a single company to have critical public infrastructure like the web to themselves. The conflict of interest that results is huge.
Manpower matters because no matter how much Chromium/Blink are forked, forks can’t be meaningfully different because they have to keep up with the firehose of changes Google is pumping out, which also makes it progressively more difficult to keep parts of the codebase that have diverged up to date. It’s a losing battle unless you’ve also got a dev team with the size and scope of Google’s Chrome team, which is a ridiculously high bar.
Even your cited examples of Edge and Brave are only superficially different, with a handful of features switched off compared to Chrome. They bring practically no diversity to the web.
> So now all open source software needs to be developed equally by purely non-profit orgs?
No, this is a special case. Web browsers are critical public infrastructure that’ve been on the precipice of total monopoly multiple times now.
We are getting a free and open source browser engine that anybody can fork. Microsoft forked it to create Edge, Brave uses it.
Frankly, I wish Apple would either open source Safari, release Safari on other platforms, or contribute to Firefox.
Edit:
> Chromium being open source does nothing to change that because nobody but Google has the same level of manpower
Microsoft