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Comment by Tinyyy | Hacker News Reader

Is this open source?

Here is the source code for anyone interested: https://github.com/adeekshith/Docs-Online-Viewer

Aren't Chrome extensions just zip packages that contain bunch of HTML and JavaScript? Couldn't you "easily" just see what is in it? Of course author can update the extension at anytime and the JS can be obfuscated.

But you might not be able to (legally) modify the source, depending on license.

Well, yeah, I guess, but you can at least see what is going on and whether or not there is need to fork it.

Well, for personal use you can always decompile and modify.

Not necessarily true; that totally depends on the licence.

You don't have to agree to the license. At that point any legal weight they have is due to copyright. As long as you aren't distributing a derivative work you're fine.

And what grows out of the ground is mine to modify and decompile provided I don't distribute the derivative.. oh wait.

The license can only provide you rights in addition to what the copyright law already grants you.

In some countries making copies and modifications for personal use is completely legal.

If you are doing it for your own use and don't tell anyone the chances you get caught are pretty slim

Dont worry, here is the source code: https://github.com/adeekshith/Docs-Online-Viewer

But it is lagging a month behind due to Firefox webextensions. I want the code to be compatible with all three browsers so I am releasing it according to Firefox's webextensions. Also, nobody ever cared to check the code from past two years so I never bothered to update it on Github. The only 1 star in the source code is my own star ;) Will do it soon.

That said, feel free to view/modify the crx/zip file as mentioned in the other comments. Will be glad if you can make any comments or suggest improvements to the code. :)

Very easily in fact: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-extension-s...

Yeah, I remember toying around with the Chrome extensions years back, but then Google changed TOS (or something) and took down my extensions. I vaguely remember them being "just-zip-files" with different extension.

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