Hacker News Reader

Comment by bubblethink | Hacker News Reader

>There is controversy about how Brave does stuff, and I agree there is some sketchy stuff they are doing

I would be more open to trying/using brave if someone respectable packaged it. As of writing, not a single distro packages it. It would lower my barrier to entry a lot if it were packaged by debian/fedora/f-droid. It doesn't imply anything serious, just that it can be built from source and that it passed the distro's basic diligence and guidelines. This seems like low-hanging fruit from brave's standpoint, and yet multiple issues on their github tracker about packaging downstream have remained open for a while.

View on HN

Nix packages it: https://nixos.org/nixos/packages.html#brave , which means you could use the Nix stand-alone package manager to install it on top of any distro. (I just tried this and am typing this from Brave, installed via the Nix stand-alone package manager running in Void Linux.)

It's fetching brave's binary. That's not what I meant by packaging.

src = fetchurl { url = "https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/releases/download/v${... sha256 = "1lbajxnxqkd422rckfjm65pwwzl66v7anq4jrzxi29d5x7abl3c1"; };

Also, bad look for nixos. I was curious about nixos too, but it'll have to be debian and fedora for now.

Fair point, though I don't know what would go into properly packaging Brave.

They certainly don't package Brave in any fashion, but if you were curious about NixOS, you might look at Guix System.

If they care about both a fast development cycle and rapid adoption then spending time getting an official package for Debian/etc. makes no sense.

> It doesn't imply anything serious, just that it can be built from source and that it passed the distro's basic diligence and guidelines.

For a modern web browser it probably doesn't achieve the latter. Both Chromium and Firefox are too complex for Debian's meager backporting resources. So they make an exception to their guidelines and ship the LTS release. I suppose the userbase just hopes that bad things don't if the browser LTS upgrade happens before the OS's LTS upgrade is ready.

Firefox has an LTS release, but chromium doesn't. So distros just ship the update every month whenever chromium is tagged. In practice, it follows chrome's release cycle very closely. Since brave is based on chromium, I don't see why this model can't work for brave given that distos are able to build and ship chromium already. (Android is a more complicated story )

Then make a Flatpak.

Hi, in my sparetime I help some of the linux packaging for Brave. We are looking for people to help us do this very thing. We provide packaged for deb, rpm, and snap. I maintain the snaps for brave but have been disappointed with the performance. If you are willing to test an maintain distros we'd be more than happy to get you involved.

Brave is a private, for-profit company that has raised $42 million in venture funding—out of curiosity why do you bother doing free work for them in your spare time?

This same argument is true of nearly all companies, including "not for profit." For instance the chair at Mozilla/FireFox pays himself $1.1 million a year, the treasurer $1 million. [1] And those numbers are probably higher now. That's from 2016, the most recent published data on their site. Since 2013 [2] their CEO has increased his yearly compensation by more than $300k, and the treasurer increased his pay by more than $400k a year. And now with Mozilla planning to release a pay-per-month browser (because their half a billion dollars in revenue just isn't enough!), we can expect to see that executive compensation skyrocket even further.

What people like to imagine "not for profit" means is not what it means in practice.

[1] - https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2016/2016_Mozilla_Fo...

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10101637

And ?

The Linux foundation heads have a similar salary range, like many other foundations and it is not an issue.

"Not for profit" means with a public stated goal, means that your share holder will not suddenly overcome your company strategy and make you sell all your client data, or make you sell bananas, because "it's more profitable on short term".

That is not an hypothetical scenario, many IT companies already felt into this trap. The foundation model of Mozilla protect you against that. This is something that Brave company does not... And the position of its CEO on publicity does not reinforce my trust into that.

Being non-profit does not somehow protect companies or their customers from making bad decisions. For instance Mozilla lately has been trying to take a position on privacy. They do this at the same time that they direct their users to Google search by default which is about as anti-privacy as you could possibly get. The reason is because they make a ton of money doing it.

Other recent bad decisions from them would include the decision to forcefully install a Mr. Robot related promo into the browser. And now most recently they plan to transition to a freemium model for FireFox where the regular FireFox will be free but "premium" features will now require a monthly fee. If you find these behaviors to those of a company who put mission ahead of profit, then we will have to simply agree to disagree.

And still I prefer all these decisions to a pseudo-compagny that try to create a monopoly on publicity by rebranding Google-chrome (WebKit). Brave could almost be qualified of a scam.

They have all ingredients of a scam, including an ICO.

> The Linux foundation heads have a similar salary range, like many other foundations and it is not an issue.

Being common doesn't mean it's not an issue.

A day job without hazard pay should never be making more than 5x median income.

What is the difference between having the share holders taking decisions for the users against user wishes, or having the heads of a non profit organization doing the same (like Mozzila did quite some times)?

On the flip side, what people seem to want “not for profit” to mean is “employees work for below market rate for some reason”.

I don't get it. I would expect employees at a non-profit to be compensated along the same lines as those at a for-profit. It's a constant easy story for shitty journalism in the UK – "oh my god this head of a charity makes far less than the head of an equivalently–sized private company! what a bastard!"

Take the ideological (and incorrect) definition of not-for-profit vs for-profit companies. The for-profit company is supposed to be willing to utilize any sort of money-making opportunity to improve their bottom line which is supposed to be their goal. The not-for-profit company is supposed to sidestep opportunities that do not necessarily align with their mission, resulting in less profit but greater integrity, as maintaining their mission is supposed to be their goal. If this were the case, not-for-profit business would invariably end up with substantially less funding than comparable for-profit businesses. As a consequence of this, it would be fiscally impossible for them provide the same sort of compensation.

This is of course fallacious. But the reason for this is that not-for-profit and for-profit companies operate in mostly the same way. This is something that most people do not understand. This is precisely what I was aiming to point out to the person who initially said 'why would you ever contribute your time for free to a for-profit?' It's an intuitive, but incorrect understanding of the differences between the sort of a companies.

I guess it's more like how many devs could be paid a decent salary from the millions that he Mozilla "leadership" pays itself.

You’re saying the same thing but wrapping it up in scare quotes.

You’re suggesting it would be better if Mozilla did… what? Had no leadership team, perhaps using some kind of non traditional management structure? Paid their leadership team below-market rate? Or is it just the general idea that high-level leaders are paid too much throughout society, and that this needs to be fixed? (Which is totally true, but not at all specific to Mozilla).

Maybe the effort isn't for the company, but for the distros and their users. Is nvidia packaging its proprietary drivers for Ubuntu?

No it's for the project.

I also contribute to linux kernel, and tons of open source projects. In this case, I am pushing that users should manage the packages as it gives the distro a bit of independence. this is also the apache way which i am a member of.

Maybe to help insure that a mono-browser environment is not in our future?

What is required in terms of testing?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com