Hacker News Reader

> If Google takes blink into a direction users no longer want a blink fork and open source distro can be made in the same sense as Firefox.

I'm not completely sure about that:

1. Maintaining a browser engine is no easy task.

2. Where does the copyright reside? For instance, contributing to various open source projects requires signing a CLA so that among other things the license of the project can be changed afterwards.

View on HN

Definitely not an easy task but my point is that it's not the same dead end situation that happened with IE. During the IE era the browser came bundled with the OS, it was closed source, Microsoft once it squashed competition stopped updating.

About licensing I admit I am no expert but somehow brave and edge use the engine right now without going into legal troubles.

> Maintaining a browser engine is no easy task

Reverting anti-adblocker changes doesn't require that many resources.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com