Most interesting to me is that even though the Chrome team specifically provided API keys for open-source Chromium builds to use back in 2013, they are now claiming that "the Terms of Service don't allow this usage, and [the previous developer] didn't have authority to change the terms."
Hiring Oracle managers is seriously starting to show it seems.
But this kind of corporate robot attitude is common for Google. It’s always the same story with them: they deprecate some service, write a heartfelt message about how they are aware this might destroy some projects/businesses and how difficult it was for them to make this decision, but they’re gonna do it anyways. Thank you very much for doing business with Google, have a nice day.
If this happened it’s because they built or facilitated a culture that does these things.
* Corruption runs to the top.
* The top is very careful to communicate verbally, through implications, or otherwise.
Dunno about Google.
Any plausible deniability they have had is gone, and lawyers are in the loop for all sorts of decisions now. Not least because having counsel on a thread can help prevent that discussion from being subpoenaed.
I guess this is the end of the open source project. Chromium was never truly open source, more like free source, but now it’s not even that. It’s just another proprietary software.
Sad to see Google become the old Microsoft.
There. Google can thank me later.
The only reason given was literally ‘we suddenly want to enforce our policies’, which is really no answer at all...
At least I'd find that more polite
Only recently was there discussion about how they used free access to widevine as bait while pushing EME, and now they conveniently ignore licensing requests...
More fuel for the ECs antitrust investigation I guess :)