Hacker News Reader

Comment by devwastaken | Hacker News Reader

*Closed source browser.

Flow is yet another project pulling on open source resources, and the browser market created from open browsers, and trying to privatize it. Imagine if google could just make whatever internal changes to chromium and nobody knew about it.

View on HN

> "yet another project pulling on open source resources"

Erm, yeah. Isn't that the point of making something open source with a permissive license? So that other people are able to use it in their own projects?

I feel like a lot of people choose permissive licenses due to inertia while not really understanding them.

Agreed - I feel like 15 or 20 years ago, GPL was a well-known license so that's just what people went with, without understanding all of the implications.

Legally for sure. But from an ecosystem perspective, it's reasonable to be concerned about people whose relationships to a commons is essentially extractive. When I use open source in commercial offerings, I see it as both morally appropriate and good business to contribute back in one way or another.

Why not use GPL/AGPL/LGPL as it's clearly more appropriate in this case?

From my perspective as an open-source consumer, that doesn't matter much. The license tells me what I can legally get away with. But what I care about pragmatically is whether that project will keep existing and improving such that it will meet my needs down the road. And what I care about morally is maintaining positive-sum relationships with my community and society.

> yet another project pulling on open source resources

And? It's a product people find useful enough to pay for.

Open source is by default provided to the world freely. If someone is opposed to it being use freely, in any way the person on the other side chooses, including commercially, there are licenses that can proscribe that.

> Imagine if google could just make whatever internal changes to chromium and nobody knew about it.

If you use chrome, they do. Chrome has a lot of changes and additions that are not in the open-source chromium codebase.

Imagine the irony of fate if they not only did that, but also had the audacity to call the resultant browser "Chrome." Makes me shudder.

One side effect, intentional or not, that came from Google naming their browser "Chrome" was that Gecko development become more difficult. It became too hard to get search engines (you know the one) to understand that you weren't looking for Google blog posts and press releases, but instead developer documentation for Mozilla internals, which you could have pretty reliably found previously by including "chrome" as a useful search term.

> Imagine if google could just make whatever internal changes to chromium and nobody knew about it.

Chromium is BSD licensed so Google absolutely can just make it closed source.

The BSD license only applies to some code from what I can tell. Other code is still under LGPL. At least this is what this file tells me:

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/...

Yes, there's code in Chromium going back to the KDE/ Konqueror and WebKit days that's LGPL licensed. Mostly in the Blink rendering engine like you linked.

Just to clarify the relevant thing is whether Google owns the copyright to Chromium source, and it does for a huge part. It can license that code however it wants, including open source, or no license at all.

Chrome/Chromium also uses a ton of open source libraries for which Google does NOT hold the copyright, but all of them, per their license, can be linked with closed source code and distributed (i.e. they are not GPL/copyleft).

...and they do, calling it Google Chrome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com