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Comment by mdasen | Hacker News Reader

So, basically, Google is adding more wight to open-source web efforts and that's confounding those that would like to put the web into their proprietary box.

A good amount of the commentary over the past couple days has been about what Chrome means for other open-source projects. It's nice to see an article whose premise (as I saw it) was that Chrome's arrival signals the triumph of the open web rather than competition for current open web products (Safari and Firefox). Sure, some Firefox users may switch to Chrome, but as long as the browsers are open source and have a commitment to standards (HTML, Javascript, CSS), it works out in favor of the open web and all those who are creating the open web (whether they be website programmers/designers or open-source browser makers).

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True, if one were to describe I.T. innovation trends in two words they'd say "Creative Destruction" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction) in this case it's not exactly Google creates Adobe is destroyed, in my take, it's more like Google creates, Firefox/IE/Safari/Opera is destroyed. But I have to admit that Open Source projects are very responsive and, consequently, we may see a response from Firefox soon.

What I do admit is that at the end of the day, it's the consumer's experience that counts and, whoever makes the product that works the best for the consumer deserves to win, although victory is not promised. Look at Opera. So, is Google Chrome good for Open Source? If they open source the browser, hell yeah, otherwise, I'll be the skeptic.

Note: Chromium is not Google Chrome, it's PR.

If I were Steve Ballmer, I'd get John Lilly and Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner on my speed dial, right now.

I for one, begrudgingly, welcome our new browser overlords.

Why is Chromium just PR? You can build it yourself and run it.

see: http://dev.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/getting-started

My impression was they packaged it separately to make it easy to have Google-owned icons, etc in the Google Chrome download.

It's not that you can't build it, it's not that it's not Open Source, but it's still PR, here's why.

I'll use the comparison of Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise, or openSuse and Suse. These are truly open source. If you are going to base your proprietary technology on an Open Source project, please build the Open Source version and distribute it if you are building the Proprietary one, otherwise, you don't want people to actually use the Open Source version, it just means you have a good PR consultant and you don't mind "free help".

I bet you $100 they got the idea from a focus group, and Google Chrome has things that Chromium doesn't.

Well put. Although I must admit I worry about what this means for projects such as Firefox, I do think that it will ultimately be good for the web.

Hopefully some equilibrium can be established between the Google and Mozilla camps, but only time will tell if the market can actually support multiple FOSS browsers.

In any case, I am optimistic about what a giant such as Google can bring to the table as competition to the likes of AIR and Silverlight.

Really, the worst case scenario is that the current Firefox codebase is dumped for Chromium which is completely open-source.

Nothing is stopping you from creating the next Mozilla off the Chromium source - in fact, I don't think Google would be anti that at all. They're looking to make sure that browsers can handle web applications. They don't make money off the browser. The better the browser experience, however, the more people are going to use their web applications.

Do I expect Mozilla to dump their codebase? Hell no. Of course, someone at Mozilla might start a nice open source project to port Chromium to XUL (a Firefox powered by Chromium). They've supported lots of different small things in the past - in fact, Firefox was such a project at one time.

As long as it's open source, there isn't a big problem because Google can't exploit anything. If Google starts doing something evil, it would be trivial for someone to fork.

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