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Comment by TheRoque | Hacker News Reader

I learned the other day that the developer(s ?) of uBlock origin don't even accept donation. That's a really dedicated behavior for someone owning on app installed on probably a million devices, that could make money in an instant if he wanted to.

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True, but it's worth mentioning that supporting the filter list maintainers is encouraged.

tbh, that scares me, simply because of the potential that one day, someone will offer enough money that it can't reasonably be expected from anyone to decline that offer.

It reassures me. Because if gorhill cared about money, he would have a 100% ethical, simple way to immediately open the floodgates and make a five- to six-digit amount per year.

This suggests to me that he doesn't need nor care about having more money, and will be very hard to corrupt by offering money. How do you bribe a person that has free money with no strings attached offered to them and says "no thanks"?

Blackmail

Threaten physical harm

Well those aren't bribes, but I see what you mean.

Not to diminish the work on the browser extensions, but the majority of the value is in the filter lists. In the cat and mouse game, these lists need to be constantly updated and pruned, while also ensuring the false positives are minimally annoying to users.

My memory may be rusty, but iirc he already gave away the uBlock project (sold?) once. The new maintainer immediately started pulling shady moves so gorhill forked uBlock into uBlock Origin and has maintained it to this date (7+ years).

It was not sold. It was transferred to a the contributor of a Safari port. Only the GitHub repository though, not the extension store page. That has always remained with gorhill. So, no one's install was compromised

proof: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/tree/0797d040740de8e9f7552...

Why did origin get made then?

The name origin was used because google took it down for using the name ublock after the GitHub repo transfer

Is ubo under an open source license? If so, it would instantly fork.

GPLv3: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/LICENSE.txt

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