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Comment by satyanash | Hacker News Reader

No talk of the license on the frontpage. Visiting the GitHub repo tells me it is 2-clause BSD license. It's high time we had a GPLv3 web browser, otherwise, this risks the same fate as the rest of the browsers with proprietary forks.

This of course comes at the cost of not being able to support non-free parts of the web standard such as DRM.

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> It's high time we had a GPLv3 web browser

Then write one.

Perhaps BSD in its anarchic freedom is compelling to the kinds of people who decide to do something crazy like building a brand new browser engine from scratch, and GPLv3 with its detailed rules and regulations is compelling to people who like to talk about how they wish the world had more software licensed under GPLv3.

Open source isn’t handed down from God, it starts with one person deciding to type mkdir.

> Open source isn’t handed down from God, it starts with one person deciding to type mkdir.

So poetic! I love that sentence!

There is absolutely nothing wrong with have proprietary forks. They exist for good reasons -- either a new browser or get embedded in another product which provides value for their end users. They may (or may not) contribute back to the original projects with bug reports, fixes and features.

Sorry this is not the GPLv3 everywhere world you are dreaming of, and I'm glad it works this way.

Like others said, if you want to have a GPLv3 licensed browser (that will probably be as unusable as GIMP), write one yourself.

> This of course comes at the cost of not being able to support non-free parts of the web standard such as DRM.

That would be a benefit, not a cost.

Absolutism like this hurts adoption of otherwise-useful tools. Given the choice between a tool which simply cannot play DRM-protected content, and a tool which can, _ceteris paribus_ most consumers will prefer the former. If you believe there are other properties of a proposed tool that mean it is a public good for it to be adopted, it behooves you to make it attractive to adopt.

I don't care if it's for most people. There needs to be at least one good option.

If you are writing an open source web browser, I guess you only care about the preference that programmers who are likely to become contributors have. I’m not sure if that would be a big change really, though.

Most consumers will prefer the browser that comes with their OS or is advertised on google.com no matter what you do. Compromising your priciples to chase after the mass market is exactly the reason for the decline of Firefox.

DRM'd content on the web is also not nearly as common as you are implying it to be. Outside of specific streaming sites that many use through dedicated apps on their TV or phone anyway it is almost nonexistent so this crap doesn't need to be in your desktop or mobile browser. Not to mention that even with DRM support you are not guaranteed to get decent content if you are on the wrong OS or don't give up ownership of your entire display pipeline or just have slightly older hardware or live in the wrong country. It's also not hard to avoid these streaming services entirely.

> This of course comes at the cost of not being able to support non-free parts of the web standard such as DRM.

LGPLv3 would solve that, wouldn't it?

Or GPLv2 with binaries loaded at runtime, like Linux does. This is a definitive good candidate for v2 as not having DRM is simply just not going to work.

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