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Comment by awesomekling | Hacker News Reader

Yes, we are aware of how permissive licenses work.

If someone forks our code and does a better job with it than we do, fair game. :)

Note they won't have to do a better job in the long run, just a good enough job in the short run to leave you behind. But yeah, as long as you're keeping this in mind :) best of luck!

Not even that sometimes, browser popularity can just be a matter of advertising (eg how chrome took off in the internet explorer offboarding era even though there were objectively equal or better alternatives at the time by just using google's internet omnipresence at the time for advertising). Sadly, modern internet is governed more by advertising industry rather than any kind of open-internet principles.

But ultimately this is all developers' decisions and I respect that. If anything, if a major company decided to take off and invest, they could do it in any case, publishing their modified source code would not make that much of difference essentially. It is really refreshing to see at last a browser that does not absolutely depend on google's resources in any way.

Just so you know, chromium exists now as an open source project because KDE developers used GPL.

Would you mind elaborating? How did KDE's use of GPL prevent Chromium from being closed-source? What about Google Chrome?

WebKit, the rendering engine that originally powered Chromium began its life as a fork of KHTML a GPL-licensed rendering engine produced by the KDE project for their Konqueror browser.

That part I know, but how are you saying that prevented Chromium from being closed-source, and why didn't the same apply to Google Chrome?

The rendering engine: Chromium had to be kept "libre", because khtml/Webkit was LGPL.

The browser: Chrome. could be kept closed because the LGPL allow the integration of libre libraries in closed products as long as the library itself remains "libre". In this case the library is the renering engine: Chromium.

As a counter example MacOS was built on top of decades of work on the BSD operating system and Apple is under no obligation to give the code back to the BSD project... and it doesn't.

So the most valuable company in the planet took from the community and it doesn't bother to give back.

For some of us that is unacceptabme.

The parent said GPL, which is what got me confused. LGPL makes more sense.

Although... this still doesn't explain why the other parts of the browser besides the rendering engine are open source? i.e. if the license was the reason, then presumably Google would've made the rest of the browser closed source, but that wasn't the case for most parts.

Your logic seems faulty.

Let me see if I have this right:

>For some of us that is unacceptabme.

1. So, Apple, creator of macOS, "the most valuable company on the planet", followed the rules of the BSD licence,and that is unacceptable?

But, Google, a company that is also highly valuable, and the creator of Chrome, also followed the rules of the LGPL licence, but that is acceptable?

Yes, forced to follow. Its a sign in retrospect that KDE should have used an even stronger license. I don't know if AGPL existed then, but if I start a browser today, I'd license it as AGPL. If you want to use the project, you have to release your changes to your users. If you don't want to do that, good luck, spend millions on developing an equivalent application in house. Thats the beauty of GPL like licenses.

With BSD companies are under no obligation to release their changes, and like any self interested party, most don't.

What is unacceptable for "some of us" is that rich corporations are parasites of the commons.

ANd give very little back. Like Apple on top of BSD or AWS on top Riak.

For people like me that find that unacceptable exist the GPL licenses.

Both companies did the bare minimum demanded by the respective license, its just that one license forces a bit more as bare minimum. Think. What does this mean? If you use a license that demands even more, you could have pressurized the companies to behave even nicer.

> you could have pressurized the companies to behave even nicer.

No you couldn't. What would happen is your project would be a complete non-starter for many companies; either in use of, or developing for.

Which would raise the bar for them requiring them to spend efforts writing it in house or procuring similar elsewhere. The more polished and complex a package is that is hard to find alternatives for, the better the leverage.

Note that it began its life at Apple, not Google. They forked KHTML first as far as i know.

It didn’t: that’s the joke.

You are not aware that chromium is open source?

I’m aware. The context of dataflow’s original inquiry is of some mechanism to prevent a large corporation forking a codebase and running away with users; Google didn’t need to close the Chromium source to pull that off.

Its a good thing the GPL stopped google from taking it and running with it!

"Hey we had a security breach!"

"Ah that means we must remove all security protections, instead of you know further strengthening security."

If older GPL failed, this means we needed a stronger license...such as AGPL, or in future something even better, instead of giving up and saying we should have just given them shit on a platter.

But if they embrace, extend and extinguish, in a way that harms your users' freedom, that would not IMO be a good outcome.

Those users can always use the original browser. They haven't lost anything.

Imagine Ladybird is developed and is successful. Lots of people use it to read websites.

But then Badcorp takes the code and builds their own varient with extensions. Badcorp is big and has lots of market share. Lots of people use Badcorps's browser, and because lots of people are using it, lots of web developers code for it, including coding for its extensions.

Soon, lots of websites -- including Badcorp's own websites, and they have lots of popular ones -- use the extensions in the Badcorp browser.

Then people still using Ladybird can't use it for most websites. They have lost something.

What if BadApple takes BSD and forks it. Then they make their own BSD with extensions that only works on their own shiny fruit hardware.

What have the original BSD users lost? Absolutely nothing. BSD still exists, it’s still maintained, and people can still use it. They can also use fruit BSD if they want.

Darwinism, one might say.

BSD and BadApple have a very small intersection of targeted markets.

The big difference is: how important is the software for interoperability?

With an OS core, interoperability isn't really important. Existing BSD users presumably weren't too interested in buying shiny new Macs to run their BSD OS on, so Apple using BSD as the core of their OS really didn't affect them. Moreover, existing BSD users didn't need to interoperate with the new MacOS users. An OS isn't some kind of network protocol. BSD users could work with MacOS users just like users of any other OS, using existing network protocols and other standards.

The poster child for the BSD/GPL argument on the GPL side is usually Microsoft's "embracing and extending" of Kerberos. It's a network authentication protocol, licensed with a BSD-like permissive license, and Microsoft infamously forked it, creating their own proprietary extensions. This resulted in only non-MS users not being able to fully interoperate with MS users.

We do already see cases now where web developers write websites targeting Chrome-only browser extensions instead of sticking with standards. In theory, if this happened with Ladybird, it should be possible for the original devs to simply add their own versions of these extensions, but how feasible that it I'm not sure. Currently, there's Chrome-only extensions which apparently haven't been implemented by Firefox for some reason, so maybe it's not as easy as it sounds.

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