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Comment by spacephysics | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile FireFox just removed their commitment to not sell user data. Its their “Don’t be evil” moment

https://www.osnews.com/story/141825/mozilla-deletes-promise-...

I think that quoting Anthill in the osnews comment this part was left out: It would be only fair to include the part that was added to the FAQ too: > It seems like every company on the web is buying and selling my data. You’re probably no different. Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP)

Independent FOSS forks of firefox without Mozilla services / tracking exist

https://librewolf.net/

They are not prepared to maintain a fork of Firefox: https://codeberg.org/librewolf/issues/issues/2252#issuecomme...

I feel that if Firefox up and died we would have people scrambling to work on something like this in much greater numbers.

Does it matter? AFAIK Firefox doesn't plan to go closed-source, so applying patches should be continue being fine too.

It depends on how much Firefox enshittifies. If it's just about removing some telemetry configuration from upstream, then a couple of downstream patches will still do the job. If, say, Firefox decides to fully embrace the spyware business model and drop support for Manifest V2 in order to kill adblockers, then LibreWolf will probably have to maintain their own fat piece of logic built on top of Firefox. Keeping it as a soft fork would then be a lot of work (you'd basically have a patchset of tens of thousands LoC to keep porting through different versions of Firefox). And making it a hard fork would be even more work (it basically means that the LibreWolf folks are on their own and they have to maintain their own independent browser).

Maybe a hard fork would be more manageable if the scope was reduced to just web browsing instead of trying to be an app platform.

If librewolf is not a fork, then what is it?

I think their point is that they build on top of Firefox. If Firefox died tomorrow, Librewolf would die with it.

It’s a downstream patch.

Changes are recorded, then applied to the latest upstream version (Firefox) then packaged and sent as an update (LibreWolf)

In other words, a fork?

Or how does the semantics of patch/changes/update differ in any way from maintaining a fork? The packaging has nothing to do with this. It may not be a well-maintained fork, the maintainers might not see themselves capable of adding features and bugfixes on their own, but a fork is a fork.

I think the distinction is a soft fork or a hard fork. A soft fork is just a patchset over upstream and some people do not call it a fork. Hard fork mean that you are diverging from upstream, you do not longer follow upstream and you are fully separate from the upstream

I think fork implies following upstream. If you don't follow, then it's a divorce, not a fork.

No, "fork" means development has separated paths from original project. Changing some relatively minor parts but otherwise keeping close to upstream would be better called a "spin", especially when most of the changes are just to the default configuration.

It's a shame that GitHub messed up this term by calling any clone of a repository a "fork".

Your definition of fork excludes many notable forks. I never heard someone call a software project a divorce.

Wikipedia calls it a fork

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreWolf

It may just be semantics though.

> Nope. Never have, never will.

Promissory estoppel maybe? Stronger case for it if you ever paid them for anything after this promise.

Given most EULAs contain standard tech boilerplate that paraphrases to "We can change anything about this agreement at any time without warning or notice to you", I doubt it.

It's really hard to take someone seriously when they say things like this:

> For years I’ve been warning about this inevitable outcome, and for just as many years people told me I was overreacting, that it wouldn’t happen, that I was crazy.

The removal of that language is important but this person is trying to make it about themselves.

I can understand them being frustrated

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