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Comment by bigyabai | Hacker News Reader

Apple isn't the only one standing in the way of a Google hegemony. If they are, then the web is already fucked since neither corporation has a benevolent track record pertaining to Open Source. Apple just can't compete without steering privileges that are equally harmful to the open web.

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If web devs get permission to start ignoring Safari (which currently sits at ~20% marketshare), there’s no way they’re going to care about Firefox which doesn’t have even a fifth as much. If Safari falls so does Firefox.

> Apple isn't the only one standing in the way of a Google hegemony.

Who else would you consider?

Chromium-based browsers from companies other than Google are still contributing to Google’s hegemony. And Mozilla is funded by Google.

KHTML, Gecko, most Blink forks.

KHTML development stopped nearly ten years ago and I don’t know any significant Blink forks.

> If they are, then the web is already fucked since neither corporation has a benevolent track record pertaining to Open Source.

Interesting take, since Google has both authored and supported hundreds of FLOSS projects over many years. They even sponsored summer "internships" for students to contribute to Open Source software as long as a maintainer bothered to register and promise to mentor the student via "Summer of Code"

As someone who's lived in the bay for a bit over 10 years now, when I first moved here Google was very much that company that you think they were. Now, they are not. Every single friend (and it was >50% when I moved here!) has since left Google in the bay area. There is one left at Google entirely, and they're only remaining due to physical location (near family outside the US). I have watched my friends get brutally and relentlessly pipped over the tiniest bullshit reasons. This is all entirely 2nd hand so my perspective is very skewed, but even my friends from Facebook/Netflix/Apple weren't treated that way.

Hi, can you provide a few examples of 'tiniest bullshit reasons'? Kinda curious as what is considered bullshit there, I'm from the EU with zero experience of anything like S.F.

One was pipped because they were placed on a moonshot, told how amazing their work was, gave internal talks on it, then the moonshot was defunded... so they got pipped over their lack of business impact. Instead of, y'know, being placed on a normal team, like where they came from only a year or so before.

I'm aware of the many changes; including the cancellation of Google SoC. However, gp claimed neither Google nor Apple have a benevolent track record towards open source, and that doesn't ring true to me. The old Google was very benevolent, perhaps only rivalled by Red Hat and (old) IBM.

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