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Comment by doso | Hacker News Reader

Something's bugging me about Atlas - it's clearly Chromium-based (you can tell from the user agent and UI), but I can't find any credit to Chromium anywhere. No license info, no acknowledgments, and when I try to access chrome:// pages they're blocked.

Maybe I'm overthinking this, but shouldn't there be some transparency about what you're building on top of? Especially with open source projects that have attribution requirements? I get that it's still early days, but this feels like a pretty basic thing to get right.

Anyone else notice this or know if this is standard practice? Just seems odd to me that they're not being upfront about the foundation they're building on.

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Just to add some official context on this, Chromium's BSD license explicitly requires attribution in derivative works. The notice clause says: "Include a readable copy of the attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file…within a NOTICE text file distributed as part of the Derivative Works; within the Source form or documentation, if provided along with the Derivative Works; or, within a display generated by the Derivative Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally appear." It's not just good practice—this is a legal requirement. Surprised Atlas skipped this.

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/config/+/refs/h...

If you go to

Help > ChaptGPT Atlas Help

it'll link you to some docs[1] and under "Setting up the Atlas browser"[2] it opens with

> Atlas is OpenAI’s Mac browser built on Chromium.

If that counts for anything.

[1] https://help.openai.com/en/collections/16051538-chatgpt-atla...

[2] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/12628461-setting-up-the-...

That does help a bit—at least there is some public acknowledgment buried in the help docs. But isn’t BSD license attribution usually expected within the product itself (like a credits screen or in-app NOTICE)? It feels like this isn’t meeting the standard for open source transparency—especially for a major project like Atlas.

The company that famous for theft, now not acknowledging open source. This checks out.

More context, Comet browser (which is Chromium-based) clearly states its use of Chromium in its Help > About Comet section (comet://settings/help). Similarly, other Chromium-based browsers like Dia (via Dia > About Dia) and Arc (Arc > About Arc) explicitly attribute their open source foundation in their About sections, making the credits easily discoverable for users. It seems Atlas could improve transparency by following this standard and including similar attribution in its About/help dialog.

I asked Atlas about this, and it indirectly pointed out that atlas://credits is a thing. Not linked to anywhere that I could find though.

Thanks for mentioning atlas://credits! If it's not linked anywhere or visible to regular users, I'm not sure it really counts for proper attribution. License compliance usually means info is discoverable without digging—otherwise, transparency is lost. It seems like Atlas should make their open-source credits more accessible.

Honestly, it feels like they're intentionally trying to scrub any traces of Chromium or Google. No mention anywhere, blocked chrome:// pages, UI stripped of references—it's as if they don't want users to realize it's built on open-source tech. It's a weird move for transparency and doesn't sit right with me, especially with all the attribution requirements.

Ironic because Chrome OG Ben Goodger joined OpenAI and likely had a lot of ownership in building this

Navigate to a page, right click > inspect, open the What's New panel in DevTools.

The company infamous for mass theft of everything they can possibly get their grubby little hands on in order to feed the machine doesn't respect OSS licenses, who coulda thunk it?

It's a pretty bad look to be using the foundations of your direct competitor.

They already did it with Google's transformer architecture- why not Google's open-source browser framework too? They're pretty much a fork of Google's good-faith open-source efforts at this point.

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