Comment by bayindirh
8 months ago
I wonder what would happen if Ladybird matures well to compete with Firefox and Chrome (hope so), and it's just forked away by some company and completely closed down in a whim, because BSD-2 allows that.
8 months ago
I wonder what would happen if Ladybird matures well to compete with Firefox and Chrome (hope so), and it's just forked away by some company and completely closed down in a whim, because BSD-2 allows that.
And so? Yes people (and companies) would fork your code, but the most realistic scenario would be that the original ladybird would still be the most relevant browser of it's family, just like firefox, so the problem kinda resolves by itself
Then why KDE's Konqueror is not the most prominent browser of the KHTML family, but Safari is?
Because apple themselves forked it. Only a handful of companies have the power to basically change the web browser market, and apple sure was one. Nowadays every company copies from chrome, so why would anyone bother forking ladybird?
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Imagine if ladybird gets used regularly by ~1000 nerds, which is its current audience, then gets forked by microsoft and the current ME gets replaced by ladybird. Even if ladybird got over 9000 users, there's no competing with megacorps.
Also, its* not it's
Well maybe they're ok with that? They want browser diversity. Getting Microsoft to use a new engine is better for diversity than if they just used chromium like now.
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Sorry for my grammatical mistake, English is not my first language.
That said, my point here was that realistically no company is going to fork ladybird since there's already chromium, plus even if ladybird was somehow forked by let's say microsoft and got popular, I don't think it would be detrimental to ladybird itself, if not even beneficial, since it would attract more users and, to a lesser extent, more contributors.
Why is that such a problem other than the human factor of seeing your code being used by some guys you don’t like?
> seeing your code being used by some guys you don’t like?
This is not even in the list of my concerns. I just don't like to see efforts of hundreds if not thousands of volunteers are rolled into a closed source application and distributed for the profit of a couple of people who pat themselves on the back because they got their next car/house/whatever for free.
This is why I prefer GPL over BSD/MIT.
That sounds no different from "code being used by some guys you don't like" to me, to be honest. If some company took my permissively licensed work and turned it into a commercial product, why would I take issue? I put my work out there for the betterment of all, and it is still bettering the world even in its new form. I have no complaints with that.
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I think the issue isn't the potential forking, but that the potential fork may become a dominant and closed one.
If one values the web being somewhat open/less monopolistic, an open source web browser would be more appealing.
I have faith in the Ladybird browser project to avoid such a situation though.
It supports capitalistic predatory tactics that erode our society. Better to exclude them...
Lots of big assumptions there.
1) Ladybird matures with a community around it.
2) A company actually cares enough to fork it.
3) Said fork becomes the dominant version.
4) Company closes down fork.
Yeah,
I did these assumptions because I saw potential in the project and witnessed the cycle enough times to worry about its future.
On the other hand, it's a food for thought. Just to play with and explore the possibilities.
Personally am asking myself what the benefits of the BSD clause compared to a more restrictive license are. The only reason I personally can see is that they want to have to option to close the browser themself in the future.
Believe it or not, plenty of people prefer permissive licenses because they grant more freedom. Not everyone agrees with the GPL.
If you want ultimate freedom, just put it to public domain at the beginning.
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One advantage of BSD license being not as complicated as GPL.
If you the amount of features in Chrome and Firefox (just those in the standard, nothing extra), you would know "mature well to compete" is a long way away, if not impossible.
And I don't see any problem with forking. Tons of browser bugs were found, reported and fixed exactly because companies forked them. And remember that Blink is forked from Webkit.
I have seen IE's rise and fall. Netscape's rise, burn and rebirth as Firefox, saw Safari as a fork of KHTML and rise of Chrome.
Ladybird might be added to this list. It's not impossible. It'll be a winding and hard road to go, but it is not a path with no end.
You don't need to fork a codebase to fix its bugs. It's GitHub's workflow (fork -> PR -> merge). What I meant, as noted in this thread, is a hard and closed fork propelled with money and corporate greed, which eclipses the open and primary version and drown it in the process.
EEE'ing it, basically. This is why I prefer GPL (preferably V3+). If you want to improve it, it's open. If you want to monetize and EEE it, then nah. It's not allowed.
To some extent I think Andreas Kling et al might still find that a win, given that the browser market would still have more choice than it does today.