Comment by awesomekling
8 months ago
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. :)
8 months ago
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.
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.
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.
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It didn’t: that’s the joke.
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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.
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