Comment by infotainment
6 days ago
This exactly. An independent Chrome’s best path toward financial sustainability is closing down the source code and selling everyone’s browsing data to the highest bidder.
We all like to have a high minded ideal of some kind of wonderful fully independent for-the-good-of-society entity stewarding Chrome, but history has shown us that’s not what will happen.
But they sell everyone’s browsing data to the highest bidder already, how would this be different? That’s their… entire… business model…
cite?
Chrome is already closed-source. The chromium project can't be closed because it's already free and released.
The new Chrome company could stop contributing back to Chromium if they wanted, but it would mean they'd diverge from the other browsers backed by the OSS project which is one of their big advantages.
I'm not saying they wouldn't do that or it wouldn't work out, but it's not an obvious win.
Selling user data to highest bidder wouldn't fly in Europe.
There are examples of good stewardship in open source projects: Epiphany, Servo, Ladybird.
hopefully the fines you get from some of the worlds wealthiest nations wouldn’t eclipse the profit you’d make