Comment by Buttons840
6 days ago
Could Chromium be made close source?
It's easy to just say "well, a company should charge money for a browser", but a company is free to write their own browser and charge for it right now. Chromium though, is bound by its open-source license and its copyright is owned by thousands of different contributors.
> Could Chromium be made close source?
Sure, it's BSD licensed, all future development could be done closed-source. Note that the name "Chromium" would need to stay with the open source side of the project, so it would be more like a closed fork than a re-licencing.
99% sure you could just keep using the name "Chrome", though, and stop releasing code into chromium instead.
So all companies can, right now, make a private fork and start selling it. There's no reason to pay for that right, everyone already has that right.
(I'm, of course, speaking in the context of xp84's suggestion that the browser should cost money. It's a fine idea, but I don't see how it applies here.)
You're essentially paying for control over the currently dominant web browser. You're paying for the existing Chrome installation base and to skip an absolute hell of a hiring process. Because forking Chromium and continuing development on your own needs over 100 of extremely narrowly specialized experts.
If you want your project to remain the currently dominant web browser, you better keep developing APIs people love, you better keep doing it faster than your competition can keep up with implementing them, and you better keep dominating the web standards committees.
Doing this from a position of a Chromium fork is orders of magnitude more difficult than just buying Chrome (and then keeping up pumping money into it at the rate Google has been doing).
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