Comment by wps

Tbh I don't think fighting open source is Google's best play. I think it is in their own best interest to keep it fully open. It is free labor by those who are most passionate. It gives strong signals at what people want, this direction you develop. It strengthens security as more people try to test it. It means people work on forks rather than alternatives. All this is true even with a monopolistic market share.

So yes, I do think they are being naïve. The stance is myopic. It is only a good move in the short term, and barely even that. It is under the false belief that we operate in a zero sum game.

I think this is true, but I also believe the original people who built it are not the people in charge now.

We haven't had antitrust enforcement for 25 years. It's high time we did.

Google needs to be broken up.

Not denying than many engineers work on Chrome just wondering how many of them work on Chrome features that are anti pattern, reducing privacy, improving information collection or tracking or against users interest in broad.

Can anyone actually share 1 - 3 examples where a hard fork of a living os project has actually succeeded ?

If AMZN couldnt make their fire whatever it was called fork of Android really grow, what chance has the community got ?

>wildly underestimate how many engineers work on Chrome.

It is completely insane how many people work on Chrome. It seems like it is time to deprecate web browsers and do something different. Like you get a frame-buffer to draw on with something like a wasm vm. Web pages get replaced by programs (which they essentially are anyway). Get rid of 99.9% of the cruft that has accumulated over the decades in browsers. If you want to have some of that cruft, that is a library you have to send.

But the open source project wouldn’t need to invest as much as Google does. There are all kinds of features and things they are working on that the general public really does not care about.

The bigger problem is wasting developer effort contributing to Google's platform. The real secret behind Android being "open" (sorta) is that while almost nobody runs AOSP, Google has tricked a bunch of fools into working on Android forks instead of building a real competitor.

Playing at their table is a losing game, the house always wins.

but perhaps we dont need several gigabytes compressed code to have a browser. perhaps what google have been doing is an utter abomination?

Don't worry, we will fork and just repeat the pattern with new names! See you next time!

Is Firefox or Mozilla perfect? Heck no. But we're not comparing Mozilla against pre-IBM Red Hat or Ben & Jerry's or whatever your concept of the ideal corporate citizen is. We're comparing Mozilla against Google. That's a very low bar that Mozilla clears with ease, especially if you're criteria includes shoving AI down your throat.

Mozilla definitely wastes a bunch of money building features I don’t want. But underneath it all, Firefox is still an excellent web browser. You just occasionally have to disable “pocket” or “gadgets” or something.

It is sad to see Firefox riding various hype trains over the years, but I can't really blame them. Miss the wrong train, and you fall behind and may not be able to catch up. Miss the train to nowhere, and you are only wasting resources.

As for the excellent browser that people want, that raises the question of what people want. There are likely as many answers as people.

Mozilla gets 100M a year from Google ??? No fucking way they are biting the hand that feeds.

It's not really a "both sides" thing given the scale difference between what Google is up to and that.

Where is the form, forum or spot in general where one can tell Mozilla?

> We need to start the long process of hard forking now or turn to alternatives like Firefox as a new foundation.

I'm reading your comment on Firefox. You can probably read mine and write a reply on it too!

Donate to Ladybird https://ladybird.org/

Well, it is time to realise that GPL and similar variants, are better in the long term. I like MIT too, but GPL worked so much better for the linux kernel. Google and others abuse the ecosystem of open source contributors here.

Rather than being smug, I’ll say awesome! The best time to start using Firefox is yesterday. The second best time is now.

IOW:

Don’t threaten to stop using Google Chrome if they do one more evil thing. Start now.

Some of us have been using it for two decades more or less.

LOL half a decade.

I've been using it for more than 20 years.

I don't know why either of use loled though

I'd love to use GrapheneOS on less secure devices, just for the sake of Google autonomy rather than privacy.

Try https://github.com/alex193a/Root-My-Pixel, worked on my 9a as of a few days ago (the version table in the readme is stale). I haven't checked the September update yet though (installing it now, to check).

Edit: September update for 8a has a kernel build from July. I believe it's still vulnerable but the exploit will need its offsets adjusting etc.

They're happy that it is locked down. They're not happy that they're not the ones doing the locking down.

Any discussion about this is shut down. I just read an article https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckqxvy98x578o In the UK according to the BBC, politicians are pressing Samsung and apple to make stolen phones bricks. Samsung in response said that they have implemented several security features for this purpose. I think Samsung considers removing OEM unlocking a security feature according to the bootloader unlock hall of shame.

Intel used to do the same with their anti theft technology aka Intel theft deterrent on their classmate PCs, so students had to enter unlock codes from an IT admin every 3 months or every say 200 boots to prevent the computer from being locked at the bios level preventing it from booting an OS, and there was an update which disabled that functionality permanently. And you would be warned when you had around 50 boots left to get the unlock code.

Making the bootloaders unlockable is a good thing.

This is what lots of people forget.

Android is not a Linux desktop or server distro. It is not about you getting to put what you want on the hardware you bought for free.

Operating systems are hellaciously expensive to maintain and that only gets worse in markets with rapid hardware improvements, as the smartphone market was up until maybe the late 2010s. Google is not a charity. SV did not come into national prominence for making investors $0. There is no money in giving maybe one in one-hundred smartphone users (and that's being generous) a bunch of code, for free, so that they can put it on their gizmo and talk to their nerd friends at their hacker meetup.

When they pitched Android as "open", they meant that carriers and device makers could load it up with all of the revenue-enhancing bloat that they wanted. In return, Google got a device that would let them hoover up all of the data they could ever want in order to build better ad service profiles for those using the devices. That is, after all, their business.

For a while, this could coexist with us screwing around with a real-life tricorder. At some point, though, the free stuff turned into a revenue opportunity that had to be exploited. And so, it will be.

Symbian and LiMo were both available at the time. It is hard to say they were good alternatives though. Windows 7 - even with the weight of Microsoft behind it - wasn't able to attract enough hardware manufacturers.

Windows Phone was pretty nice, too bad Microsoft didn't follow their DOS and Windows strategy of getting it preinstalled on every consumer PC sold. There was really only the Nokia Lumia line that I recall, but everyone I knew who had one loved it.

Maemo.

WebOS was pretty cool (Palm). But I’m not sure if Palm would have licensed it. Lg ended up with it.

Also Bada

There were several credible competitors: WebOS, Symbian, Maemo/MeeGo, Palm OS 6, and of course Windows Mobile. But they required cooperating with a single vendor and/or a lot of work to adapt.

Android won because it was available "right now" and easy to hack. Vendors could get a BSP (Board Support Package) from a chip manufacturer, slap Android userspace on top of it, and ship a phone within half a year. It was a glorious mess for a while.

Google then slowly tightened the reins and made the ecosystem more ordered.

It wasn't Canonical's limitation. Mozilla can confirm: the barriers to enter the phone manufacturing market are immense. Samsung, Ericsson, Sony, LG, etc, all had solid control of the deals with the network operators worldwide. It's a highly regulated market, you can't get in without Verizon, att, Vodafone etc to let you in. Canonical, Open Moko, Mozilla... Didn't have the strength to push through. Google and Apple did.

When IBM tried that with PS/2 it didn’t go so well.

One poses an active, unchecked threat to the constitutional rights of US citizens, has a chartered mission to subvert and undermine the very field of cryptography itself - going so far as to bribe standards bodies to adopt backdoored algorithms (using taxpayer funds to do so), has plotted to mass-violate the constitutional rights of their own citizens and lie about it to the national legislature (which they carried out successfully, committing perjury in the process and facing zero consequences for it), secretly cooperates with the criminal justice system via parallel construction to target nonviolent, law-abiding political activists with fabricated criminal charges as retaliation for politically disfavored speech, while the other is about 6500 miles away, has negligible presence in / reach into the US, and is generally unconcerned with the domestic political activities of US citizens.