[avar]

What's wrong here is that he's refusing to work with a willing upstream. It would be much better for everyone if he submitted patches to Google to allow everyone using Chrome to optionally turn off these tracking features.

Instead he's needlessly forking the project to "bring a lot of publicity to my person and my homepage". That's not being a good open source citizen.

[loewenskind]

He claims that in Germany he can make a lot of money at this. If he can then it means he's taking an open source project and doing something with it to make money. It doesn't even sound like he's closing the source of his fork (assuming he would even have this option). It's not the most efficient thing but if he really can make money with this I don't see much fault in it. It's risky because someone else could just push these changes back to Chrome killing his revenue stream.

[avar]

Sure, it's just that the whole thing has a big "Google's all about stealing your data" vibe in its advertisements.

When in fact Google would be happy to take his patches, and most of those data-sharing features are improving the user experience (like type-ahead suggestions etc.).

That just rubs me the wrong way.