Ah too bad, that breaks it for me. I aim to have the same browser on all my platforms, obviously they're not there yet as it runs only on the Pi 400 now, but I doubt they will ever support things like FreeBSD officially (even Firefox doesn't!)
So it won't be for me but nevertheless more competition in the rendering engine area is welcome.
We've been taking open source for granted for the past decade. As open source has proven difficult to monetize, we may be seeing a return to proprietary closed source software.
Whether this is a good or a bad thing depends on how it plays out. If software like Flow conforms to standards and offers a better experience, battery life, privacy, etc then it might work out well. An open infrastructure with a marketplace to pay for desired features will benefit us all.
The bad scenario is that the web continues to fracture into proprietary components. While a web not dominated by Chrome seems almost unimaginable today, it wasn't that long ago that sites that only worked in Internet Explorer were commonplace. If Flow actually becomes the dominant web browser and Flow-only websites ever become the norm, we'll all be worse off for it. That really is a far off scenario, so for now, having Flow as an extra player on the web is probably a good thing.
Flow's model isn't directly as an application, I suspect, but rather a browsing engine. Since the article mentions set-top boxes, that means deploying to fixed hardware which is usually the case for things like integrated browsers on TVs, consoles, and digital billboards or the like. And possibly video game UIs, like Coherent Labs's software.
So presumably one would license the engine to use in their device or game and integrate that cost on the end product, rather than a user explicitly paying $X to Ekioh.
One possible approach here could also be dual-licensing under both something like the GPLv3 and offering commercial licenses. That way you get the advantages of being FOSS, but also become able to sell the application to system builders.