Chromium is under a BSD license, explicitly allowing Google to build a proprietary product on top that siphoning all the users' data to make money off of it and influence where the http world goes.
The product here is under a Copyleft license. Any derivative is at the service of humanity at large, today and tomorrow. It is much harder to exploit people this way.
Open Source has never served the users, it has always been about the editors. A Copyleft license is a good way just like a public institution at the helm is.
Google could build a proprietary service on top of an AGPL Chromium. All they would have to do is either not accept external contributions (they already sponsor most if not all of the development anyway) or require contributions to sign a CLA to give them the copyright to it (they already require you to sign that anyway)
The scenario the GP outlines is one where Google is the sole licensor of Chromium. They could then build proprietary (or whatever!) versions of that however they liked, since they'd have copyright to the whole thing.
If Chromium were AGPL they couldn't build a proprietary service. They couldn't even build a service that earns them money but can't be copy pasted as-is by anyone else such that it would earn money to someone else. That's the whole point. If one benefits, everyone benefits
The point is that if you have the copyright to a project and you release it as AGPL, it has absolutely no affect on what you can do with it. You can also relicense it to others and tell them they don't have to follow AGPL either.
So if Chromium were AGPL, Google could do anything they felt like doing with it, just like now. Google just wouldn't be able to keep anybody else from doing stuff with it for versions that they released under AGPL, as long as those people didn't violate it.
also the way google dumps code is also a factor, is it going to be repo where we can keep track of the whole development process, or just a code dump every once in a while.
To be fair, I think that what we are seeing happening to Chromium has little to do with it being open source and more with the fact that it has essentially become the de facto web browser. If google released an entirely rewritten and closed-source version of Chrome tomorrow, 95% of the people would not bat an eye and keep using it.
Corporations contributing to FOSS have agenda, but so have individuals. Being open source isn’t everything, but it is a damn good start.
So GP would be justified in preferring the FOSS solution if it meets their technical requirements vs the commercial OSS solution because at one point they could be the only option and abuse that network effect / monopoly.
My point was it's who is developing the software because it takes effort for another maintainer to step up and it doesn't always happen. Also if a commercial company digs a big enough moat with the open source product they could abuse it, so do you trust them now?
Similar to Google abusing Chromium, Castopod could one day be in that position if you don't support FOSS alternatives today. That would be the mindset to put yourself in.
That being said, I don't think it matters as much as the browser space, but I'm not in the podcast community. I could see though that it could potentially be very costly to have a monopoly for podcast hosting, but currently that's Spotify right?
Note: I have no preference here, just assuming what motivates GP's preference.
I think the first paragraph captures the core of the issue: which solution best meets their requirements. I don’t have a podcast (yet!), but it seems like the two projects don’t have the exact same feature set.
Isn’t it the beauty of open source that you and I are able to take that project and make it “better”? That we are able to maintain it with our time and energy?
The mindset of “FOSS or nothing” (FOSS in the sense of “not supported by corporate interests”) is noble but also a little bit naive. Nothing is free, and even the greatest FOSS projects rely on corporate and individual contributions (monetary or otherwise). I think that wholesale dismissing an (F)OSS product because it is backed by a commercial company is just showing them that the alternative (closed source software) is the more sensible choice.
Chrome-imium did not become the default because it was open-source and no other better “FOSS” alternatives were available, it did because it has relentlessly been pushed to users on the single most visited webpage in the world for years. If you and I did not use Chrome (which we probably both don’t, I’ll allow to infer from your stance), Chrome would still be the de facto browser today. Is this better than another “strictly” FOSS browser being the de facto default? No. Is it better than a closed source browser (Netscape or IE) being the de facto browser? Definitely, at least we could/can fork it.
>Castopod could one day be in that position if you don't support FOSS alternatives today. That would be the mindset to put yourself in.
they can't turn an AGPL license code into proprietary one. Open source and FOSS are similar but ideologically different beasts.
One gives the downstream developer to decide the license of their work, including the ability of allowing them to turn it into proprietary code while FOSS forces all code to be foss and never proprietary
>Similar to Google abusing Chromium
chromium is under BSD while this is under AGPL. there is a world of difference between these two licenses. One allows proprietary forks while another forbids it.
Or we can let the enemy's own resources contribute to their demise. Let Google work on Chromium, but use the browsers that take the engine and do the things that are in our interests. Brave is not implementing v3.
Brave isn't implementing v3 immediately, but Chromium is their upstream and I haven't seen them claim they will be able to resist indefinitely. They have their own non-extension adblocker for which v3/no-v3 is irrelevant.
The tweet you're referring to in the GP simply says "Brave will support Manifest V2 extensions such as uBlock Origin even after Chrome stops doing so". Which would be true statement even if that support only lasts for a day after Chrome stops supporting V2. That is to say, this does not look like a guarantee of indefinite support by any means, but rather extended support (for an undetermined amount of time).
The product here is under a Copyleft license. Any derivative is at the service of humanity at large, today and tomorrow. It is much harder to exploit people this way.
Open Source has never served the users, it has always been about the editors. A Copyleft license is a good way just like a public institution at the helm is.