We get this question a lot. Our CEO is clear about this: Our guiding principle isn’t about licensing models ... it’s about interoperability.
The original Unix philosophy (McIlroy, Ritchie, Thompson) says nothing about source code licensing. It’s about programs that do one thing well and work together through universal interfaces.
Open source is a distribution and licensing model; conflating it with software openness misrepresents those core tenets. Orion supports Chrome extensions, Firefox extensions, and standard web APIs — that’s interoperability in practice.
Sure, there's nothing wrong in pursuing a closed-source commercial business model. But you guys also said you won't collect any user data with the browser, and that may be true. And yet, you stopped offering offline installers, in lieu of online installers that can be used (in theory) to add persistent and unique ids, do data harvesting and dynamic / customised installations. That doesn't inspire trust to your pro-privacy claims.
Applying the 'one thing well' bumper sticker to a web browser, which does a million things in a mediocre fashion, is a bizarre take. Not only is that whole comparison inapplicable, it's orthagonal to the point. You can do 'one thing well' and open source the code too, but you're not, and this post does not explain why.