Gregory's Serverall web browsers should be open source.
there's no good reason to lock your code down.
the way you browse the web should be open and inspectable, just like how the web was designed to be.
 20 comments
yes, this is a direct callout post for vivaldi. fucking stupidest reason i've heard in my life for locking your code down. @arch every single chrome fork acts like they're reinventing the wheel when they are just google chrome again @chirpbirb @arch The only "valid" Chromium build is Ungoogled Chromium and I'm sure someone will say something about it that moves it to the "all Chromium builds are bad" category. "But, the way we see it, Vivaldi is more than just its code. It is our brand, with associated trademarks we have to protect. This means any fork needs to be branded as a different product. And this new product then would become an immediate competitor without putting any significant technical work to reach that status." https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser-open-source/ like, go home. shut up. you're just chrome with a skin on it. you're not that fucking important. @chirpbirb how else will they stop people from ripping out things like automatic redirects to affiliate links using default booksmarks <:) i too really dislike vivaldi  @chirpbirb Does Firefox not do this exact thing while also being open source? I seem to remember Mozilla getting pretty butthurt about forks with branding in them.  @petri @chirpbirb That's just bog-standard trademark protection (see https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/trademarks/distribution-policy/). Among other things, it gives them legal grounds to prosecute somebody distributing a malicious version of Firefox. The difference is, Firefox is explicitly designed to let you rebrand it easily (see https://kb.mozillazine.org/Rebranding_Firefox), and forks are encouraged. @petri @chirpbirb Yeah, the Firefox name and logo are trademarked, that's why Firefox was (is?) IceWeasel in Debian. Crucially, the source code is still open. IceWeasel just has to have Firefox branding removed, it still has access to all of the source code. You just can't use Firefox's name on a non-Firefox project. @chirpbirb Agreed, their reasoning seems to be "our product is a custom Chrome skin and an ad-blocker, and people could just take those somewhere else." I guess when you don't have a product the only thing to defend is your brand.  @chirpbirb @fidget @petri there was historically some low grade weirdness about it along the lines of "<niche distro> has to rename it because they added some small patches whereas Ubuntu gets to still call it Firefox even though they have a huge number of patches for distro integration" but none of it was ever really important. @0x2ba22e11 @chirpbirb @petri That’s more of a trademark law problem, too. Defense of your trademarks is required to keep them. Firefox could license it, but there are legal costs involved in that. It’s not in anyway perfect, but it’s the only thing preventing something like “McAfee Firefox by Intel” from becoming a reality.  @fidget @petri @chirpbirb *was. Looks like iceweasel killed off in 2016-7 and Debian suddenly ok with Firefox branding Looks like there's IceCat these days, kinda hokey. @chirpbirb "any fork needs to be branded separately" hey, like pale moon! and waterfox! almost like mozilla already figured this whole thing out! @chirpbirb The operating system and the browser are the two big things that I want to be open source on a personal device. Yes, there's a bunch of proprietary firmware under the hood but firmware won't target you with advertisement. ...unless it does? :blobfoxsnugterrified: |
"but my branding! i'll lose my branding!!!"
shut. the fuck. up.