I’ve used VS Code for a long time, but have recently grown weary of Microsoft’s approach to OSS. I’ve checked out VS Codium which seems like it might be a great option.
What text editor are you using?
I’ve used VS Code for a long time, but have recently grown weary of Microsoft’s approach to OSS. I’ve checked out VS Codium which seems like it might be a great option.
What text editor are you using?
I mean, I don’t have deep insights into Brave’s development either, but they only have around 150 employees (according to https://craft.co/brave-software ).
I doubt there’s numbers out there for how many Google employees work on Chrome, but the Mozilla Corporation has around 750, which they only just cut down from 1000 ( https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/11/21363424/mozilla-layoffs-quarter-staff-250-people-new-revenue-focus ).
As far as I’m aware, Brave doesn’t really tweak much about the rendering engine (Blink) either, which is probably the biggest chunk of code in Chromium. So, they would need to build up a lot of expertise.
And finally, well, long-term security may also require feature development. Chrome and Firefox both have developed forms of sandboxing. Mozilla published a new way of doing sandboxing via WASM not too long ago. So, yeah, you kind of need to continue innovating, which requires manpower.
As for forking Chromium versus a piece of KDE software, the difference is that with Chromium most of the development work comes from one entity, Google. You would pretty much need to poach these employees, or build up a huge team of your own, to be able to move the project in a different direction.
With a piece of KDE software, there’s usually multiple entities involved, i.e. multiple independent people. So, the core maintainers are not the only people who do development, or you may even win over some of the core maintainers for a fork.
And even if that is not the case, a handful of frustrated community members can probably outperform the current maintainers.
You just have a lot less development manpower tied to the maintainers.
LibreOffice might again be a better example. OpenOffice was maintained by Sun Microsystems and they provided a bunch of infrastructure and held the brand name, but most of the development work came from the wider open-source community.
So, when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, those developers organized, created The Document Foundation, and set up their own infrastructure. So, the maintainer changed, but the developers largely stayed the same.
Now, this seems to be more about the manpower needed to mantain a browser that about the open-source or free (or in fact even community-driven) natures of Chromium. Is there anything that makes Firefox more opensource than Chromium?
Again, even departing from the strict opensource definition, I think that how much a project is free come from the possibility to have a fork that works, not necessarily one that can compete with the original project. Is it necessarily a good thing if the development team of a projects can be outperformed by “a handful of frustrated community members”?
In fact, is your point that it would be better if there were no professional developers and only projects run by communities of hobbyists?
Well, that’s why I didn’t name Firefox as a particularly good example of open-source, just a reference for the manpower needed.
I do think, they work more in the open than Chromium. And because the Mozilla Foundation is legally a non-profit (of which the Mozilla Corporation is a 100% subsidiary), they don’t really have that profit-motive behind their decisions (they can only use money to pay their employees or to develop their projects further), so they tend to make decisions more in line with the open-source expectation. But yeah, I would still certainly prefer, if more of the development was done by the wider community.
Nah, I would just like it, if companies wouldn’t tout their projects being open-source, when that’s basically just misleading many users. Which is most definitely a lost cause, so that’s why I’m in favor of just letting the “open-source” term die and finding a better word.
Is there a good example of open-source web browser? For example, what do you use as a browser?
More generally, is there anything that passes you “hard fork” test for another reason than the scale effect? Is there any sign that the frustrated community members are more talented if the maintainer is hired by a non-profit rather than a private company?
There is a precise definition of what is open source. If users think it encompasses more, that’s a problem of communication from part of the open source community.
Do you really think there is no advantage of a program being open source? Don’t you think it is a good thing that the online community can check the source code, fork it to remove the bits they don’t like, install a previous version if they don’t like the new one? Would you prefer if there was no open source Chromium, no ungoogled-chromium, no soft forks of it, so that one would need to run Chrome if they need to use an app developped for Chrome?
Do you exclusively use software that is designed by communities rather than companies?