That is, although proprietary soft, you can be 100% sure of what you are using
sorry but unless they provide access to the complete proprietary source code in a form where you can actually compile it yourself and run it instead of their binaries, you are mistaken.
You can access and even modify these 5% related to the UI. There are a interview with Tetzcher and Manjaro, where this is explaint very well.
https://youtu.be/ivDiL9XeDw0
even if it was “source visible” non-free software, I wouldn’t use it, but, their EULA also says you can’t “reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to derive the source code for the Software”. so, yeah, no thanks. 🤷
Not for other projects as for own use, it’s full auditable, in the community even show you how to do this, to avoid that Google and Edge are the first in forking it and with this killing Vivaldi and all other browsers. How do you think Vivaldi with less 1% marketshare will survive with the big ones have the same?
In a market with nearly 100 browser forks, dominated by Google and M$, where another 70 have already been abandoned that tried to introduce more features in OpenSource, leaving something that makes it different for free use, it’s suicide.
The main reason for being for FOSS is to give the possibility of collaboration for the devs in developing new products, but this in a market as saturated as that of browsers, this does not make much sense anymore. Ok, a dev capable of analyzing the script can say that this gives some more security, but the rest of the 99.9% of users can not and have to trust what others say, just like in any other soft, by far they can check it using some services that analyze the security and privacy of the product and this depends solely on the intentions of the author or manufacturer of these, regardless of whether it is FOSS or not, especially since most of the current FOSS comes out of the workshops of Google and Microsoft, whose privacy practices we already know well (=cero).
We are in the question of who do we trust the most? of a Google FOSS, or of a small cooperative in the EU, with its privacy rules, non-existent in the US, which launches with its own means a proprietary freeware, with good support, clear and good TOS and PP and a support community, which allow to interact directly with the devs and the CEO himself in a democratic way?.
But of course, if you are able to read and analyze the thousands of lines of a script, I do not say anything and you will be right to prefer it.
Personally I am governed by the verification of the veracity of the statements for 6 years and as a result of the confidence acquired. I’m not bothered at all that part of the exceptional UI is proprietary soft, I know it carries no scripts to track or spy on the user. I can synchronize the data completely encrypted end2end, without the possibility of recovering them if I forget the password, there is no recovery email as others have, because Vivaldi does not have access to this data, nor to the password. Small price for privacy.
It’s means that you can’t use this code (derive) for other projects or browsers, but permits to mod your Vivaldi to your like (on the own risk), that is tolerated.
i’m pretty sure that if you reverse engineer Google Chrome (google’s proprietary version of Chromium), google will also tolerate it as long as you don’t redistribute it, but, the difference is, you don’t generally need to because Chromium is actually free/libre open source software so there are lots of independent builds of it and its many derivatives (of which vivaldi is one, albeit another proprietary one like Chrome).
if you want to use a privacy-focused chromium derivative that is actually free software, i think ungoogled-chromium is a decent one.
Be well informed and try to do reverse engineering with Chrome. Chrome, just like Vivaldi, is based on Chromium, but from there the similarities end. You don’t need to reverse engineer Vivaldi to modify the proprietary UI, the only part that is. You can degoogle Vivaldi yourself in the privacy settings, since, unlike others, in Vivaldi it is an option, because there are users of Google services (students, professionals…), which require certain Google APIs to work, even Firefox incorporates them because of this and also ‘ungoogled’ Chromium, but where you can’t disable them, in Vivaldi you can, if you don’t want to use Google services (Crypto Tokens, WebstoreAPi if you want to use extensions from there, and some others), the internal Google telemetry APIs are already removed from Vivaldi by default, same as in a degoogled Chromium.
That is, you can degoogle Vivaldi as an option to such an extent that Google doesn’t recognize it as Chromium, if you want. But in this case some pages and services will not work for you, If a “degoogled” Chromium can use Gmail, Blogger, Hangouts or now Google Chats and extensions from the Chrome Store, it isn’t really degoogled. Even Firefox, less the Google Store, can use these, a degoogled Vivaldi with all APIs desactivated, can’t.
sorry but unless they provide access to the complete proprietary source code in a form where you can actually compile it yourself and run it instead of their binaries, you are mistaken.
You can access and even modify these 5% related to the UI. There are a interview with Tetzcher and Manjaro, where this is explaint very well. https://youtu.be/ivDiL9XeDw0
even if it was “source visible” non-free software, I wouldn’t use it, but, their EULA also says you can’t “reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to derive the source code for the Software”. so, yeah, no thanks. 🤷
Not for other projects as for own use, it’s full auditable, in the community even show you how to do this, to avoid that Google and Edge are the first in forking it and with this killing Vivaldi and all other browsers. How do you think Vivaldi with less 1% marketshare will survive with the big ones have the same? In a market with nearly 100 browser forks, dominated by Google and M$, where another 70 have already been abandoned that tried to introduce more features in OpenSource, leaving something that makes it different for free use, it’s suicide.
The main reason for being for FOSS is to give the possibility of collaboration for the devs in developing new products, but this in a market as saturated as that of browsers, this does not make much sense anymore. Ok, a dev capable of analyzing the script can say that this gives some more security, but the rest of the 99.9% of users can not and have to trust what others say, just like in any other soft, by far they can check it using some services that analyze the security and privacy of the product and this depends solely on the intentions of the author or manufacturer of these, regardless of whether it is FOSS or not, especially since most of the current FOSS comes out of the workshops of Google and Microsoft, whose privacy practices we already know well (=cero).
We are in the question of who do we trust the most? of a Google FOSS, or of a small cooperative in the EU, with its privacy rules, non-existent in the US, which launches with its own means a proprietary freeware, with good support, clear and good TOS and PP and a support community, which allow to interact directly with the devs and the CEO himself in a democratic way?.
But of course, if you are able to read and analyze the thousands of lines of a script, I do not say anything and you will be right to prefer it. Personally I am governed by the verification of the veracity of the statements for 6 years and as a result of the confidence acquired. I’m not bothered at all that part of the exceptional UI is proprietary soft, I know it carries no scripts to track or spy on the user. I can synchronize the data completely encrypted end2end, without the possibility of recovering them if I forget the password, there is no recovery email as others have, because Vivaldi does not have access to this data, nor to the password. Small price for privacy.
are you saying their EULA isn’t enforced? or what?
how can it be fully auditable while explicitly prohibiting attempts to derive the source code?
It’s means that you can’t use this code (derive) for other projects or browsers, but permits to mod your Vivaldi to your like (on the own risk), that is tolerated.
i’m pretty sure that if you reverse engineer Google Chrome (google’s proprietary version of Chromium), google will also tolerate it as long as you don’t redistribute it, but, the difference is, you don’t generally need to because Chromium is actually free/libre open source software so there are lots of independent builds of it and its many derivatives (of which vivaldi is one, albeit another proprietary one like Chrome).
if you want to use a privacy-focused chromium derivative that is actually free software, i think ungoogled-chromium is a decent one.
Be well informed and try to do reverse engineering with Chrome. Chrome, just like Vivaldi, is based on Chromium, but from there the similarities end. You don’t need to reverse engineer Vivaldi to modify the proprietary UI, the only part that is. You can degoogle Vivaldi yourself in the privacy settings, since, unlike others, in Vivaldi it is an option, because there are users of Google services (students, professionals…), which require certain Google APIs to work, even Firefox incorporates them because of this and also ‘ungoogled’ Chromium, but where you can’t disable them, in Vivaldi you can, if you don’t want to use Google services (Crypto Tokens, WebstoreAPi if you want to use extensions from there, and some others), the internal Google telemetry APIs are already removed from Vivaldi by default, same as in a degoogled Chromium. That is, you can degoogle Vivaldi as an option to such an extent that Google doesn’t recognize it as Chromium, if you want. But in this case some pages and services will not work for you, If a “degoogled” Chromium can use Gmail, Blogger, Hangouts or now Google Chats and extensions from the Chrome Store, it isn’t really degoogled. Even Firefox, less the Google Store, can use these, a degoogled Vivaldi with all APIs desactivated, can’t.