People who are involved in the open-source community often ask us why Vivaldi browser isn’t available under a unified open-source license. Here we explain why.

I know that many reject Vivaldi, because he is not entirely FOSS and only listed as Free-Proprietary, although I think that it is not at all fair to compare it for this with others in this category. The small part, about 5% of the code is obfuscated for good reasons. However, it does not prevent the user from modifying it to their liking and it is even encouraged by Vivaldi, but it does prevent large companies (Google) from making a fork of Vivaldi and thereby destroying this still small cooperative.

  • SeerLite
    1•3 years ago

    it does not help you that the code is open, if you are not a programmer and then it will not be easy for you to review sometimes millions of lines of code to see where they point (try them with the FF code)

    And that is when you rely on the community for that. As long as 1 programmer can see what’s up and explain it to the rest with proof from the source, we are all up to date with everything that’s going on behind the scenes. That’s why we have Ungoogled Chromium and LibreWolf. That is why there was so much commotion when Brave some referral links (or whatever it was, I don’t remember), they were visible in the source code. This is not possible with Vivaldi.

    You may say there’s no advantages to something being FOSS, but you’re not saying there’s any disadvantages either. I say there’s many advantages to FOSS, like the one I said above. Therefore I remain convinced that FOSS is better than proprietary in most circumstances (including Vivaldi).

    You gave a bunch of valid examples about FOSS projects not necessarily being trustable just because they’re FOSS. They are still FOSS though. People can see how things work and if there’s anything shady that’s happening. As I said before you don’t have to be a programmer for this; If the project is popular there’s bound to be people who’re gonna examine it for you. It’s not automatically better, but it’s an extra level of trust towards the devs.

    Any app, FOSS or not, is only as good as the community or company behind it

    Yeah, and if an app is proprietary the community’s quality is gonna suffer.

    Vivaldi makes money from search engines and default bookmarks. Making it FOSS will not change that. Yes, someone will make a fork and strip all that stuff from the browser. No, it’s not gonna be as popular as Vivaldi. LibreWolf does not have as many users as Firefox and Ungoogled Chromium does not have as many users as Chrome.

    • @ZerushOP
      1•3 years ago

      Vivaldi let in the choice of the user how much privacy like to have. FF and Mozilla forks not. As I say before, only entering in Mozilla.org, they put you a tracker from Alphabet Inc Privacy? What do you think how many lines of the script of FF or forks are pointing to Google? Their code also is financed by Google, without a choice from the user like in Vivaldi. For this I prefer an CE Browser, privacy norms in the US don’t exists. FOSS isn’t a sinonym of privacy, nor security. Search a degoogled Geck Engine, and Gecko also is at the end of possibilities and also FF in the future go to Blink, this is a fact.

      • SeerLite
        1•3 years ago

        Vivaldi let in the choice of the user how much privacy like to have

        And Firefox doesn’t? What is the difference? What is it about privacy that Vivaldi “gives you an option for” and Firefox doesn’t?

        Privacy? What do you think how many lines of the script of FF or forks are pointing to Google?

        With Firefox I can check. With Vivaldi I can’t check. Vivaldi may have thousands of lines pointing to Google for all we know (though I’m sure that’s not true, it’s an example).

        Their code also is financed by Google,

        Google pays Mozilla to keep them as the default search engine. Don’t make it sound like Google controls everything that goes in the source code of Firefox. Also even if they did, as I said before, Firefox is open source, so I can check.

        Search a degoogled Geck Engine, and Gecko also is at the end of possibilities and also FF in the future go to Blink, this is a fact.

        I don’t understand what this sentence means nor why it is a “fact”.

        You’re really missing my point here on purpose just to defend Vivaldi. If it’s so good, so much better than Firefox, so much more private, with 0 references to Google in the code, then why isn’t it FOSS so I can see for myself? You haven’t given me a single reason for why it shouldn’t be FOSS. Repeating “Vivaldi better than Firefox” doesn’t answer my question.