> There are currently no plans to switch to a less permissive license.
Hey, just a reality check: in the event that you actually do become wildly successful, this means that others (Google, Microsoft, etc.) will be able to fork the browser and then develop it faster than you - thus leaving you behind and taking away your users! Would highly recommend leaving yourself some mechanism to prevent that, unless you're really okay with the project defeating itself through its own success.
Note they won't have to do a better job in the long run, just a good enough job in the short run to leave you behind. But yeah, as long as you're keeping this in mind :) best of luck!
Not even that sometimes, browser popularity can just be a matter of advertising (eg how chrome took off in the internet explorer offboarding era even though there were objectively equal or better alternatives at the time by just using google's internet omnipresence at the time for advertising). Sadly, modern internet is governed more by advertising industry rather than any kind of open-internet principles.
But ultimately this is all developers' decisions and I respect that. If anything, if a major company decided to take off and invest, they could do it in any case, publishing their modified source code would not make that much of difference essentially. It is really refreshing to see at last a browser that does not absolutely depend on google's resources in any way.
"Ah that means we must remove all security protections, instead of you know further strengthening security."
If older GPL failed, this means we needed a stronger license...such as AGPL, or in future something even better, instead of giving up and saying we should have just given them shit on a platter.
WebKit, the rendering engine that originally powered Chromium began its life as a fork of KHTML a GPL-licensed rendering engine produced by the KDE project for their Konqueror browser.
The rendering engine: Chromium had to be kept "libre", because khtml/Webkit was LGPL.
The browser: Chrome. could be kept closed because the LGPL allow the integration of libre libraries in closed products as long as the library itself remains "libre". In this case the library is the renering engine: Chromium.
As a counter example MacOS was built on top of decades of work on the BSD operating system and Apple is under no obligation to give the code back to the BSD project... and it doesn't.
So the most valuable company in the planet took from the community and it doesn't bother to give back.
Both companies did the bare minimum demanded by the respective license, its just that one license forces a bit more as bare minimum. Think. What does this mean?
If you use a license that demands even more, you could have pressurized the companies to behave even nicer.
Which would raise the bar for them requiring them to spend efforts writing it in house or procuring similar elsewhere. The more polished and complex a package is that is hard to find alternatives for, the better the leverage.
Yes, forced to follow. Its a sign in retrospect that KDE should have used an even stronger license. I don't know if AGPL existed then, but if I start a browser today, I'd license it as AGPL. If you want to use the project, you have to release your changes to your users. If you don't want to do that, good luck, spend millions on developing an equivalent application in house. Thats the beauty of GPL like licenses.
With BSD companies are under no obligation to release their changes, and like any self interested party, most don't.
The parent said GPL, which is what got me confused. LGPL makes more sense.
Although... this still doesn't explain why the other parts of the browser besides the rendering engine are open source? i.e. if the license was the reason, then presumably Google would've made the rest of the browser closed source, but that wasn't the case for most parts.
I’m aware. The context of dataflow’s original inquiry is of some mechanism to prevent a large corporation forking a codebase and running away with users; Google didn’t need to close the Chromium source to pull that off.
Imagine Ladybird is developed and is successful. Lots of people use it to read websites.
But then Badcorp takes the code and builds their own varient with extensions. Badcorp is big and has lots of market share. Lots of people use Badcorps's browser, and because lots of people are using it, lots of web developers code for it, including coding for its extensions.
Soon, lots of websites -- including Badcorp's own websites, and they have lots of popular ones -- use the extensions in the Badcorp browser.
Then people still using Ladybird can't use it for most websites. They have lost something.
What if BadApple takes BSD and forks it. Then they make their own BSD with extensions that only works on their own shiny fruit hardware.
What have the original BSD users lost? Absolutely nothing. BSD still exists, it’s still maintained, and people can still use it. They can also use fruit BSD if they want.
The big difference is: how important is the software for interoperability?
With an OS core, interoperability isn't really important. Existing BSD users presumably weren't too interested in buying shiny new Macs to run their BSD OS on, so Apple using BSD as the core of their OS really didn't affect them. Moreover, existing BSD users didn't need to interoperate with the new MacOS users. An OS isn't some kind of network protocol. BSD users could work with MacOS users just like users of any other OS, using existing network protocols and other standards.
The poster child for the BSD/GPL argument on the GPL side is usually Microsoft's "embracing and extending" of Kerberos. It's a network authentication protocol, licensed with a BSD-like permissive license, and Microsoft infamously forked it, creating their own proprietary extensions. This resulted in only non-MS users not being able to fully interoperate with MS users.
We do already see cases now where web developers write websites targeting Chrome-only browser extensions instead of sticking with standards. In theory, if this happened with Ladybird, it should be possible for the original devs to simply add their own versions of these extensions, but how feasible that it I'm not sure. Currently, there's Chrome-only extensions which apparently haven't been implemented by Firefox for some reason, so maybe it's not as easy as it sounds.
1. All the BSDs have been out there for decades without anyone running with it.
2. Google and Microsoft - while being a shadow of their former selves technically - are probably still very capable of reimplementing whatever they want.
3. If Ladybird gets so wildly popular, lets celebrate wildly!
Yet BSD is very alive and nobody who wants BSD is lost to Mac.
At least I personally have never heard anyone deliberating over a free BSD vs Mac.
Edit: and of course upvote. Apple ran with it. But they didn't run away with it. We still have it. Actually we have some patches thanks to them. As I mentioned in my other reply: Open source is not a zero sum game.
In a relative sense, I would argue that Apple has pilfered an order of magnitude higher value from the community than they have given back. The only example of Apple's net-positive contributions seem to be CUPS and LLVM, both of which were cross-platform before Apple took control. Compared with how much networking and userland code they've taken it feels like a trillion-dollar pittance. Even Microsoft chips in more.
> In a relative sense, I would argue that Apple has pilfered an order of magnitude higher value from the community than they have given back.
I take objection to the use of "pilfering" to describe usage of software according to the terms specified by its authors.
Or would you somehow argue that some features disappeared from BSD thanks to Apple copying their code as they were expressly allowed to in the license?
Furthermore, even if it wasn't free software but rather MS Windows or a "pirated" movie many people here would argue it wasn't theft but just unauthorized use.
They do? With what? (Besides Linux kernel drivers that are only useful for running Linux on their own VM solution.) I guess VScode, for people that use it?
CUPS is fantastic, though you're right, it was cross-platform before Apple took control.
Well, macOS is sort of BSD, but not quite. The kernel isn’t really BSD despite large sections being originally taken from BSD. The XNU kernel isn’t really BSD anymore. Then, the userland (BSD is both kernel and userland developed together) isn’t really BSD anymore, and Apple neglects their UNIX userland anyhow.
It is used in Cisco's email and web security appliance, which is also their hosted offering. This appliance was previously known as IronPort, before being acquired by Cisco.
Have you caught anyone deciding to go with Cisco instead of BSDs on their servers or their laptop?
I'm serious here: Open source isn't a zero sum game.
Partially thanks to the permissive license of BSD we now have both Mac OS and JunOS (edited: it said Cisco first), which is a good thing, not a bad thing.
The problem with Chrome isn't that it exist but that it has been forced upon us and the fact that we know they have used questionable methods to establish it as the dominant browser.
It's rather condescending of you to assume that the developers of Ladybird aren't fully aware of the consequences that their choice of license entails.
That certainly wasn't the intention. Was there really a need to turn this into a personal swipe? This is a common outcome many smart and talented developers have historically come to regret. You can find their stories all over the web, including right here on HN. I didn't want to see the same thing happen here, is all.
There are very simple game theoretic-esque arguments that many fans of BSD/MIT dogmatically refuse to acknowledge, I've never gotten a straight answer from them, zero actual data when asked for any against my argument and just try to weasel out of the debate somehow.
I don’t maintain any particularly important software, but I would be extremely happy to know that code I wrote is used in major products everyone uses; so, I prefer to use licenses that minimize the burdens on users.
Also, I don’t think intellectual property is real and so I don’t think I can make demands on the users of my code: it seems to me that there’s an implicit contradiction in the GPL between the FSF’s anti-IP stances and their attempt to control how their software is used using IP constructs.
And indeed GPL/AGPL minimizes burdens greatly on me as a user of a product, I can easily download to debug and if wanted modify the source code of the project of the company I want without involving anyone else.
Whereas if the company had forked a BSD project, there is no such legal recourse for me if the company chooses not to share the sources, at best you can hope to talk to them/pressurize them but of course that is most cases futile. As a user its much more inconvenient for me, I need to use advanced debuggers, disassemblers, etc to debug or modify. Sometimes even that does not work.
As a user, GPL/AGPL provides me far more convenience by default than "permissive" licenses do. It gives me an assurance I can just as easily see and modify the sources of any forks of the project, and if in any case such fails, its only because it wasn't strong enough, for example using GPL software in SaaS, due to which stronger licenses like AGPL were invented.
I believe in the simple golden rule, you give back to society what society has given back to you. Just like all others who gave back their changes, I trust any corporation should have no difficulty, since they are using the product of thousands of man hours for free. Not a single dollar is required, only the source code of any new changes made.
Secondly, my game theoretic argument. Lets say a powerful corpo takes your code and makes something that turns out very useful and popular. If it was BSD, they have no obligation to share anything back and your original project is left to dry and rot. If it was (A)GPL they are obliged to return the changes, and then you can absorb their changes and beat them to the punch. Its more competitive and creates a stronger capitalist environment. BSD's end state is feudalistic, GPL is capitalistic.
Also, I trust you'd be happy to have your code MINIXed, to have your code end up in closed source bootloaders locking down your new ARM laptop, and so on. At least with GPLs you get some code dumps. At least with Androids we end up with a begrudgingly shat out Linux source dump, that helps a little at least. With iPhone you got, absolutely fucking nothing, nil, nada. I am just suggesting please do not complain if BSD works ever end up creating such a world.
> Also, I trust you'd be happy to have your code MINIXed, to have your code end up in closed source bootloaders locking down your new ARM laptop, and so on.
Yes, this is implied by my view that IP is a fiction
Its a religious thing unfortunately for some developers. They don't seem to understand the concept of all entities esp large companies acting in their self interest unless forced to. They are building the noose by which themselves will be hanged, and I think it'd be hilarious to see once we finally see the current crop of MIT/BSD being used to completely lock down hardware and software. And these developers unable to use their own hobby oses anymore. I don't know if they will still see what their error was, they probably won't, as I said its a religious matter. And religious dogmatism is a strong bulwark against logic and sense.
Chrome in itself is not the problem. Competition is good. Firefox is better now thanks to Chrome.
Neither is Safari. Safari is actually part of the solution. Safari has saved Firefox and other browsers by being the only option on iOS for a long time and a better choice for many (because of battery usage) on Mac OS. Without Safari I am afraid we would all be locked into Chrome now.
The problem is that Google, like Microsoft before them,
1. used their dominant position in one market to force their way into dominating another market,
2. used various underhanded tactics to make users think Chrome were better while in reality it was just given better treatment by their backend servers and also the Googles frontend devs[1]
3. and that unlike Microsoft they still haven't got a multi billion fine for it and haven't been forced to advertise alternative browsers for months.
[1]: see various bugs[2] in everything from the core of the Angular framework to Google Calendar to YouTube
[2]: yes, I am generous enough to consider them bugs. I am fairly certain though that bugs that doesn't affect Chrome aren't exactly considered top priority.
If you're going to complain about 1-3 for google and ms, I don't think you can praise safari in the same breath.
Apple's abused their position with the iPhone to make safari relevant, and unlike Chrome and IE, users can't just install another browser.
Apple's behavior is the only reason I can't run my own addons I've written for firefox on iOS (they run _fine_ on android of course), why I can't run uBlock origin on iOS, and so on.
Apple's behavior on iOS is far more egregious than anything microsoft or google has ever done.
I never once had to run IE or Chrome unwillingly since I could always install netscape, or mosaic, or firefox.
I'm forced to run Safari, unable to decently block ads, unable to use the adons I've written, unable to fork and patch my browser to fix bugs, and I've generally had my software freedoms infringed... and if I don't run safari, then I can't talk to my family group chat (no androids allowed, sms breaks the imessage group features too much) or talk to my grandma who only knows how to use facetime.
I wish so much I could use a phone with firefox, but I can't justify having a spare iPhone just to talk to my family, so I'm kinda forced to suffer through safari, held hostage by apple's monopolistic iMessage behavior.
The only thing that comes close to Apple's behavior is Google's campaign to force Chromebooks upon children in classrooms, requiring them to use Chrome, but at least Google isn't holding their grandmother's hostage... and managed work/school devices already are kinda expected to have substantially less freedom than personal devices, so it feels much less egregious.
Maybe I missed something but your arguments seem be about how Apple’s locking down of iOS/iPadOS and Safari are harmful to user freedom. That’s a very different argument from the one the person you’re replying to was making. They were saying that the popularity of Apple’s mobile devices coupled with their only running Safari holds back a Chrome monopoly in the browser space. If people don’t support Safari they lose out on a large portion of users.
The story would be different, if Apple wasn't miserly with their native APIs and App distribution. But this is indeed a harmful and competition-restricting decision, even in Mozilla's opinion: https://mozilla.github.io/platform-tilt/
So I think we can safely assume that Apple's policy harms browser diversity by forcing their users to support a single minority option. If their users preferred a more feature-filled browser, we would never know; they aren't sincerely presented an alternative choice. If Apple wants their users to defend Safari, maybe they should invest in it until their browser (or Operating System, for that matter) competes with Chrome. Until then, they're promoting a megalomaniac solution and being a sore loser about it at the same time.
> You mean the company dominating the internet heavily promoted and pushed users towards its own browser.
If the company dominating their hardware did any better, maybe the majority of them wouldn't leave Safari. If Apple doesn't want to build a competitive browser, then they need some (non-anticompetitive) strategy to retain their users. Otherwise we're doing the Microsoft Shuffle again.
> Where by "feature-filled" you mean "all the Chrome-only non-standards because free market or something"
No, at this point I really do just mean "feature-filled". iOS has notoriously restrictive APIs and it makes full sense that those users would want a browser do do the things Apple prevents their iPhone from doing natively. At the rate Apple's heading, I wouldn't be surprised if next-gen iPhone apps were just PWAs that hook into WebGPU. Big-business has no reason to keep living under Apple's thumb, and market regulators can't justify it in Europe, Japan or even the United States.
> If the company dominating their hardware did any better
Apple doesn't dominate all of hardware. Google, however, dominates major access points to the internet, and used it to aggressively promote its browser.
> No, at this point I really do just mean "feature-filled".
I doubt it
> iOS has notoriously restrictive APIs and it makes full sense that those users would want a browser do do the things Apple prevents their iPhone from doing natively.
Ah. So you are talking about Google-only non-standards
> I wouldn't be surprised if next-gen iPhone apps were just PWAs that hook into WebGPU
Android has been the dominant OS for over a decade now. It has no real or perceived limitations of iOS. We've yet to see a single amazing PWA future we hear so much about.
> We've yet to see a single amazing PWA future we hear so much about.
Then maybe it's time you gave Android another try. Chrome runs on mobile just as well as it does on desktop, so any of the web apps you use on your computer work fine on phone too. It makes modern Safari look like a tofu browser substitute by comparison.
> Then maybe it's time you gave Android another try. Chrome runs on mobile just as well as it does on desktop
So?
> so any of the web apps you use on your computer work fine on phone too.
So where's the amazing PWA future we hear so much about. All the "amazing web apps" we hear about are shitty slow bad monstrosities that can barely display a few lines of text without jank.
The very few actual great apps which are made ad great engineering effort and expense (like Figma) don't run in full mode on mobile for obvious reasons.
So, my question remains and you haven't answered it.
Edit: There are some web apps here and there which are surprisingly good. E.g. I'm quite impressed by Foodora's app. And it runs well on iOS, too. However, 99.9999999% of the "great PWA future" is just garbage despite the "Chrome runs just as well on Android".
Although Orion also has built in a (simpler) implementation the most important Firefox for me and I assume many others, tree style tabs. Orions built in version doesn't have the full customizability from TST but it works and presents tabs nested by what tab the descend from which is the most important feature.
Kind of in in the same way that people are thankful for Churchill: not because he was a fantastic man in every way (he wasn't) but because he saved us from something even worse.
If you have to convince people that you are seriously telling the truth, you are probably making an unproven assertion that relies on many benefits of the doubt.
Yes, and the commenter claims that in this context this is actually good because it halted chrome/chromium's dominance in the internet (and I actually agree). It may sound paradoxical, but context is important imo.
I even thought it wasn't necessary to test them separately but I recently heard from someone with more and more recent experience that some differences exist, particularly around prefixed css attributes. Can't say for sure though, but that was why I wrote my comment above somewhat defensively.
EU law does force them to advertise alternative search engines. I just updated Chrome on my work laptop and they gave me a slate of search engines. My Chrome defaults to Brave Search now.
A: "Hey the measures we took weren't enough to prevent the abuse?"
B: "Ah I see that means we should just give up all measures, instead of you know advocating for stronger measures or anything else obvious and logical like that."
This only means we must start any projects today with stronger GPL or similar variants such as AGPL.
You had a security breach, despite using a better set of technologies and techniques.
During the postmortem, you suggest this means we should give up all security or just use the weaker solution, since its all the same, the server would have gotten breached in either case.
Instead of advocating for building a stronger security.
"Better" is a subjective term. I would probably stay on OG Ladybird if it meant MS/Google-ified LB starts screenshotting/OCRing/Uploading/LLMing all the data, even if it were to become faster and more slick.
Slow computing it's sometimes called [0]
I sometimes experience some friction (really acceptable though) on Firefox, it has never lured me to Edge of Chrome. Some people have standards you know ;)
Hey, just a reality check: in the event that you actually do become wildly successful, this means that others (Google, Microsoft, etc.) will be able to fork the browser and then develop it faster than you - thus leaving you behind and taking away your users! Would highly recommend leaving yourself some mechanism to prevent that, unless you're really okay with the project defeating itself through its own success.