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Linux users are more likely than most to be familiar with Chromium, Google's the free and open source web project that serves as the basis for their wildly popular Chrome. Since the project's inception over a decade ago, users have been able to compile the BSD licensed code into a browser that's almost the same as the closed-source Chrome. As such, most distributions offer their own package for the browser and some even include it in the base install. Unfortunately, that may be changing soon.
[...] To the average Chromium user, this doesn't sound like much of a problem. In fact, you might even assume it doesn't apply to you. The language used in the post makes it sound like Google is referring to browsers which are spun off of the Chromium codebase, and at least in part, they are. But the search giant is also using this opportunity to codify their belief that the only official Chromium builds are the ones that they provide themselves. With that simple change, anyone using a distribution-specific build of Chromium just became persona non grata.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2021, @04:44PM (5 children)
Can't even use Palemoon on the BSDs because the browser devs got into a similar spat with some package managers, took their ball, and went home.
Open source is so pervasive now that you can't do anything with the source. And somehow the final product isn't open.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2021, @05:31PM (3 children)
AFAIK they couldn't call it palemoon if it wasn't completely the upstream dick's code.
I forked my own version and they threatened me about it.
But since it is under a free license, they could have called it icemoon or something. What was the result of that spat?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2021, @06:47PM (2 children)
Package maintainers don't want to maintain it after the kerfuffule, and something about the build system is nonobvious enough that it's not straightforward to build from source.
's part of why when my work laptop died I just gave up and installed the corporate Windows image. So few tolerable browsers out there, and getting fewer by the month.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2021, @08:44PM
windows! lmao.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2021, @12:25AM
And there is NOT ONE interested user in the whole BSD world, capable of taking a buildscript from BEFORE "the kerfuffule" and changing the version number inside?
If so, I entirely understand Moonchild's not caring about such an useless segment of his userbase.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday January 27 2021, @05:53PM
Open source is so pervasive now that you can't do anything with the source. And somehow the final product isn't open.
Well, people should have listened to Richard Stallman. He warned us of this exact thing, and it's why he invented the GNU license. But all the open-source lovers complained, saying "it's not really free if some company can't take my code, add some proprietary stuff to it, and then use that to monopolize!"