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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
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: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Wednesday January 27 2021, @05:21PM (1 child)
What happened to Google is the same thing that happens to a lot of companies, namely that they lost track of what made them good in the first place. Somebody has a good technical innovation or improvement, starts a company to sell it, builds it up into a business, and sooner or later the MBA types take over, the founder(s) stop doing the day-to-day management, and before long it's just another fossilized MBA company making all the same short-sighted decisions that the company existed to rebel against.
To use a completely different company as an example: Ben and Jerry's started out as a couple of hippie guys who liked making ice cream opening up a shop in Vermont. They did well enough that they were able to take on a few employees, and eventually expanded into a few shops. They were routinely innovating flavors, because they did all this because they liked making ice cream. They started their take-home pints business as an add-on to that, which proved immensely popular, then they started selling it in local stores, and eventually needed a factory to serve that need. They had some interesting policies, like for a long time Ben and Jerry had a policy of a remarkable level of pay equity, and it was generally considered a very good place to work. Then Ben got older and decided he wanted to cash out. Jerry ran the company on his own for a while, then he decided he was done too, so they got together and in the mid-1990's broke their pay equity rules to hire a CEO to run the place. And as soon as that happened, in a few years the suits took over, and despite their hippie aesthetics it's now really just another brand of Unilever, the employees aren't treated as well, the ice cream isn't as good and definitely not as innovative as they once were, and the "pints" aren't full pints anymore.
And if you want to stick to tech stuff, look at Apple, who lost a lot of its technical mojo when Woz decided to call it quits, because he was the guy in the boardroom who cared the most about engineering greatness and had the chops to know what that looked like. Or Red Hat, who started with the purpose of making Linux something ordinary people could use but is now firmly transitioned towards suits trying to impress other suits (especially with their recent dumping of CentOS).
Google, like many others, started out with a genuinely great idea of how to build a search engine that was much much much better than its competitors, as anyone who had to deal with early web search engines like Altavista can tell you, but eventually the suits took over and the innovation petered out for anything other than soaking its users more.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2021, @06:38PM
Woz's only influence with Apple was the Apple 8-bit computer line.
Apple Computer's amazing rise came with the Macintosh computer in the 80s and the new Macintosh line in the 90s based on Steve Jobs' NeXT computer company when Steve was invited back to Apple to save it after the CEO had given him the boot years ago and proceeded to drive the company into the ground. The iPad, iPhone, iPod, all had zip to do with Woz who didn't do anything at Apple after the Apple II series. (Unsure about the flop Apple III.) Don't get me wrong, Woz was the engineer that Jobs needed so that together they could start Apple in the 70s, but his contributions were only useful during the 8-bit era. He hasn't done anything since in computers. Jobs >> Woz in the tech world.
As for Google, it wasn't the CEO who turned it evil. The original founders did that and returned to run the company after leaving day to day management to a business type for a while. It's more evil than ever under their management. Their moral character (one of them at least) is pretty bad in personal matters at Google as well, with screwing all the female underlings in the office as possible in those early days. I don't think there was ever any aversion to getting huge and rich and doing whatever was necessary to achieve it. Now, managing perceptions so that they seemed unmotivated by money and power? They managed that successfully for a long time until their results and methods could no longer be reconciled with the PR.