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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, 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!"