this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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[โ€“] samuelc@lemmy.world 14 points 11 months ago (1 children)

fork

what if google chrome decided to close the fork by changing the license to something restructive, i mean the fork can goes on for a little while but we are still depending on the resources of a Big $$ corporation....

firefox is the only way for a free web....

[โ€“] jcg@halubilo.social 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Then they'd be alienating the open source community that makes a lot of contributions (though much of chromium is still essentially built internally). They also wouldn't be able to lock down the code that's already been released under the more permissive BSD license.

Now, a fork of Chromium is its own beast. Some searching shows that just to build it takes 30 minutes on a decent workstation. It's huge, which makes me think it's the kind of project that could only really be maintained by a large company. Not necessarily a Google sized company, but a large one nonetheless if you seriously want to remove the dependency on Google.

EDIT: turns out it's Chrome that takes that long to build, which includes things not in Chromium like Widevine, licensed codecs, telemetry, sync, that kind of thing.