Balder

They’re all desperate that so much venture capital is being poured on this, so whoever promises more gets more money, and whoever has more money can bankrupt the rival. There’s no need for an actual AGI to ever exist here to win the game.

If you all work harder we’ll be able to fire you FASTER and increase my bonus!

Fixed it for you

Ironically the world is full of people who like to think about solutions to problems. But those in power won’t put them to solve those because it’s not part of the political game.

Thanks for the clarification.

Ok, so I did some checking and Firefox uses a custom license from Mozilla, which says the open source code can be freely mixed with proprietary code, as long as you disclose and also distribute the open source files you’ re using.

This is much more permissive than some other open source licenses. LGPG, for example, only allows this mixing if you use the open source code as a library that needs to be separate from the main proprietary binary.

That said, Librewolf apparently licenses all its source code in the same Mozilla license, which means no issues here.

Nowadays that’s incorrect if you’re in the European Union.

What @bizarroland@fedia.io is saying is not correct, because it depends on the license. For example, GPL software requires that ALL the source code that uses some GPL code to be released as GPL too. That’s why some people avoid GPL at all costs.

Other licenses, such as LGPL allow you to link your proprietary code with open source parts and only release the code of the open source part (along with any modifications you did to it).

I’m pretty sure a $10 one time payment won’t pay for the costs of development that Firefox requires.

Open source only works when there are people motivated enough and skilled enough to maintain something for free or when the organization managing it has another source of income.

None of these small browsers can make significant changes to the original project. A browser nowadays is a super complex bloated thing that requires too much resources to maintain. If even M$ abandoned their engine to go with Chromium (because it was probably costing them a lot of resources to keep compatibility with the evolving standards, security fixes etc.) what hope is there for small companies? Arguably Apple’s Safari has significant differences compared to Chrome, but we’re talking about Apple…

People thinking this is a solution are gonna get disappointed eventually. For now, Firefox is the only alternative product that has been maintained for decades.

I feel like this sort of thing should be more modular. Maybe on Linux we could in theory have multiple packages that could have different implementations and the browser UI would just use the underlying packages with their specific extras on top.

That would also align well with the Unix philosophy of each component “doing one thing well” and composing small tools to achieve complex tasks.

Splitting things add a different level of complexity (public APIs, deprecations, different versions, etc.) but it would make the web much more free, since we could have different individuals maintaining different packages and no organization would have too much control over the web.

I believe this is possible because we have very complex stuff such as entire Desktop Environments on Linux that are made up of multiple packages and each package just do a well defined thing and build on top of each other to create a “whole” experience in the end.

This summarizes it well: https://www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-money/

That’s not the worst. It is burning billions for the companies with no signs of them ever becoming close to profitable.

And I’d have thought the potential customers segment are exactly the Mastodon users.