The amount of roadblocks Google is putting up for GrapheneOS is just ridiculous. None of their decisions make any sense, from the delayed source patches upstream, to the embargos, attestation issues, etc. Google simply regrets android being open source.
I hope people remember this when advocating for chromium. Just because it is open source doesn't mean they don't control it. We need to start the long process of hard forking now or turn to alternatives like Firefox as a new foundation.
> Google simply regrets android being open source.
Android wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't open source. With all the work from outside Google. The same is true chrome.
But they won't learn that on their own. They are breaking the deals. So we move. We force their hand
I think they're fully aware of this. They just don't care, because the goal of "get market share super high" has been reached, so now they have no need for it to continue being open.
I don't disagree about what that means we should do; I just don't think we should assume they're being naive here. It's like writing a program to play chess; you should select your move assuming the opponent is smart and will make the optimal counterplay rather than assuming weakness, and then if they end up being less smart than that, you're still in a good place.
Every time the HN crowd rediscovers that companies make business strategy choices rather than immutable principled philosophical decisions, the angst and dismay are really something.
When Android launched, making it open source (ish) was the right competitive decision. It got phone makers and carriers on board and accelerated the ecosystem’s development. Today it being open source (kinda) is a met negative for Google. So, yeah, they’re changing that.
Well-run companies aren’t zealots. They adapt to changing conditions. If a company’s actions happen to align with your personal preferences today, it doesn’t mean you’ve found a lifelong philosophical soulmate. Ditto if a company’s actions run counter to what you want today. Either can and will change, and there’s nothing morally concerning either way.
Not every business owner is a profit obsessed psycho. Most multinational CEOs are but you can find good people at every level. The "only exist to make money" thing starts when you let in shareholders, but a company can stay ethical as long as they put up strong barriers before taking outside investment.
A lot of people get the wrong impression from reading Dodge Brothers and think companies are legally required to put profit first. What really happened is Friedman and Reagan planted the idea of shareholder supremacy, convinced schools to teach it and now generations of business majors think it's a sacred truth they have to enforce anywhere they go. Never let a MBA take over.
It’s not about the moral or ethical qualities of the CEO. It’s about the structural incentives of the organization as a whole. This is even more true in a larger organization, where any one individual has relatively little effect on the behavior of the organization as a whole.
Companies that don’t do a good job of making profits tend to go away, thus there exists natural selective pressure to put profits ahead of other concerns. Note that none of the above has anything at all to do with morals or ethics.
This is why a healthy, society-aligned regulatory regime is impoetant, to set incentives. If you make more money being decent than you would being abusive, companies will adapt. They are more like corals than they are like people.
Being "a profit obsessed psycho" might help some people rise to positions of power, but I think the stronger point is that a corporation is an emergent superorganism with its own identity above the individual human level, without a psychology, that operates on its own principles of self preservation based on the incentives of the environment it operates in and that individual choices result in a gestalt of behaviors that no one person really has full control over even though they are part of it and what they do does affect the overall outcome, like a cell and organs making up an animal.
And if I asked people to name companies which retain a good public perception of being not entirely profit driven, the ones that would most likely come to mind are ones like Costco, where there's someone who is setting the tone and not leaving it to the committee of free market/investors to decide the fate of the company. I wonder if there are parallels here to other similar economic models, hmm...
companies like Costco, Patagonia etc are rare why ? because deliberate actions & care have been taken to go against the grain of what a company should do.
just like the USA at it's founding - deliberate actions were taken etc that were counter to the normal. & going against the wind takes a lot of energy.
at a certain point in time - you run out of energy or you've to keep keep reinvesting to not run out otherwise barbarians are knocking down at the gate.
The problem with “profit driven” is that it reduces motives to a lowest common denominator. Short term profit? Long term profit? Brand value that can be leveraged later?
Costco, specifically, I have a good story about. Jim Sinegal spoke at my MBA program, and he talked about when they were starting and the challenge was a value prop of “buy bulk, lower cost” contrasted with bulk actually being more expensive than small quantities, therefore needing to target higher incomes.
Part of the solution: wider parking spaces. Make people feel like their expensive cars are safer, it’s easier to get in and out of the car (especially for older people, who have more wealth), and differentiate from typical stores.
Now, you tell me: would you be just as happy with cramped parking spaces because the larger ones are profit-driven? Does motive even matter here?
Costco has a policy to cap margins at 14% or something to that order. And it's disciplined enough that it's broken off with major brands that tried to dispute this.
It's profit driven in its own way, but against the grain of modern corporate strategy.
Pushing back on companies breaking social norms you think are important is one way to make the world how you wish it to be. The point is to make it clear that doing immoral things will affect their finances.
Setting on "companies exist for the sole reason to make money" as the only motivating factor just makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Companies are not sentient beings in themselves: they are made up of human beings with wills. If the human being(s) make moral choices the result will be companies that do moral actions.
> companies exist for the sole reason to make money - not to make the world better - that's a side effect.
That is one interpretation on the purpose of companies (and a relatively recent one):
* “Profits are to business as breathing is to life. Breathing is essential to life, but is not the purpose for living. Similarly, profits are essential for the existence of the corporation, but they are not the reason for its existence.” ― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_A._O%27Reilly_III
* “On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy...your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.”[72] — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Welch#Politics
Or going back a few decades:
> In 1949 General Foods’ president Clarence Francis told Congress that he had a “three-way responsibility to the American consumer, to our associates in this business, and to the 68,000 [stockholders in General Foods]. We . . . would serve (the company’s) interests badly by shifting the fruits of the enterprise too heavily toward any one of those groups.” Two years later, the president of Standard Oil of New Jersey claimed that managers needed “to conduct the affairs of the enterprise in such a way as to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly interested groups—stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.” So widespread were such views that, in 1959, one writer in the Harvard Business Review complained that it was no longer “fashionable for the corporation to take gleeful pride in making money.” Instead, he complained, it was typical “for the corporation to show that it is a great innovator; more specifically, a great public benefactor; and, very particularly, that it exists ‘to serve the public’.”
> American corporate law has long drawn a bright line between for-profit and non-profit corporations. In recent years, hybrid or social enterprises have increasingly put this bright-line distinction to the test. This Article asks what we can learn about the purpose of the American business corporation by examining its history and development in the United States in its formative period from roughly 1780-1860. This brief history of corporate purpose suggests that the duty to maximize profits in the for-profit corporation is a relatively recent development. Historically, the American business corporation grew out of an earlier form of corporation that was neither for-profit nor nonprofit in today’s parlance but rather, served a multitude of municipal, religious, charitable, educational, and eventually business purposes in early nineteenth-century New England. The purposes of early American business corporations—rather than maximization of profit to private shareholders— were often overtly public, involving development of local transportation, finance, and other much-needed economic infrastructure. With the rise of factory-based manufacturing, railroads, and other capital-intensive industries in the middle decades of the nineteenth century and the advent of general incorporation statutes, the purpose of the American business corporation shifted fundamentally from public to private. By 1860, the stage was set for the modern firm.
They absolutely are zealots; the zealotry focuses on profit.
Why these types of stories are so jarring to some is that they serve as a reminder that your pet technology or project will get fed into the wood chipper if enough bloodless “Ex-Bain, Ex-Mercer, I Love LinkedIn” types tell the ceo it’s a profitable idea. And you and I are just as expendable.
Just because you know there's a chance of being punched in the face, doesn't mean it still isn't a bit painful actually being punched in the face. Even if you brace for it.
But yes, that's the beauty of open source. The ability to take your ball home if and when the maintainer breaks the social contract. It's a contingency plan for this exact scenario.
>and there’s nothing morally concerning either way.
There's many moral concerns. Whether or not the company cares does not expel the concerns itself.
I think this is a different situation than what you're describing. It's one thing when a company acts in their own interests, their communications are consistent with that, you observe that, and align with them (or don't).
It's another when they say they're going to do one thing, you align with them, and then they do another later. That's generally frowned upon morally because it's considered to be deceptive/untruthful.
It's not surprising, but that doesn't mean people should be ok with it, especially when other businesses get by fine making more ethical business choices, or at least avoid outright lying for their own benefit.
Tbh I don't think fighting open source is Google's best play. I think it is in their own best interest to keep it fully open. It is free labor by those who are most passionate. It gives strong signals at what people want, this direction you develop. It strengthens security as more people try to test it. It means people work on forks rather than alternatives. All this is true even with a monopolistic market share.
So yes, I do think they are being naïve. The stance is myopic. It is only a good move in the short term, and barely even that. It is under the false belief that we operate in a zero sum game.
Most successful open source projects have devs being paid by big corporations, including Linux itself, which only really took off in the 2000's when companies like IBM started caring.
Also in the last century most software was commercial, and thanks to business friendly licenses we are back to demos, PD, Shareware and co, only with new names for a younger generation.
I vividly remember my father coming home from Borders Books & Music one fateful day in 1998 with a boxed copy of Red Hat Linux 5.1. (This was the distro that eventually became Fedora, not RHEL). It was the first Linux distro I’d ever used, but my dad also had some older SuSE and Slackware CDs and floppies in his archives as well. I’m confident Red Hat has always paid their employees, and I’m confident SuSE GmbH did as well.
Famously IBM did eventually buy Red Hat, but not for another 20 years. The fact is, Linux was alive and well and growing as far back as the late 1990s, and devs were getting paid. You could literally buy CDs in a box of an installable Linux distribution at an ordinary retail chain bookstore in 1998.
And for whatever it’s worth, the reason Linux took off the way it did when it did was because the Dot Com Bubble helped pump smaller companies like Red Hat or SuSE up, and they were certainly selling floppies and pressed CDs at a margin like Shareware as well, since most people didn’t have the time or hardware to download and burn ISOs until the early/mid-2000s when P2P music took over the world.
I’ve seen many open source contributors deflated because they wanted to share their code/solutions with other individuals and the world to learn from only to have their work sold as a service by a big cloud vendor without seeing something back for it. Or maybe even getting more work back to support the cloud vendor for free.
So I’m not surprised at all that licenses that allow commercial use up to a point and above that require seperate license or contributions back. It is still open source in a lot of ways. Can still be part of other open source distributions that themselves make no profit etc. And only companies that are more than able to pay must pay something.
It's a good idea if it actually works. Are enough commercial users paying up so that these projects get some serious funding?
If companies avoid using software governed by such licenses then the overall impact is negative in my opinion, because it will lead to competing and diverging clean room clones that just split the community and the ecosystem.
which only really took off in the 2000's when companies like IBM started caring.
Correlation is not causation.
What I lived through, was Linux taking off like a juggernaut, and IBM embracing it as a result. Large corps came along for the ride, they didn't drive it and at best paid for some gas.
DEVs being paid is simply what it is. The entire scsi/sata stack was originally re-authored by 3ware for example.
Why?
To sell stuff, and the guy was an advocate too.
It's always been this way, under the great wonder of the GPL, blessed be it.
It was so relevant that even Wikipedia discusses this, we were using Solaris, HP-UX and Aix for actual production deployments. Linux was our MP3 server.
Meanwhile every startup in SV was using Linux, Facebook was using Linux, Google, and everyone in between. This was early 2000. It had immense momentum without big boys like IBM coming in (and IBM was massive compared to Google or Facebook of that day).
Yes, yet it was. There were the BSDs, some more popular than others. A lot of the time, especially back in the earlier days, stuff was more regional.
There certainly were mailing lists, usenet, forums, all of an all-encompasing scope. But there were also very local user groups, and pockets of wildly more and less usage depending upon region. The Internet was young, and many made decisions predicated upon what they saw around them.
The best way to be sure you had support, was a local healthy community of hackers around.
There are several 'early 2000s' after the .com crash. Linux growth was phenomenal, and as tends to happen with growth, starts with smaller market share.
There is no conflict in "linux was growing without the big boys' and 'it started with small market share'.
And yes, you can find exceptions to the rule, although regardless, do you see me saying "exclusively"? What does someone using Solaris, have to do with Linux only growing due to external help?
Google learned that it's exactly not in in their best interest when they lost their court case against Epic a few years ago which is why they are shifting focus away from open source and moving towards Apple's walled garden approach. If they had locked down their platform similarly as Apple did, Epic would probably have lost it's case for similar reasons.
Granted, we know Android would not be where it is today without open source contributions.
> Granted, we know Android would not be where it is today without open source contributions.
But the parts of Android that are majority outside developed is still available as the Linux kernel. I have my doubts that the uniquely Android bits of the userland and system services have many outside contributions.
Its still crazy to me that a judge effectively said "yes you're a monopoly, but it's too hard to break you up so we won't bother"... I'm being glib, but only slightly.
It isn’t, and nobody said it is. The ruling in question did not find that Google had a mobile OS monopoly. It found that they had monopolies in both the ad server and ad exchange markets, and was using them to reinforce each other in an anticompetitive way.
So why would they breakup Android away from Google (essentially killing the product as a whole due to lack of funding from Play) instead of separating the Ad business?
Wow, Apple really made the right business choice only catering to people who don't care about any of this. Google set different expectations, and it already bit them with Epic.
Hard forking doesn't solve the problem of closed source.
If the goal of a hard fork is "the community will invest equal resources that Google does today" then you wildly underestimate how many engineers work on Chrome.
Not denying than many engineers work on Chrome just wondering how many of them work on Chrome features that are anti pattern, reducing privacy, improving information collection or tracking or against users interest in broad.
You can just look at the commit stream and see for yourself. Despite community pearl-clutching, 99% of the work is just good old fashioned software engineering.
The bigger problem is wasting developer effort contributing to Google's platform. The real secret behind Android being "open" (sorta) is that while almost nobody runs AOSP, Google has tricked a bunch of fools into working on Android forks instead of building a real competitor.
Playing at their table is a losing game, the house always wins.
The developer effort is not wasted because it's open source. Anyone can fork it at any time. None of it can be thrown away from humanity, wasting it.
The reason why no one runs AOSP is because the phone market rewards differentiation. Each phone manufacture wants to build their own experience and building on top of AOSP is how they do so.
Is it really a losing game? Building a new OS from scratch is not worth it. Why throw away an entire app catalog for your device? Consumers want access to existing app catalogs when buying a phone. If anything is a losing game it's building a new mobile operating system over forking Android as a base.
> The reason why no one runs AOSP is because the phone market rewards differentiation.
This is what empire-building middle managers say to rationalize their boondoggles, but in actual fact most customers can't even tell the difference between two different vendors' Android skins, definitely can't tell the difference before they buy one, and the way they actually differentiate phones is on real hardware differences that show up in the specs like the camera or performance.
The hardware company's idiosyncratic fork of the software is irrelevant at best and annoyingly irregular in the common case.
> the way they actually differentiate phones is on real hardware differences that show up in the specs
You forgot about one thing they care about above all others — cost.
And the easiest way to keep costs down is through "alternative revenue streams", which involve your own tracking, your own app bundling deals and your own App Store, which you're pushing on users constantly. And if you do that, you may as well get the branding win from doing the custom skin too.
That's the middle manager's rationalization again, but meanwhile nobody actually uses their OEM-specific app store and the two dollars they made from the two percent of customers who accidentally bought an app using their store is less than the amount of money and goodwill they lose to pissing people off.
They were used quite a lot at the time, outside of the usual Samsung/HTC, a lot of OEM didn't bother to make their own full app suite, nowadays it's necessary though
> The developer effort is not wasted because it's open source. Anyone can fork it at any time
Assuming you can get a hardware vendor to support your fork.
Android has always been a weird blend of proprietary BSPs wedged together with the core AOSP project - we used to have an entire team whose full-time job was merging the Qualcomm BSP into our AOSP fork. At the time you didn't even get access to that BSP without inking a deal with QCOM...
If you are not working to destroy Android, you are supporting it. You might feel happy about your custom ROM nonsense and how it protects your privacy, but that just means you're selfish, because nearly everyone will still be trapped on Google's version.
Technologists need to aggressively reject solutions which don't spread freedom to ordinary users as well.
It wasn't worth it, but it's 2026, not 1991, when Linus first released Linux. AI can shit out a new OS, given enough tokens, and a VM/compatibility layer would let you run Android apps until native ports became available. The question is why would you want to do that? Computers are vastly more capable than they were when the Linux kernel was originally designed, and the needs of programs and their permissions have changed as well. https://xkcd.com/1200/ While throwing away all the learnings and starting from scratch are usually not justified, sometimes it is the right choice, if enough things have changed. Should GPS location, fine grained or coarse, and related permissions, be a part of the OS kernel or a user space daemon that other processes can query or some other thing? That wasn't a question when Linux was created but should be a core consideration for a replacement system that was created today, along with a myriad of other modern day questions that didn't exist back then. I don't think it's a loosing game, and I don't have the resources to make one myself, but I do think that the world's materially changed enough to justify it.
It wasn't worth it, but it's 2026, not 1991, when Linus first released Linux. AI can shit out a new OS, given enough tokens, and a VM/compatibility layer would let you run Android apps until native ports became available. The question is why would you want to do that? Computers are vastly more capable than they were when the Linux kernel was originally designed, and the needs of programs and their permissions have changed as well. https://xkcd.com/1200/ While throwing away all the learnings and starting from scratch are usually not justified, sometimes it is the right choice, if enough things have changed. Should GPS location, fine grained or coarse, and related permissions, be a part of the OS kernel or a user space daemon that other processes can query or some other thing? That wasn't a question when Linux was created but should be a core consideration for a replacement system that was created today, along with a myriad of other modern day questions that didn't exist back then. I don't think it's a loosing game, and I don't have the resources to make one myself, but I do think that the world's materially changed enough to justify building a new one from scratch.
AI generating code changes the game significantly, though there are issues with that. A new OS would have taken several millions and multiple teams, but can now be done for far less. The problem is hardware to run it on. Who'd pay $2,000 for a shittier phone with less features when a $500 used one with GrapheneOS is right there? So the market, (in)efficiently, hasn't come up with a new phone OS. Not because it isn't warranted, but because the free market isn't a perfect system.
What proprietary AI running on big corp servers was 6 months ago is now runnable on owned bare metal compute, and there's no reason to believe this trajectory won't continue for the foreseeable future.
Neither Wine nor Proton run on Windows. Building Android emulators for Linux: Worth your time. Building Android knockoffs which claim to remove the Google from Google's operating system? Foolishness.
Valve is working on supporting apks for their new VR operating system. If this goes anything like Proton then I'm hopeful for the future of Android without Google.
But the open source project wouldn’t need to invest as much as Google does. There are all kinds of features and things they are working on that the general public really does not care about.
> But the open source project wouldn’t need to invest as much as Google does.
Not at first. Yet over time the work increases as one must differ more and more from Chrome. I believe that's why so many forks are giving up on Manifest V2.
Forks are giving up on mv2 because it's not as important as the people online say it is. If mv2 was what would cause a browser to gain market share they would keep maintaining it, but if the market is not rewarding browsers with mv2 then it does not make sense to maintain.
Seriously. The average person in real life has no idea what MV2 or MV3 is. And despite what people here would have you believe uBlock Origin Lite works nearly as good as uBO and is generally indistinguishable from its MV2 counterpart. A casual user wold not be able to tell the difference, nor do they care.
Indistinguishable because ad blocking still works at the visible end of the spectrum.
Under the hood, what the MV2 uBlock can do and Lite can't is at the least stripping tracking parameters from links and block 3rd party trackers that are cloaked in a subdomain of the originating site.
Yep. Google has been incredibly aggressive in promoting Chrome over the years, including practices similar to those Microsoft gets lampooned for doing the same with Edge.
The thing is that most of this is invisible to people who already live within Google’s bubble which is probably why they don’t get called out for it. The promotion is visible mostly to those of us who don’t, and it gets irritating.
This is complete nonsense, it's a post hoc copium where you're trying to dishonestly rewrite history from your personal hatered.
Chrome was better than competition pretty much all its lifetime and there's plenty of historic articles to prove it, no matter how much your emotions refuse to accept the history.
The only personal insult to everyone here is such blatant lying and rewriting of history. And it's telling about the bottom barrel culture of the internet that you're angrier about having someone called out as a liar they are instead of actual lies.
We were there and we didn't install Chrome via some made up toolbar installer, but because it was significantly better than what Mozilla and Internet Explorer offered.
I am plenty calm, I do not know what gives you the impression I am angry. You, however, absolutely need to ease off the gas. You can’t talk to people like this here. You are being needlessly hostile and taking swipes at people. Treat people with respect or just don’t bother commenting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>wildly underestimate how many engineers work on Chrome.
It is completely insane how many people work on Chrome. It seems like it is time to deprecate web browsers and do something different. Like you get a frame-buffer to draw on with something like a wasm vm. Web pages get replaced by programs (which they essentially are anyway). Get rid of 99.9% of the cruft that has accumulated over the decades in browsers. If you want to have some of that cruft, that is a library you have to send.
Or go the other way and make web pages not programs at all, like they originally were. Unfortunately, just communicating information isn't cool, doesn't monetize, and certainly doesn't get clicks.
The biggest mistake the web ever made was leaving it up to to the website to choose how content renders.
It should be the users choice how their browser renders, it's their damn browser. Instead, browsers are built to follow standards that mostly favor the developers preferences above those of the person who actually own the device rendering it.
If a web browser allows images, then the website always has full control over how content renders. It's the default. HTML and related standards are trying to persuade developers to cede some of that control in the name of accessibility, user choice, searchability, device compatibility etc. that all-image websites lack. But this can only succeed if the developers still can do everything they want to. If they can't, then they'll fall back to images and everyone loses.
A lot of websites back in the 90s were just made up of images that were clickable using image maps. It was not a fun time.
I get what the parent comment is saying, though, and it's why I use Gemini (the protocol[0], not the AI). It doesn't align with corporate interests, but for now I consider that a good thing.
Users want an app platform that 1) works on every device, 2) is 1-click (no app installation / management, click a link and go), and 3) has advanced capabilities which let them easily do the task at hand.
Think "an interactive visualisation for choosing a seat when buying a concert ticket." That's not a "traditional" webpage, should work on whatever device the user is currently on (so native is unsuitable), and shouldn't require the user to install anything.
People clearly want web pages to be exactly this; we're on iteration #3 of the idea now. Iterations 1 and 2 were Java Applets and Flash, not necessarily in that order, and they were massively popular despite their shortcomings. Clearly, if we somehow deprecated the web as it is now (which is an utterly ridiculous idea, which makes me really curious what comments like yours are exactly trying to achieve here), as long as we keep it an open standard, users will choose browsers which offer this capability in some form. We should appreciate that the current iteration is an open standard which anybody is free to implement, instead of some proprietary blob that you need to license from Oracle or Adobe.
So do hackers. A big chunk of the open standards revolve around sandboxing malicious code, and given the amount of tracking happening anyway, fail at it.
This kills accessibility. You wouldn't even be able to select text unless the page implemented that feature itself. Screen readers would have nothing to work with. No high-contrast mode, no translation, no changing the font size, no reader mode........
Unfortunately none of the things you listed are what page vendors want you to have. They'd very much prefer you didn't. On the web, they're just too hard to prevent, so most don't bother.
I think that must be false. Serving the page as a static image was possible from the early days of the web, but vendors (mostly!) moved away from that as features like web fonts became available. I guess Flash was the big remaining exception. And remember Java applets? But even now as rendering to a canvas is possible, enabling animation and interactivity without necessarily including accessibility, websites are mostly not doing that. Accessibility is good for business. And sometimes it's legally required.
Software accessibility is bad for business - that's why it has to be legally mandated. There's no firm difference between "accessible", particularly to screen readers, and "amenable to end-user automation", and the latter is anathema to businesses.
As for the styling and fonts - it's all a bunch of low-key trade-offs here. The businesses want to exercise total control over the end-user experience, for sales/marketing and branding reasons. At the same time, going off the beaten path quickly makes development costs skyrocket.
Flash was a good choice back when all visitors were using a PC and there were like 3 different screen resolutions to choose from. Once laptops gained popularity, this started to shift, then pre-iPhone mobile briefly became consideration, and Flash stopped being sufficient; then iPhone came out, killed Flash, and started an era where every visitor has a different screen than the previous one. "Responsible web" became the cheapest option, and you can see its evolution as a trajectory towards giving more and more control over experience to developers, and less and less to the users.
I'm fine with it being legally enforced. The point is, web site owners mostly wouldn't move to "a frame-buffer to draw on with something like a wasm vm".
> Like you get a frame-buffer to draw on with something like a wasm vm. Web pages get replaced by programs (which they essentially are anyway).
The biggest thing standing in the way of this is actually Apple, since they don't allow competing browser engines or equivalent so you can't make something like this for iOS whatsoever.
The premise is that you want to make something that competes with Safari, e.g. you want to provide a graphics API to third party developers.
Doing that in Safari doesn't work twice. First, if Safari doesn't already expose whatever GPU primitives you need to do things efficiently, you can't get them. And second, your API implementation (which is likely to be large) would then have to be distributed by anyone using it instead of being part of the browser they use for all sites, creating a >100MB dependency for a <50kB web page.
To some extent I would argue that Linux is a spiritual fork of Minix and Unix.
But I think it’s also worth pointing out that these were in vastly different times where a single person or a small group of people could maintain an OS. An OS or browser is vastly more complex now.
It was a bit challenging long before that. I ran webhosting on FreeBSD in the early 2000s - remember finding a tool you needed and hoping it was in ports?
The point which i didnt not mention in my original question is that merging from the fork is a pain, which is why its just easier to jump onto and continuing development on the fork if it gains traction.
The amount of people that to this day still default to OpenOffice and have either never heard of LibreOffice or think it's the same as OpenOffice is crazy making though.
Difficulties maintaining a sufficient number of contributors to keep the project viable have persisted for several years. In January 2015, the project reported a lack of active developers and code contributions.[49] There have been continual problems providing timely fixes to security vulnerabilities since 2015.[50][51][52][53] In September 2016, OpenOffice's project management committee chair Dennis Hamilton began a discussion of possibly discontinuing the project, after the Apache board had put them on monthly reporting due to the project's ongoing problems handling security issues.[54][55][56]
Sounds like AOO is effectively dead, so this example is a fail to my challenge.
OpenSearch & ElasticSearch both seem alive, as well as OC & NC.
AOO became a thing after LibreOffice essentially won.
Before that it was OpenOffice.org owned by oracle, forked into LibreOffice in 2010, with LibreOffice getting significant traction and Oracle throwing in the towel and donating OO to Apache Foundation in 2011.
OsmAnd does have live navigation as far as I understand it (turn-by-turn directions), but no live traffic status, because for that you a lot of drivers willing to surrender their location/sensor data. Anything "live" cannot be privacy respecting. I never found live traffic information particularly worthwhile to be honest.
Maybe it's time to give up privacy absolutism and add strictly opt in live data features.
That reminds me, place reviews using ATProto. Kinda surprised that no map client jumped on that when it's the exact thing you need to replace a centralized service. A lot of people use Google Maps to find businesses more than directions.
Because of their enshitification we do have alternatives that were developed.
At this point the their only services I'm using are Maps, Translate and Keep Notes and it is mostly due to lazyiness as all of those already have alternatives.
Edit: forgot about YouTube, which is ironic, because that one is a toughest one because the value comes from creators, but I'm doing my part and using GrayJay[1] so I can follow them if they switch their platform.
funny, somehow we managed to have these things before chrome became basically two orders of magnitudes exploded. are you seriously defending the size of chrome as rational? we are talking verbosity to the levels that even claude would be jealous of
Google started making proprietary APIs for their Pixel on their non-open version of Android. Even if they stopped contributing to the open Android, what ladder did they pull up? The open Android is still there.
> or turn to alternatives like Firefox as a new foundation.
With the way Firefox is heading, that might not be the best idea. Nowadays Mozilla seem more focused on riding the AI-hype wave than actually making an excellent browser people want to actually use.
Is Firefox or Mozilla perfect? Heck no. But we're not comparing Mozilla against pre-IBM Red Hat or Ben & Jerry's or whatever your concept of the ideal corporate citizen is. We're comparing Mozilla against Google. That's a very low bar that Mozilla clears with ease, especially if you're criteria includes shoving AI down your throat.
Mozilla definitely wastes a bunch of money building features I don’t want. But underneath it all, Firefox is still an excellent web browser. You just occasionally have to disable “pocket” or “gadgets” or something.
Google is not the same company Mozilla partnered with decades ago. You can listen to retrospectives from Mozilla engineers, and you sense a desire to bite the corrupted hand that feeds.
However, for Mozilla to be the bold, it needs funding diversity, and that isn't going to come from a browser alone.
I have not agreed with everything Mozilla has thrown against the wall, but I sincerely hope something sticks. We need it to.
It is sad to see Firefox riding various hype trains over the years, but I can't really blame them. Miss the wrong train, and you fall behind and may not be able to catch up. Miss the train to nowhere, and you are only wasting resources.
As for the excellent browser that people want, that raises the question of what people want. There are likely as many answers as people.
There is a weird standard Mozilla is held to that doesn't exist even for other privacy-minded companies.
There is also a layer of hypocrisy when people beg for Mozilla to generate greater revenue diversity, but then an immediate scoff whenever they try anything unrelated to Firefox -- where there is no money beyond search deals since Mozilla can't go down the Brave crypto route.
reply