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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I share this view.

"Sorry this website only works in Chrome"

"Google Hangouts / Google Talk will no longer support XMPP / Jabber"

"Try our not-so-open source available mobile OS" We'll follow you across the web and in real life because our Open Source platforms are published as proprietary.

"Try our proprietary browser for which we release the code for but heavily modify before it gets to you"

At least Microsoft has open source projects that you get what they share published, no crazy surprises, telemetry aside for .NET tooling (which imho is seriously minuscule compared to what it could be).

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I have to agree, Google gives new meaning to "open source". Open source as "we share some source but the actual meat is in closed proprietary codebase that you cannot inspect". I still remember the AOSP maintainer (Google employee) leaving because he couldn't do his work properly because of Google's politics w.r.t. Android.

Or was that the open source that RMS warned us about?

Free as in freedom and not free beer indeed. I mean I don't mind some proprietary uses of Open Source (how else will you fund the project!) but there should be limits to how you do this. I prefer extra paid features / paid support. Google could of made Android a proper Linux distro and charged manufacturers for OS package releases / updates or something of the sort, something reasonable. I wish Android was more Linux like where I can install w/e I want without being forced anything specifically. Replace the UI completely as I so desire as well.

Android is really a good image of what happens when Google design something from top to bottom according to what they want. There's a tiny piece of it open-sourced, the bare minimum and everything else around is closed source. They made sure that the whole ecosystem is complicated and convoluted enough that you can't easily modify it for yourself.

We could have had a Linux distribution tailored for mobile, instead we get that mess that is Android.

To put it less crypticly, the AOSP maintainer left because AOSP was capable of running on exactly zero android devices, including Google's own flagship devices.

> Or was that the open source that RMS warned us about?

Exactly

And VS Code, which is actually not a free software when downloaded from the official website if I understand things correctly.

Here is the license: https://code.visualstudio.com/License/

And yes, VSCode from this website includes tracking.

Though they clearly advertise this as "Free. Open source.". Which seems wrong to me. In my opinion, it's based on open source code at best.

Really? You’re going to complain about an Electron app like VSCode? AMP is way worse, and Microsoft has made a lot of strides in OSS, for example by acquiring GitHub.

I was just replying to the last paragraph. I haven't said anything else and please be assured I'm not going to complain.

I'm not attacking Microsoft and I'm not endorsing google. I actually agree with the rest of the parent's comment and with amp being bad. I do think selling anything as open source when it's not in a subtle way is shady and I won't comment on which is worse, I'm not in a position to compare. And VScode being an Electron app isn't relevant to me.

I also won't comment on Microsoft buying github, I'm not a fortune teller. As far as I'm concerned, I chose not to host my stuff on github anyway from the begining, since the platform is not open source. I won't rely on any feature of gitlab that is not in the community edition for the same reasons. I which gitlab sold support and hosting instead of proprietary software.

>"Sorry this website only works in Chrome"

Because the Chrome team is consistently the fastest at supporting newly introduced standards.

A more accurate reading would be: "Sorry, this website only works in Chrome right now. Try Firefox in two weeks, and Edge and Safari in about six months".

Even though some people have changed their Firefox user agent and found that the web page still works under Firefox. Chrome isn't the only browser doing things to extend the web. Firefox and Mozilla work on new features too. Chrome didn't come up with WebAssembly, Mozilla developers did. Edge isn't as behind as it once was either, pretty sure they called it Edge for "Bleeding Edge" and you can see the source for their JavaScript Engine on GitHub.

>Chrome isn't the only browser doing things to extend the web. Firefox and Mozilla work on new features too.

I don't disagree at all. It's actually extremely respectable how much collaboration is involved in the process.

>Even though some people have changed their Firefox user agent and found that the web page still works under Firefox.

I'd blame site owners for that one.

>Edge isn't as behind as it once was either

Mixed thoughts. Edge is 100% better than IE used to be, but it still largely lags behind the other vendors.

> I'd blame site owners for that one.

I installed a Firefox plugin to support my YubiKey for two factor authentication. It worked fine for github, but Google login just locked me out saying Firefox doesn't support it.

So yeah, I blame the website owners, which means Google.

> Because the Chrome team is consistently the fastest at supporting newly introduced standards.

Yeah, that's an interesting way to see it when Google/Chrome dominates/finances the whole WHATWG web "standardization" process directly after "what Webkit is doing". Not saying there isn't bona fide work, but basically there are many ways to derail meaningful standardization efforts other than by not playing ball: by making it so fscking complicated and prohibitively expensive that nobody can't compete. HTML is over 25 years old. There should be no need to rush features all the time. If that's happening anyway (WHATWG's "living standard" nonsense), then something is seriously wrong with the scope and organization of WHATWG's work.

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