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Comment by luto | Hacker News Reader

I'd recommend Podlove instead, which is paid for by the European/German podcasting community instead of an advertising company: https://podlove.org/

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what do you mean, https://github.com/ad-aures/castopod states the license as AGPL which is just as FOSS as any other project to the likes or mastodon or peertube. how does it matter there is an advertising company paying for the project as long as the code is open for scrutiny and is a FOSS project?

the likes of amazon and amd and even adobe is funding blender so does that mean those projects are ruined by corporate money? https://fund.blender.org/

How do you feel about Google and Manifest v3 in Chromium?

Being open source isn't everything, it's also about predicting the future development trajectory.

Or we can let the enemy's own resources contribute to their demise. Let Google work on Chromium, but use the browsers that take the engine and do the things that are in our interests. Brave is not implementing v3.

is brave going to maintain a fork of chromium for eternity?

Eternity is a long time, but they have it been doing it for 5 years already.

Brave isn't implementing v3 immediately, but Chromium is their upstream and I haven't seen them claim they will be able to resist indefinitely. They have their own non-extension adblocker for which v3/no-v3 is irrelevant.

https://twitter.com/brave/status/1574822799700541446

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1534893414579249152

GPs tweet is from a few days ago, the one you linked is from June and was speculation about what Google will do.

Eich later in the thread you linked said this: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1534905779630661633

The tweet you're referring to in the GP simply says "Brave will support Manifest V2 extensions such as uBlock Origin even after Chrome stops doing so". Which would be true statement even if that support only lasts for a day after Chrome stops supporting V2. That is to say, this does not look like a guarantee of indefinite support by any means, but rather extended support (for an undetermined amount of time).

Instead of getting attached to semantics, how about looking at it from the perspective of business and economics?

If your business depends on the idea that Big Tech can not track you, you need to do whatever it takes to keep it a reality. The cost of supporting a fork of Chromium might be too much when you are starting out, but when you are already a company of 100+ employees and 60M+ MAU, it becomes acceptable.

So, yes, if I had to guess with the information currently available, I'd say that Brave will keep away from v2 as long as it possible and as long ad the user base shows that this is what they want from their browser.

But Brave does, as mentioned before, have their own built-in adblocker (based in part on uBlock Origin), which doesn't depend on extension features. uBlock Origin does still have some additional functionality that the built-in "Shields" don't, but mostly it's not dissimilar. So, given that an ad-blocking experience on Brave doesn't depend on extensions entirely in the first place, I would think that would be a business/econ reason why they may not want to divert lots of resources into maintaining v2.

(Not sure where 'semantics' came from in the first place here.)

To be fair, I think that what we are seeing happening to Chromium has little to do with it being open source and more with the fact that it has essentially become the de facto web browser. If google released an entirely rewritten and closed-source version of Chrome tomorrow, 95% of the people would not bat an eye and keep using it.

Corporations contributing to FOSS have agenda, but so have individuals. Being open source isn’t everything, but it is a damn good start.

So GP would be justified in preferring the FOSS solution if it meets their technical requirements vs the commercial OSS solution because at one point they could be the only option and abuse that network effect / monopoly.

My point was it's who is developing the software because it takes effort for another maintainer to step up and it doesn't always happen. Also if a commercial company digs a big enough moat with the open source product they could abuse it, so do you trust them now?

Similar to Google abusing Chromium, Castopod could one day be in that position if you don't support FOSS alternatives today. That would be the mindset to put yourself in.

That being said, I don't think it matters as much as the browser space, but I'm not in the podcast community. I could see though that it could potentially be very costly to have a monopoly for podcast hosting, but currently that's Spotify right?

Note: I have no preference here, just assuming what motivates GP's preference.

I think the first paragraph captures the core of the issue: which solution best meets their requirements. I don’t have a podcast (yet!), but it seems like the two projects don’t have the exact same feature set.

Isn’t it the beauty of open source that you and I are able to take that project and make it “better”? That we are able to maintain it with our time and energy?

The mindset of “FOSS or nothing” (FOSS in the sense of “not supported by corporate interests”) is noble but also a little bit naive. Nothing is free, and even the greatest FOSS projects rely on corporate and individual contributions (monetary or otherwise). I think that wholesale dismissing an (F)OSS product because it is backed by a commercial company is just showing them that the alternative (closed source software) is the more sensible choice.

Chrome-imium did not become the default because it was open-source and no other better “FOSS” alternatives were available, it did because it has relentlessly been pushed to users on the single most visited webpage in the world for years. If you and I did not use Chrome (which we probably both don’t, I’ll allow to infer from your stance), Chrome would still be the de facto browser today. Is this better than another “strictly” FOSS browser being the de facto default? No. Is it better than a closed source browser (Netscape or IE) being the de facto browser? Definitely, at least we could/can fork it.

>Castopod could one day be in that position if you don't support FOSS alternatives today. That would be the mindset to put yourself in.

they can't turn an AGPL license code into proprietary one. Open source and FOSS are similar but ideologically different beasts. One gives the downstream developer to decide the license of their work, including the ability of allowing them to turn it into proprietary code while FOSS forces all code to be foss and never proprietary

>Similar to Google abusing Chromium

chromium is under BSD while this is under AGPL. there is a world of difference between these two licenses. One allows proprietary forks while another forbids it.

You have idiosyncratic definitions. BSD licenses are FOSS licenses. Open Source is a proper subset of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software).

What is an example of something which is Free but not Open Source?

> Open Source is a proper subset of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software).

Other way around.

You all are confusing Free Software with FOSS.

FOSS is "Open Source" and "Free Software", where "and" means union, not intersection.

Obviously OSS cannot be a superset (more than) FOSS.

Huh, I always took it to mean intersection, but it does make more sense the other way around!

Chromium is under a BSD license, explicitly allowing Google to build a proprietary product on top that siphoning all the users' data to make money off of it and influence where the http world goes.

The product here is under a Copyleft license. Any derivative is at the service of humanity at large, today and tomorrow. It is much harder to exploit people this way.

Open Source has never served the users, it has always been about the editors. A Copyleft license is a good way just like a public institution at the helm is.

also the way google dumps code is also a factor, is it going to be repo where we can keep track of the whole development process, or just a code dump every once in a while.

Google could build a proprietary service on top of an AGPL Chromium. All they would have to do is either not accept external contributions (they already sponsor most if not all of the development anyway) or require contributions to sign a CLA to give them the copyright to it (they already require you to sign that anyway)

AGPL explicitly prevents this: any service provided with AGPL software must be AGPL. That's the whole point of the license.

The scenario the GP outlines is one where Google is the sole licensor of Chromium. They could then build proprietary (or whatever!) versions of that however they liked, since they'd have copyright to the whole thing.

If Chromium were AGPL they couldn't build a proprietary service. They couldn't even build a service that earns them money but can't be copy pasted as-is by anyone else such that it would earn money to someone else. That's the whole point. If one benefits, everyone benefits

The point is that if you have the copyright to a project and you release it as AGPL, it has absolutely no affect on what you can do with it. You can also relicense it to others and tell them they don't have to follow AGPL either.

So if Chromium were AGPL, Google could do anything they felt like doing with it, just like now. Google just wouldn't be able to keep anybody else from doing stuff with it for versions that they released under AGPL, as long as those people didn't violate it.

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