Good riddance. I hate Big$G creepily tracking all of my internet search history from Chromium by default unless I explicitly turned it off.
But its cute that people still think that Big companies contribute to Open Source because they want to "give back". Hell no ! It has been about reaping free, complex technical labour, monopolies (chrome, kubernetes) and marketing for hiring devs.
Now M$ loves open source? What a joke. Most developers still don't like it and the fresh ones almost don't need to pay much attention. Farewell, M$. Now it's time to make Google and Facebook to "loves privacy", in regrets.
The response of the Director of Engineering towards the slackware package maintainer comes off as very arrogant.
I guess this is the end of the open source project. Chromium was never truly open source, more like free source, but now it’s not even that. It’s just another proprietary software.
Percent-wise I don't think there is any other company that contributes as much to open source software, I do think it was a dick move from them but let's not conflate the things.
I was bitten too and I'll probably avoid their products & platforms in the future. What I see very positive from them is the act of contributing back. Perhaps they are maturing...
Nonetheless, you can be a SOB of a profit and world domination seeking corporation and embrace open source at the same time. Think Oracle or Google (and many others).
It's like this beast that does these benevolent things, but at some point it catches up to them and they shut something down after getting people kinda hooked. For example Picasa - massively popular - free and pretty amazing desktop photo management tool. It slowly morphed such that all of the users of it were just folded into a cloud offering: Drive.
Chrome and all of it's open source awesomeness, again, mostly used to fold people into the bigger profitable picture. So even though there are developers that work at Google creating protocols that help everyone, including non-Chrome browsers - that benevolence has a product manager paying that developer's time. At some stage it's not all free beer.
They're probably one of the best corporate citizens of the open source community.
Alternately, they're giving things away for free to discourage non-Google innovation and generally devalue the labor of other companies and developers.
It's a shame that a company which spearheaded free availability to open source code has sunken to the point of encouraging proprietary installers and adware laden applications.
This does raise a point - do we now have to assume that all those services that provide free hosting/access/service to open source projects will be strip-mining the work of the open source community to sell them back to us all? I almost feel stupid believing it was an altruistic move to contribute back to the shoulders of giants they were already standing on...
Being a non-profit doesn’t give them a pass on making bad products. Being open source doesn’t give a free pass on bad products. If they choose a unsustainable business model, where making profit ruins their product, then they created this problem themselves.
I run Chromium, it probably spies on me, but it doesn’t do it in my face, and it doesn’t pretend otherwise.
When I run Firefox, they say they care, but they shamelessly bundle that crapware. Makes me wonder if another day after another Firefox update they’ll add Pocket 2.0 without me knowing.
It’s the same issue I have with Brave as well, I cannot stand the BAT integration.
They built a ton of value, were unable to capitalize on it (just like early Docker), and when they tried to capture the value of the thing they built it pissed off the open source ecosystem (and all the profitable companies) built on top.
They should have thought about this a long, long time ago.
I feel for the smaller companies, but I feel for big companies that come in and plunder because of open license terms.
Exactly my thoughts when I read the article - a hugely successful company not contributing to an open source project which enabled them to succeed in the first place ...
But its cute that people still think that Big companies contribute to Open Source because they want to "give back". Hell no ! It has been about reaping free, complex technical labour, monopolies (chrome, kubernetes) and marketing for hiring devs.
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