Chromium has a CT policy in place, and the Google CT team and the Chromium team who make inclusion decisions are separate, so currently this is working well. There are a number of non-google logs currently included.
Believe it or not, Chromium/etc (the ones we are referring to here) are open source project with a lot of Google committers, not a Google project that accepts things or not depending on whims.
In fact, the project has a ton of non-google non-drive-by committers (250+ IIRC, it's been a while since i looked ).
Sorry, but what the FUD is this? Chromium has never done anything of the sort. It's developed completely in the open and has a huge number of non-Google contributors committing code every day.
What's wrong with using Chromium though? I understand most of the work being done on it is by Google, but do they control the direction of the project?
Interesting bit of history. Thanks for this article. I'm curious, though, how the fact that Chromium is open-source will change this dynamic, because the ethos of open source seems directly against the idea of Google abusing their control over Chromium.
Parts of the codebase are maintained by Intel, Nvidia, Microsoft and others. There have been times when Google engineers have had changes rejected by people from those companies.
You might be thinking of Android, which has a far less open governance...
Very interesting project. ungoogled-chromium seems to addressing many of the concerns that inhibit control and transparency. E.g Chromium even without a Google account cannot address those concerns.
Developed communally, as part of the Chromium project. Not as a vendor-neutral working group or anything of the sort yet, mind you. But there's no reason it wouldn't move to become that if any other vendor was actually interested in coordinating on it--they're not hiding their cards inside Google's walled garden or anything.
Does Google have veto power over what goes into Chromium?
I had always assumed the relationship between Chromium and Google was akin to the relationship between Webkit and Apple, or between any ASF-donated project and its corporate originator: a community-owned (and several-major-corporate-stakeholders sponsored) open-source project upstream, with a corporate closed-source "living patchset" project sitting downstream of it; where the corporate devs try to push as much as possible upstream, to keep the patchset they must maintain downstream as thin as possible; but where it isn't up to the corporate devs whether the upstream "steering committee" accepts the corporate work upstream.
But I guess this isn't true; per Wikipedia:
> However, in terms of governance, the Chromium projects are not independent entities; Google retains firm control of them.
Which is just bizarre to me, given the following sentence on that page:
> The Chromium browser codebase is widely used, so others have made important contributions, most notably Microsoft, Igalia, Yandex, Intel, Samsung, LG, Opera, Vivaldi Technologies, and Brave. Some employees of these companies also have @chromium.org email addresses.
You'd think these other companies wouldn't stand for Google having unilateral control over a project they're so dependent on! But I guess, as large corporations, they can always express their true concerns through more... corporate politick-y means.
There is probably some discussion around this on the chromium-dev or chromium-discuss lists in the chromium.org Google groups. I haven't checked though.
A bit offtopic, but: are all chromium & V8 team members Googlers? just wondering, chromium and V8 are both open source, but I've never head of any major contributors other than Google itself.
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