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...
Google is the dictator of what gets accepted into Chromium and what does not. That's how open source development works -- even if the code is available to everyone, its maintainers control its future.
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.
You are under the mistaken assumption that Google maintains absolute power over the Chromium codebase.
It is very permissively licensed, and Microsoft’s Edge is so successful and Microsoft is contributing a ton upstream. In a few years time they will have de-facto equal say over where the codebase goes. If Google disagrees too much, we will in fact see a fork.
The governance of Chromium is internal to Alphabet. Chromium is developed with Google Chrome in mind. The Chromium community consists of people working on things in the interests of Alphabet.
There’s no consensus process for including stakeholders. Forking is the only option for making changes not to Alphabet’s liking.
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.
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.
Chromium is actually a far more open project than most people imagine.
As well as being open source, it also accepts outside contributions (android does not for example), developers talk in public mailing lists, and even leadership positions in the project can, and often are, taken by non-Google people.
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?
I don't think Chromium is that kind of open source project. It doesn't seem that having the FOSS community leading the direction of dev is something they do. If you read some of the docs it seems that Googlers have special privileges and it's quite intertwined.
Chromium has a pretty open leadership process. Each subsystem has a small number of people who make technical decisions about the roadmap, and for some subsystems of the browser, none of those people are Google employees. Qualcomm, Microsoft, and Nvidia all have direct leadership control over some Chromium subsystems.
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 ).
Google effectively has the right to veto patches into Chromium. In the worst case, Google could fork Chromium, and since Google controls the build artifacts, in a dispute between Google and Microsoft, it's Google who wields the power.
Chromium is nominally open source - in practice it's controlled by Google employees in any way that matters. So you would literally be handing full control over the web-experience to Google.
Forks of Chromium are not controlled by Google. Google gave up the legal right to restrict what other parties can do with Chromium when they released it under a liberal open-source license. Google has a little influence over Chromium in that the people that designed and implemented Chromium mostly still work for Google.
Google has more control over Mozilla than they do over organizations that have forked Chromium because about 90% of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google.
I'm not sure I understand why you think Chromium is supposed to be community driven. Chromium is an open-source project that has a lot of Google and non-Google contributors (for example, Microsoft), but all of the main decision-makers are working on Chromium on behalf of their companies, and the majority of decision-makers are employed by Google.
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...
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