The Vivaldi team: open source is cool. It gave us Chromium to fork from, that's more than 90% of "our" code base!

Question to the Vivaldi team: then why don't you open source your Vivaldi code?

The Vivaldi team: uhm, when it comes to our browser, open source isn't cool because we fear someone might fork it. We need to protect ourselves from that possibility.

.

Every closed source project out there.

@netikras Reusing some library code or so is one thing, but forking a complete project to make the very same kind of project, and then be worried about forking, that's next level asshattery.

Wait, really?

Lol, what an irony

@electrineer See their own blog: https://vivaldi.com/blog/...

Ah yes, onesided code-communism:
Your code is our code. Our code is our code.

So, did anyone actually read the blog post?

The part they aren't open-sourcing is the part they themselves wrote. No one is ever under any obligation to open-source something that isn't derived from an OSS source, which their UI layer isn't. And it's not hypocritical to not do so just because it's built on top of something that IS open-source in the same way that we don't bitch and moan about literally every company on Earth not open-sourcing what they built just because it runs on, say, Tomcat, which is itself open-source.

If they aren't pushing any changes they might make to Chromium back then yeah, that's a reason to complain because it's literally a license violation. But that's not the case.

And if their justification for not open-sourcing what they built is they don't want others to fork their work then that's no better or worse than literally any other reason anyone could give because... say it with me... NO ONE IS EVER OBLIGATED TO OPEN-SOURCE THEIR ORIGINAL WORK.

@fzammetti Yes, I did read the post, obviously. The point was not a licence violation, but being assholes. Forking a browser and then be worried that someone else might do with Vivaldi as they did with Chromium is asshattery.

@fzammetti no one claimed what they're doing is illegal. Sure, it's also the least interesting part of the code: the UI. They claim they want to protect their branding with the choice. This means they want to present themselves as an independent browser while putting in just the UI work.

They also claim they don't track you like Google https://vivaldi.com/blog/...
Should you trust them if you can't even reproduce the build yourself?

@electrineer And then also: oh, Chromium is doing the manifest v3 thing to cripple adblockers. Vivaldi doesn't put in the work to also keep the relevant v2 APIs like Mozilla does. Also, uBlock Origin for v2 will vanish from the Chrome store, and Vivaldi lacks its own store.

The Vivaldi team points to their own adblocker and otherwise tries to avoid that discussion, but their adblocker is a joke compared to uBO because they rather worked on gimmicky features, and including uBO directly in Vivaldi won't work because uBO is under GPL so that it's not available for Vivaldi.

Well, I went back to Firefox because of the adblocker issue that Vivaldi failed to address. I also deleted Vivaldi as non-FF test browser and now use Chromium for such testing.

@chaosesqueteam Easy: Chromium is not under GPL, but under BSD. Close-sourcing a fork is allowed as per the BSD licence. Read up on the relevant licences, moron.

@chaosesqueteam you're a terrible lawyer if you really are one. I'm sure you're not one. Who would even ever hire you?

dick move, but to be honest, it's one of the parts of open source. at least the users of Vivaldi can be sure that the base is solid, because it's open source and they used it as a base.

So technically it doesn't matter *as much*, since they are still a different thing from chromium and if the chromium license allows them to do that, then that's fine

but on a social/dev level, it's a pretty dick move unless there's a really good reason for it, which there most likely isn't :)

@fzammetti

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The part they aren't open-sourcing is the part they themselves wrote.

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^ also this

if only their part of the code is closed source, then it's not even that dick of a move. It just drops their trustworthiness in the OSS community eyes, because that code could contain anything . Other than that, meh?

@chaosesqueteam You really feel the need to start with "hey moron", and think it doesn't make YOU look like the moron right off the bat, huh? Man, some people.

@Fast-Nop Yep, I get that, I just don't see it the same way. Again, as I said earlier: we don't scream and yell about every person that doesn't open-source something they built on top of other open-source, right? So then why is Vivaldi being assholes for doing that when no one else is?

@electrineer Right, and I didn't say anyone was claiming it was illegal. This is clearly a "good citizen or not" situation, so to speak. But I'm not seeing why they're a bad citizen in this case. Isn't the whole point of open-source, one of them anyway, to "build on the shoulders of giants", in a sense? I think it is. But does that automatically mean you HAVE to contribute back? As I said earlier, unless we're going to give EVERY project out there that builds on the work of others a hard time for not open-sourcing their own work then I don't see why we'd make a stink about it this time.

However, I concede the security point is a good one. I think it's a separate issue, but a very valid one.

@fzammetti Because they don't just take some OSS and reuse it in an unrelated project. They fork a browser to make a browser and then fear that someone might fork Vivaldi.

Even their arguments for that are ridiculous. Oh, someone might fork Vivaldi and put no effort into the spin. Yeah, and how many examples are there where this happens and the no effort fork actually gets the traction? Who would even use that over the original? Just why?

“Even though our license doesn’t strictly allow this, we welcome it and we encourage users to share these code modifications on our forums.”

@tkjkrnu you're still not a real lawyer