Re:DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome
by rawgabbit on Tuesday November 19, 2024 @10:19AM
(#42184369)
The issue is who controls Chromium. I would create a non profit and staff it with a handful of maintainers. Their primary job would be to ensure safety and squash exploits. Their other job is to curate and approve pull requests from volunteers for enhancements. They should make it open source with the caveat if it is used for commercial purposes, there will be a licensing fee to pay for security enhancements, bug bounties, and the like.
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Re:DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome
by kernal on Tuesday November 19, 2024 @12:29PM
(#42185981)
Do you think Google will continue to invest money and resources into the development of Chromium if they were forced to sell Chrome? I don't. The first thing I would do is close source the Chromium project and work on a new closed source browser to compete with Chrome. I also don't see Chrome surviving when all of the Google/Chromium developers have left.
Re:DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome
by rawgabbit on Tuesday November 19, 2024 @02:20PM
(#42187087)
I beg to differ. Google will go where the users are; their ad business depends on it.
Re:DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome
by rollcat on Tuesday November 19, 2024 @01:58PM
(#42186895)
So more or less what Mozilla was supposed to be all along?
Re:DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome
by rawgabbit on Tuesday November 19, 2024 @02:19PM
(#42187078)
Yes.
Re:DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome
by Ferret7446 on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @03:26AM
(#42191826)
Whoever contributes to it controls Chromium.
If 90% of the contributors were non-Google, then it would effectively be controlled by non-Google, because they could fork it and their fork would still get 90% of development.
See Terraform for a live example.
The only reason Google "controls" Chromium is because Google funds almost, but not quite, 100% of its development.
On a similar note, there's nothing stopping Microsoft from investing equal or greater amounts and forking Chromium (well, arguably they might already have with Edge). Except that they're benefiting from all of Google's investment, for free. Why turn down a massive developer investment from your competitor with no strings attached?