Don’t you just love it when companies get together under the thin guise of open source to promote their own interests?
Today Google is pleased to announce our partnership with The Linux Foundation and the launch of the Supporters of Chromium-based Browsers. The goal of this initiative is to foster a sustainable environment of open-source contributions towards the health of the Chromium ecosystem and financially support a community of developers who want to contribute to the project, encouraging widespread support and continued technological progress for Chromium embedders.
The Supporters of Chromium-based Browsers fund will be managed by the Linux Foundation, following their long established practices for open governance, prioritizing transparency, inclusivity, and community-driven development. We’re thrilled to have Meta, Microsoft, and Opera on-board as the initial members to pledge their support.
↫ Shruthi Sreekanta on the Chromium blog
First, there’s absolutely no way around the fact that this entire effort is designed to counter some of the antitrust actions against Google, including a possible forced divestment of Chrome. By setting up an additional fund atop the Chromium organisation, placed under the management of the Linux Foundation, Google creates the veneer of more independence for Chromium than their really is. In reality, however, Chromium is very much a Google-led project, with 94% of code contributions coming from Google, and with the Linux Foundation being very much a corporate affair, of which Google itself is a member, one has to wonder just how much it means that the Linux Foundation is managing this new fund.
Second, the initial members of this fund don’t exactly instill confidence in the fund’s morals and values. We’ve got Google, the largest online advertising company in the world. Then there’s Facebook, another major online advertising company, followed by Microsoft, which, among other business ventures, is also a major online advertising company. Lastly we have Opera, an NFT and cryptoscammer making money through predatory loans in poor countries. It’s a veritable who’s who of some of the companies you least want near anything related to your browsing experience.
I highly doubt a transparent effort like this is going to dissuade any judge or antritrust regulator from backing down. It’s clear this fund is entirely self-serving and designed almost exclusively for optics, with an obvious bias towards online advertising companies who want to make the internet worse than towards companies and people trying to make the internet better.
Thom, in may opinion you show a lot of entitlement for someone who has never written code (as you self admitted many times).
I agree with you that the Chrome situation is not perfect. But on the upside it is:
– truly free and open
– high performance (the JS engine is so good that they built a full eco-system around it and I say this while I despise java script)
– those funds will pay developers and OS advocates so they can spend time contributing to Linux and OS
It may not fit into your views, but actually someone has to pay for all this stuff.
I myself contribute quite a few things to open source but I can afford this only because I have clients paying me and so allow me to subsidize my open source efforts.
Show us a better way and show us code before endlessly bashing Google. Please!
‘in may opinion you show a lot of entitlement for someone who has never written code’ sounds quiet irrelevant. I would say this is more a thing for lawyers or business.
The argument that we should accept a dictator because at least said dictator pays for everything, is nonsense, and cowardly.
There is much more they could do to foster a better online experience, without forcing the commodification of personal data. Instead, they just want more money, and we are the product. It would be better if such tools stop existing, if that is what they need to exist.
Dictator?! They force you to use any of their products? At gun point?
Do you children even know what Dictatorship means?
>”in may opinion … (as you self admitted many times)”
Well, on the other hand, Thom does appear to have at least a passing familiarity with the English language and things like spell checkers and grammar checkers. So his basis for expressing his opinion may be greater than yours despite the fact that someone once paid you $5 to put the shebang at the beginning of a bash shell script.
I am sure, it has been 3 shebangs at least.
Andreas Reichel,
There are a lot of takes on the subject, some adversarial, some candid. FOSS compensation is something I’ve struggled with since I graduated. So many FOSS devs don’t get compensation, especially if your not sponsored by a big entity. There’s nothing wrong with passion projects, they can be fun and educational, but it’s a problem if you have a family to support and the majority of businesses seeking to use FOSS software aren’t paying a dime for it. And technically MIT/GPL/etc allow and encourage this so I can’t strictly blame the companies obeying the license. Still, the freeloading culture puts an incredible stress on developers who sacrifice a lot of time but won’t be financially compensated.
Many of us are working for small/local companies who are also feeling their own economic stresses. It’s a completely different world to the multi-trillion dollar companies and multi-billion dollar executives. They’re the ones with disproportionately huge vaults of money.
> So many FOSS devs don’t get compensation, especially if your not sponsored by a big entity.
Isn’t that exactly what Google is doing here: sponsoring people working on Open Source and providing a massive code base for free to work on?
You don’t like Manifest V3, here is the code and some money, work on it?
What are we blaming Google here? For running a company?