stochastictrebuchet

Thanks for teaching me something new!

So Chromium is based on Blink, which is LGPL – a less viral GPL. Hence, it can serve as a dependency in closed-source software.

As to the shared heritage of these well-established projects – I don’t know how else to interpret it other than a testament to the complexity of building a decent browser engine.

Btw, quick shout out to Orion, a rare WebKit browser by the makers of Kagi that’s apparently coming to Linux as well. I’m a monthly supporter. Even though I still mostly use Vivaldi, it’s been coming along really nicely. Proprietary software but idc. I appreciate their unspoken mission statement: pay or be the product. (No-one should be a product, obviously, but that’s capitalism.)

Don’t have time to factcheck so going to take your word for it. Interesting bit of knowledge! Honestly wouldn’t have thought that. How else are Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi and co getting away with building proprietary layers on top of a copyleft dependency?

I’m no legal expert. All I know is that when I’m picking dependencies at work, if it’s copyleft, I leave it on the table. I love the spirit of GPL, but I don’t love the idea of failing an audit by potential investors because of avoidable liabilities.

I’m OOTL. Are these actual issues people have with the project?

C++ might not be as memory-safe as Rust, but let’s not pretend a Rust code base wouldn’t be riddled with raw pointers.

BSD tells me the team probably wants Ladybird to become not just a standalone browser but also a new competing base for others to build a browser on top of – a Chromium competitor. Even though BSD wouldn’t force downstream projects to contribute back upstream, they probably would, since that’s far less resource-intensive than maintaining a fork. (Source: me, who works on proprietary software, can’t use GPL stuff, but contributes back to my open-source dependencies.)