I agree mostly, but forks don’t need to keep the upstream. They can go their own way.
Comment on Announcing the Ladybird Browser Initiative
vanderbilt@lemmy.world 2 months agoBecause software monocultures are bad. The vast majority of browsers are Chromium based. Since Google de-facto decides what gets in Chromium, sooner or later the downstream forks are forced to adopt their changes. Manifest V3 is a great example of this. You can only backport for so long, especially when upstream is being adversarial to your changes. We need an unaffiliated engine that corrects the mistakes we made with KHTML/Webkit.
el_abuelo@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Why are open source software monocultures bad? The vast majority of non-Windows OSes are Linux based. Teams who don’t like certain decisions of the mainline Linux team maintain their forks with the needed changes.
And we could get a functional one today by forking Chromium and never accepting a single upstream patch thereafter. I find it really hard to believe that starting a browser engine from scratch would require less labor. This is why I’m looking for an alternative motive. Someone mentioned licensing.