Update: They just open-sourced it https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp-private-components
cross-posted from: https://kbin.melroy.org/m/foss@beehaw.org/t/170330
See also https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/floorp-going-closed-source/52783
Update: They just open-sourced it https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp-private-components
cross-posted from: https://kbin.melroy.org/m/foss@beehaw.org/t/170330
See also https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/floorp-going-closed-source/52783
To some people all forks are hostile. This appears to be such a case. He just seems to be sour over people exercising the same freedoms he got from Mozilla upstream. Rules for thee but not for me. The free software community doesn’t need his obscure fork.
I disagree in this case. The majority of Firefox forks make it clear they’re a fork, giving credit to Mozilla. Midori seems to hide that they’re a fork while adding very little to the browser. Their website also takes donations while having a fake phone number and broken contact button. Hard not to see that as suspicious.
Edit: the dev was also completely ok with Firedragon switching to their codebase because they did so resepectfully.
I still disagree with what the dev did, but I get the struggle.
I agree that the Midori website is suspicious however their repo properly credits Firefox and Floorp in the very first sentence of the readme (however they don’t actually link to this repo for some reason). In any case, my intent isn’t to defend Midori (which I don’t use or have any interest in) but rather to defend the four freedoms none of which are conditional on how much a fork adds or contributes back. In other words, it’s perfectly ok to just fork something and change the name.
I still maintain it’s ironic that a fork developer is complaining about forks of his fork. This statement is baffling but I suppose it comes from a proprietary mindset where copying is theft:
By this logic the decades of development time on Firefox is wasted because of this guy’s fork.