this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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"Just" fork it. Right.
It's a massive undertaking to maintain a fork of something that large and continue pulling in patches of later developments.
Not to say that Brave doesn't have the resources to do so - I really don't know their scale - but this notion of "just fork" gets thrown around a lot with these kinds of scenarios. It's an idealistic view and the noble goal of open source software, but in practical and pragmatic terms it doesn't always win, because it takes time and effort and resources that may not just be available.
Did you read the tweet from Brendan Eich linked in the OP? According to him, Brave already is a fork, and he provides a link to a (surprisingly) extensive list of things that are removed / disabled from chromium on their browser.
This is correct - any “Chromium-based” browser is literally a fork unless it’s completely unchanged from upstream (even rebranding and changing the logo and name would require maintaining a fork).
Sure. And the further a fork diverges from upstream the more difficult maintenance becomes. My point is that relying on the open source model to fork projects making hostile changes only works so long as the community is actually able to maintain the fork(s), and so long as those forks actually have a reasonable chance of being adopted. It's equally important, if not even more important, to try to ensure these large projects steer in consumer friendly directions than to react and fork to try to remove anti-consumer features.
Google has enough market and mind share that they can push this and it's a real risk of becoming an anti-consumer standard regardless of any attempts to maintain a fork.
So what do I think we, as a body of users of the Internet, should do? Simple. Stop using Google Chrome and any other Chromium based browsers. Google has the ability to push these changes and make them defacto standards (and later, codified standards) because we collectively give them the power to by using Chromium downstreams.
That may be true, but it's a fork where I doubt any company has the capability to do the engine development needed to be totally independent from Google. There is a reason Apple and Mozilla are the only two alternative engines left. It costs a lot to develop a browser
"Don't like it? Just fork it!" is the software equivalent of "Are you sad? Just be happy!"