by Alec Muffett
All bets are off when a huge open source platform like Solaris or Chrome is sold off, and we can see from the diverse installed Solaris ecosystem today how successful the various Solaris “forks” were at individual survival.
Chrome will die and take all its progeny, except maybe Edge, with it.
DOJ Will Push Google to Sell Chrome to Break Search Monopoly | Bloomberg
@alecm there is an open source contributor who might buy it as they depend on it: MSFT. ?
You think they will be allowed to?
@alecm important to be aware is that the engine is still derived from KHTML and has a copyleft license. Making it fully closed source is not legally possible at this point.
I just commented on Mastodon: it’s precisely the situation that we had with Solaris: an entire real Unix operating system with phenomenal enterprise credentials being open-sourced, and Oracle walked that back. The result was to cut the trunk off of the evolving tree of software and collapse of faith in its future, leading to the eventual and utterly complete triumph of Linux everywhere.
The licence is irrelevant.
@alecm Probably nothing will happen: https://mstdn.social/@osnews/113506616513631923
Perhaps it is important to work towards that outcome, otherwise something might happen.
I can’t read all the article and don’t know what others thoughts are on it, but if that happened, I wonder if it could be good for Firefox?
Probably in much the same way that having an enormous meteor hit the earth and destroy most life, leaving open potential niches for mammals to expand into now that all the dinosaurs have been killed, could also have been described as “good for mammals”
@alecm Oracle, or Broadcom!
@alecm I mean, allowing advertisers to put their ads wherever they want is actually worse than what we have now. I’m all in favor of Google taking some damage, but this little bit here is not what the consumer needs ??
My sense is that this could well be a matter of “the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t”
@alecm
Ugh
The thing is, Google largely EARNED their place in the search marketplace, they didn’t use sneaky tricks to obtain it.
I’m totally opposed to government intervention claiming that Google has a monopoly on search.
They don’t, they just happen to be really good at what they do.
@alecm
But also, you were a former Sun employee?
Ow – I hate what Oracle did to your former employer
1992..2009 – it was a great place to work
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