Don’t you just love it when companies get together under the thin guise of open source to promote their own interests?
Today Google is pleased to announce our partnership with The Linux Foundation and the launch of the Supporters of Chromium-based Browsers. The goal of this initiative is to foster a sustainable environment of open-source contributions towards the health of the Chromium ecosystem and financially support a community of developers who want to contribute to the project, encouraging widespread support and continued technological progress for Chromium embedders.
The Supporters of Chromium-based Browsers fund will be managed by the Linux Foundation, following their long established practices for open governance, prioritizing transparency, inclusivity, and community-driven development. We’re thrilled to have Meta, Microsoft, and Opera on-board as the initial members to pledge their support.
↫ Shruthi Sreekanta on the Chromium blog
First, there’s absolutely no way around the fact that this entire effort is designed to counter some of the antitrust actions against Google, including a possible forced divestment of Chrome. By setting up an additional fund atop the Chromium organisation, placed under the management of the Linux Foundation, Google creates the veneer of more independence for Chromium than their really is. In reality, however, Chromium is very much a Google-led project, with 94% of code contributions coming from Google, and with the Linux Foundation being very much a corporate affair, of which Google itself is a member, one has to wonder just how much it means that the Linux Foundation is managing this new fund.
Second, the initial members of this fund don’t exactly instill confidence in the fund’s morals and values. We’ve got Google, the largest online advertising company in the world. Then there’s Facebook, another major online advertising company, followed by Microsoft, which, among other business ventures, is also a major online advertising company. Lastly we have Opera, an NFT and cryptoscammer making money through predatory loans in poor countries. It’s a veritable who’s who of some of the companies you least want near anything related to your browsing experience.
I highly doubt a transparent effort like this is going to dissuade any judge or antritrust regulator from backing down. It’s clear this fund is entirely self-serving and designed almost exclusively for optics, with an obvious bias towards online advertising companies who want to make the internet worse than towards companies and people trying to make the internet better.
Thom, in may opinion you show a lot of entitlement for someone who has never written code (as you self admitted many times).
I agree with you that the Chrome situation is not perfect. But on the upside it is:
– truly free and open
– high performance (the JS engine is so good that they built a full eco-system around it and I say this while I despise java script)
– those funds will pay developers and OS advocates so they can spend time contributing to Linux and OS
It may not fit into your views, but actually someone has to pay for all this stuff.
I myself contribute quite a few things to open source but I can afford this only because I have clients paying me and so allow me to subsidize my open source efforts.
Show us a better way and show us code before endlessly bashing Google. Please!
‘in may opinion you show a lot of entitlement for someone who has never written code’ sounds quiet irrelevant. I would say this is more a thing for lawyers or business.
The argument that we should accept a dictator because at least said dictator pays for everything, is nonsense, and cowardly.
There is much more they could do to foster a better online experience, without forcing the commodification of personal data. Instead, they just want more money, and we are the product. It would be better if such tools stop existing, if that is what they need to exist.
Dictator?! They force you to use any of their products? At gun point?
Do you children even know what Dictatorship means?
>”in may opinion … (as you self admitted many times)”
Well, on the other hand, Thom does appear to have at least a passing familiarity with the English language and things like spell checkers and grammar checkers. So his basis for expressing his opinion may be greater than yours despite the fact that someone once paid you $5 to put the shebang at the beginning of a bash shell script.
I am sure, it has been 3 shebangs at least.
Three shebangs for only five dollars? I think you need to increase your rates!
Andreas Reichel,
There are a lot of takes on the subject, some adversarial, some candid. FOSS compensation is something I’ve struggled with since I graduated. So many FOSS devs don’t get compensation, especially if your not sponsored by a big entity. There’s nothing wrong with passion projects, they can be fun and educational, but it’s a problem if you have a family to support and the majority of businesses seeking to use FOSS software aren’t paying a dime for it. And technically MIT/GPL/etc allow and encourage this so I can’t strictly blame the companies obeying the license. Still, the freeloading culture puts an incredible stress on developers who sacrifice a lot of time but won’t be financially compensated.
Many of us are working for small/local companies who are also feeling their own economic stresses. It’s a completely different world to the multi-trillion dollar companies and multi-billion dollar executives. They’re the ones with disproportionately huge vaults of money.
> So many FOSS devs don’t get compensation, especially if your not sponsored by a big entity.
Isn’t that exactly what Google is doing here: sponsoring people working on Open Source and providing a massive code base for free to work on?
You don’t like Manifest V3, here is the code and some money, work on it?
What are we blaming Google here? For running a company?
Andreas Reichel,
Money can be used for both good uses and bad uses for society. It’s not so much that corporations deliberately set out to do bad things, but with very few exceptions they are self serving and we should acknowledge this. In terms of funding for chromium, it could be framed as a purely philanthropic gesture, but that’s not really the whole picture. On the other hand google have an urgent need to establish a viable business structure for chromium in case the antitrust cases surrounding chrome go wrong for google. Maybe we can blanket over the details and say this is “good” regardless of google’s motives for doing it…but it also helps establish greater influence over a critical piece of software. For better or worse when you are dependent on others they hold power over you.
In short: it’s generally not ideal for FOSS to be beholden to corporate money. It is what it is.
Correct and I agree. I would do the same.
Please show me just one single example of ‘pure philanthropy’. There is always something in for yourself, even when it was just the pride and joy of doing it.
Agreed, but I don’t see anything wrong with that as long as the net outcome is still good for the OS/community.
You are not wrong though I don’t see how google is forcing you to use any of their tools. Not only they allow you using their tools, they even provide the source and now add some funds for maintaining it. In my book that’s good (unless they have forced minors in forced labor camps to write the code).
I totally agree, but the same applies to any and every employee and even the most contract workers. Face it, we are all just private dancers one way or the other.
Andreas Reichel,
I’d say that depends on if the corporate influence ends up compromising FOSS projects. Their agenda may not be compatible with communal interests. IMHO it’s just harder to have faith in a project’s intentions to serve the community if they can’t operate independently of external pressure. But therein is the rub, many projects struggle to be self sufficient. There’s no easy answer.
Well, I respectfully suggest that by using an overly literal definition of “force” you are sweeping some of the dirt under the rug. In the real world network effects and monopolistic behaviors are extremely problematic even if no guns and chains are used. I’ve often been forced to switch browsers and even buy an unaltered google phone to pay taxes, do banking, login to work, etc. The point being the network effects are extremely coercive and tech companies often design technology to exploit these network effects to their advantage.
Just as an example: secure boot is ostensibly a neutral standard, anyone’s keys can be put in the firmware. But in practice it benefits microsoft because their keys are going to be the defacto standard by default whereas other operating systems are now expected to boot under microsoft’s control. Pointing out that it’s not done “at gunpoint”, while true, does nothing to dispel genuinely problematic market power dynamics.
I don’t have a great solution. The natural order of things is for power and wealth to create positive feedback loops that keep rewarding the wealthy and powerful at the top, which leads to monopolies/oligopolies taking over.
@Alfman, apologies for breaking the structure. I can’t open level but your arguments are always worth an effort in responding:
I am in the same boat and it IS ANNOYING as hell. Same with Microsoft Office documents. But who is to blame here: The Governments and Public Sector, who use TAX money to sponsor FOREIGN software/tech companies ignoring the local software sector? Or the companies itself.
StarOffice was a GERMAN product. SUSE was a GERMAN Linux distribution. Still every damn office in Germany run MS Teams and Office 365 paid with Billions of Tax EUROs leaving to the USD. I don’t blame that on MS or Google though.
I think we both know that blindly bash Google is not the solution.
This order could be easily broken up when Governments and Public Sector would enforce policies that software paid with Tax Money must be open source and preferably have local support.
Works very well in Indonesia btw. where they enforce a “Local Content” policy effectively and strict. If not at least 60% of the Value are generate in Indonesia, you are not even qualified for the tender.
Andreas Reichel,
You should though. I’m not saying they’re the only ones to blame, but it is often their fault that our mainstream platforms don’t favor consumer interests. They could promote and support more vendor neutral federated standards, but instead they impede it while doing their best to keep us dependent.
That doesn’t feel like a fair accusation to me, but is that what you think I do?
Sure, I think there should be FOSS mandates tied to public funds…but a big reason we have the system we have today is because wealthy western corporations lobbied for things to be this way. We have a long standing tradition of corporations corrupting policy and corporate representation keeps getting stronger. Things have gotten so bad that those who try to fix the corruption from within are themselves ousted. This rampant corruption in the US government is on full display: congress is for sale, the executive branch is for sale, and the judicial branch is for sale. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t “blame the government”, but just as I said that “it’s not ideal for FOSS to be beholden to corporate money” earlier, the same applies to politics.
@Alfman
Hell no, this was not anyhow directed to you but the tone of the original article.
Your assessment is always well thought and balanced and much appreciated.
Doesn’t Chrome have proprietary components? The Chromium base is what’s open source, right?
> Google creates the veneer of more independence for Chromium than their (sic) really is.
Do they? The project page says: “The Chromium projects themselves will remain under current, existing governance structures while just the new Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers will be housed under the Linux Foundation”. It couldn’t be more explicit than that.
> I highly doubt a transparent effort like this is going to dissuade any judge or antritrust (sic) regulator from backing down.
Yeah, quite obviously so; and Chrome is yet another step removed from Chromium, so why would anybody think that this is the reason behind the initiative? Without any further evidence the title is just silly speculation, and that doesn’t look to me like good journalism, even for an opinion piece.