this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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We need a truly FOSS browser that developed and maintained by the community. Librewolf isn't it unless it fully forks away from Mozilla. We need a new engine and we just don't have one yet.
Why a new engine, Firefox is open source?!
Fork Firefox.
But good luck funding a team to keep up with commercial companies’ pace. It needs funding.
If Mozilla made a way to donate in a way that I KNEW it would go towards the maintenance of the browser, and not another crappy thing they’re trying to be profitable, I’d donate in a second. I spend about £30/month on OSS donations and I’d happily add £5/month to Mozilla if I trusted them not to misspend it.
You answered the question yourself. The worry is that without a hard fork that is fully maintained we'll continue to have a dependence on Mozilla. It doesn't need to be a new engine, but it does need to be an independent one.
Ladybird Browser is coming, but could be a couple years still
https://ladybird.org/
From scratch, BSD licensed, non-profit managed
Ew. It ought to be AGPLv3.
(I almost just said "copyleft," but as Chromium proves, even LGPL is insufficient protection from corporate usurpation.)
Truly; it's shocking how much people are still clinging to permissive licensing in the middle of everything going on.
Huh? The goal of the chromium project was to facilitate a corporate browser in the first place. It's why they don't have a more permissive license. They want to be able to use everyone else's work if anyone forks it.
Permissive license doesn't mean that corporations suddenly get the ability to completely change existing work for the worse, or change its' license. They can bloody well do that with GPL too if they own the project including contributions, so it doesn't matter if it's BSD or GPL, the only protection that the open source users have, in any case, is that licenses can't be changed retroactively, so if Firefox, Chromium or Ladybird went completely closed source and proprietary today, we'd still have the right to use the code as it was yesterday. Permissive licenses just mean that someone somewhere can create a closed source build without the permission of the person or company who owns the project and that doesn't particularly matter for anyone using Ladybird or any future open source derivatives. Permissive licenses are useful for libraries, but also for software that could be bundled as part of a bigger solution. Maybe you want to embed a web browser in your proprietary application and don't want to use webview because its' usability differs platform to platform.
Also why AGPLv3 and not GPLv3? I don't think the "A" part is even necessary here, that's needed more for server side applications, I.e if the end user is using online without the code running on their own computer, AGPL is the one to use.
Anyway, in the modern age, (A)GPL is used by a shit ton of corporate software. Oftentimes with an (A)GPL open core and a bunch of proprietary functionality not included in the core. I should know, I work with one example on a near daily basis. This way, nobody can just take their core functionality and develop a closed source alternative, while they can sell you an enterprise license for full functionality on their "open source" software.
The reason why Chromium uses LGPL is because they forked the code from Safari, which had previously forked the code from KHTML (KDE's web rendering component, used in Konqueror). The LGPL was provably insufficient to prevent corporate usurpation of the project, as a historical fact.
As for the "A" part of AGPL not being relevant for locally-run software, (1) it doesn't hurt either, and (2) having maximal protections could prevent weird corporate shenanigans that we haven't thought of yet.
The LGPL does its job, it's not as copyleft as GPL or AGPL, but having those licenses doesn't guarantee that companies will use it, like Gab, which used a fork of Mastodont, Truth Social, or Pawoo. If you want a more restrictive license, the OSI basically won't accept it as open source because it doesn't meet their guidelines.
Also, there are no other browsers due to the standards set by W3C and therefore browsers have to have corporate support.
An AGPL license is a verdict that the browser will not be successful.
In addition, Ladybird is under the guardianship of a non-profit organization.
Backed by Shopify, huh? Bet they wish that wasn't the case, given recent events.
The web platform is huge... It's going to take a long time to reach parity with other browsers.
Sounds like a job for JoMiran! Rooting for you!
I agree. I'd even be willing to regularly donate to a foundation that would have this aim as their goal and have their acts matching their promises.
Although, not necessarily a new engine. Going from scratch is a good way to remake a lot of mistakes, while reusing old code is a good way to keep old debt. That's not a decision I would like to have to take.