this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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I’m OOTL. Are these actual issues people have with the project?
C++ might not be as memory-safe as Rust, but let’s not pretend a Rust code base wouldn’t be riddled with raw pointers.
BSD tells me the team probably wants Ladybird to become not just a standalone browser but also a new competing base for others to build a browser on top of – a Chromium competitor. Even though BSD wouldn’t force downstream projects to contribute back upstream, they probably would, since that’s far less resource-intensive than maintaining a fork. (Source: me, who works on proprietary software, can’t use GPL stuff, but contributes back to my open-source dependencies.)
well, its possible to check if a rust equivalent would be riddled with raw pointers: just check the Servo code base.
personally I think its a good thing to have another browser implementation, regardless of specific choices they make about language or license
Don’t have time to factcheck so going to take your word for it. Interesting bit of knowledge! Honestly wouldn’t have thought that. How else are Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi and co getting away with building proprietary layers on top of a copyleft dependency?
I’m no legal expert. All I know is that when I’m picking dependencies at work, if it’s copyleft, I leave it on the table. I love the spirit of GPL, but I don’t love the idea of failing an audit by potential investors because of avoidable liabilities.
The three currently-maintained engines which (at their feature intersection) effectively define what "the web" is today are Mozilla's Gecko, Apple's WebKit, and Google's Blink.
The latter two are both descended from KHTML, which came from the Konquerer browser which was first released as part of KDE 2.0 in 2000, and thus both are LGPL licensed.
After having their own proprietary engine for over two decades, Microsoft stopped developing it and switched to Google's fork of Apple's fork of KDE's free software web engine.
Probably Windows will replace its kernel with Linux eventually too, for better or worse :)
They're allowed to because the LGPL (unlike the normal GPL) is a weak copyleft license.
Thanks for teaching me something new!
So Chromium is based on Blink, which is LGPL – a less viral GPL. Hence, it can serve as a dependency in closed-source software.
As to the shared heritage of these well-established projects – I don’t know how else to interpret it other than a testament to the complexity of building a decent browser engine.
Btw, quick shout out to Orion, a rare WebKit browser by the makers of Kagi that’s apparently coming to Linux as well. I’m a monthly supporter. Even though I still mostly use Vivaldi, it’s been coming along really nicely. Proprietary software but idc. I appreciate their unspoken mission statement: pay or be the product. (No-one should be a product, obviously, but that’s capitalism.)
What about safari? Doesn't it still use webkit?
yep. (see my other comment in this thread)
I'm curious. Why do you believe the last statement to be true?
Anti Commercial-AI license
I don't know if it's riddled with it or not, but what I (think to) know is that one of Rust's goal is to minimize them. No need for raw pointers when handling lists and buffers most of the time.
Did you paste the wrong link?
They have that under all their comments.
If you cant tell from just looking at the relative successes of BSD and linux that copyleft licenses are better than I dont know how to convince you of anything
using the Linux / BSD situation as a benchmark ignores a lot of history. I would argue that the BSD lawsuit was the deciding factor.
the Linux project is not representative of a typical GPL code base. It rejected GPL3 and features a rather significant exception clause that deviates from GPL2.
Clang vs GCC is probably a better metric for the role of the license in viability and popularity. Or maybe Postgres vs MySQL.
Why has nothing GPL replaced Xorg or Mesa or now Wayland?
Why hasn’t the MIT or Apache license held Rust back from being so popular? Why would Ubuntu be moving away from GNU Coreutils (GPL) to uutils (MIT)? How did Pipewire (MiT) replace PulseAiudio (LGPL)? How did Docker or Kubernetes win (both Apache)? Actually, what non-Red Hat GPL software has dominated a category in the past 10 years?
If the GPL is the obvious reason for the popularity of Linux, why would RedoxOS choose MIT?
This is not an anti-GPL rant.
My point is that choosing the GPL (or not) does not correlate as obviously with project success as you make it sound. It is an opinion that would require a lot more evidence.
By that logic proprietary licenses are best for desktop OSs because Windows has the biggest market share?
Windows has lost more market share in the last 20 years than any other operating system
To.... MacOS. Yet another proprietary closed source license
Actually macos was based off of BSD, but there were no basically contributions back to the community, so its whithered away. meanwhile linux is running in every sattelite and scientific insrument, it runs every router and nearly every server that are the internet. Microsoft google and apple all begrudginly make linux better while they make the operating systems they sell worse
It's the only operating system with that much market share to lose.