3 ms·

The dinosaur was recognizable and unique, with a long history associated with the company. Why did it need to change?

Nomentatus 10y ago
To reduce stigma, I suppose. After a string of losses. Rearranging deck chairs feels really good, up there in the cool, salty air. Soberly looking at icebergs tends to give you an awful queasy feeling, instead. That said, I like Rust, and I like the idea of a Rust browser, I still have some hopes for Mozilla - but their attachment to GPLish patent-grabbing software licenses is a massive problem. It meant Google (etc) went off to create Chrome with a different open source lineage, duplicating the whole effort and wasting a ton of money.
- toyg 10y ago
  License had little to do with Google picking webkit, iirc. The difference was mostly that the webkit codebase at the time was relatively small and clean, whereas Gecko has been a clusterfuck of hacks for a veeeery long time. This is the same reason webkit exists in the first place: Apple picked the KHTML original core because it was so much easier to deal with than Gecko.
  - Nomentatus 10y ago
    You're right (and I'm wrong) about the detail: KHTML is GPL, so webkit is as well. Webkit wasn't chosen for its license. BUT the broader picture and complaint remains the same: because webkit isn't the legal base of Chrome. It couldn't be 'cause good old GPL got in the way again and necessitated wholesale recreation of existing software, yet one more time. Blink is the base of Chrome, and Blink is a similar replacement - not literally a fork - of the WebCore component of WebKit with a much more liberally license. That bunch-o-unnecessary-work came courtesy of a different patent-grabbing license than the one I pointed to, but this turns out to be one more example of why I should be so disappointed that Mozilla remains so attached to patent-grabbing licenses. Do that, and your work just gets replaced (wasted) by someone who owns patents, such as Google. I still think copy-left is a fine invention, I just wish that one troll Unix company hadn't panicked a good part of the open-source movement way-back-when into an ultimately futile and crazily wasteful attempt to effectively eliminate patent laws.

To reduce stigma, I suppose. After a string of losses. Rearranging deck chairs feels really good, up there in the cool, salty air. Soberly looking at icebergs tends to give you an awful queasy feeling, instead. That said, I like Rust, and I like the idea of a Rust browser, I still have some hopes for Mozilla - but their attachment to GPLish patent-grabbing software licenses is a massive problem. It meant Google (etc) went off to create Chrome with a different open source lineage, duplicating the whole effort and wasting a ton of money.

toyg 10y ago
License had little to do with Google picking webkit, iirc. The difference was mostly that the webkit codebase at the time was relatively small and clean, whereas Gecko has been a clusterfuck of hacks for a veeeery long time. This is the same reason webkit exists in the first place: Apple picked the KHTML original core because it was so much easier to deal with than Gecko.
- Nomentatus 10y ago
  You're right (and I'm wrong) about the detail: KHTML is GPL, so webkit is as well. Webkit wasn't chosen for its license. BUT the broader picture and complaint remains the same: because webkit isn't the legal base of Chrome. It couldn't be 'cause good old GPL got in the way again and necessitated wholesale recreation of existing software, yet one more time. Blink is the base of Chrome, and Blink is a similar replacement - not literally a fork - of the WebCore component of WebKit with a much more liberally license. That bunch-o-unnecessary-work came courtesy of a different patent-grabbing license than the one I pointed to, but this turns out to be one more example of why I should be so disappointed that Mozilla remains so attached to patent-grabbing licenses. Do that, and your work just gets replaced (wasted) by someone who owns patents, such as Google. I still think copy-left is a fine invention, I just wish that one troll Unix company hadn't panicked a good part of the open-source movement way-back-when into an ultimately futile and crazily wasteful attempt to effectively eliminate patent laws.