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With one increasingly irrelevant exception, all the major players in the browser space are open source with "fork all you want" licenses. The barrier to entry f

by tylerl 8y ago

With one increasingly irrelevant exception, all the major players in the browser space are open source with "fork all you want" licenses. The barrier to entry for a new player from a coding perspective is zeroish. That's not what keeps new players out and what gives incumbents the edge; what keeps them out is precisely the opposite problem, driven by the fact that it's TOO EASY to launch a new platform. There's enough new players that the novelty is gone and the world is _done_ caring. Nobody gives a damn about your new freedom/speech/privacy/blockchain -oriented browser. You're not starting from scratch, but that's like saying that the transportation industry would be better off the barrier to entry for designing new bullet-trains from scratch was lower. Like... OK. Sure. Maybe. But that's probably not the crux of the problem.

Taek 8y ago
Simply having an open codebase is not enough to promote diversity in implementation. Sure, you can get an exact clone, but if there's a piece of the code you don't like or want to replace, it's going to take a large team and likely a few experts who worked on the original to get through it. And through all of that, your codebase is just falling behind what teams of hundreds of engineers are doing on the upstream of your fork. If the major browser vendors today team up and decide to implement something people find hostile, say strict DRM, there's not much the world can do to stop them. It's just too much code to work through if you make a fork.
- sjellis 8y ago
  "If the major browser vendors today team up and decide to implement something people find hostile, say strict DRM, there's not much the world can do to stop them. It's just too much code to work through if you make a fork." It's probably very hard to quantify how lucky we are that Mozilla exists as a non-profit. They aren't perfect, and they don't have the weight to directly oppose Google and Apple even if they had to, but they have a seat at the table, and provide a viable alternative for those that want it.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    For example, most likely Dart or NaCL would have had another outcome.

by tylerl 8y ago

Taek 8y ago

Simply having an open codebase is not enough to promote diversity in implementation. Sure, you can get an exact clone, but if there's a piece of the code you don't like or want to replace, it's going to take a large team and likely a few experts who worked on the original to get through it. And through all of that, your codebase is just falling behind what teams of hundreds of engineers are doing on the upstream of your fork. If the major browser vendors today team up and decide to implement something people find hostile, say strict DRM, there's not much the world can do to stop them. It's just too much code to work through if you make a fork.

sjellis 8y ago
"If the major browser vendors today team up and decide to implement something people find hostile, say strict DRM, there's not much the world can do to stop them. It's just too much code to work through if you make a fork." It's probably very hard to quantify how lucky we are that Mozilla exists as a non-profit. They aren't perfect, and they don't have the weight to directly oppose Google and Apple even if they had to, but they have a seat at the table, and provide a viable alternative for those that want it.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  For example, most likely Dart or NaCL would have had another outcome.