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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 do
by 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 agoFor example, most likely Dart or NaCL would have had another outcome.