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Vivaldi Browser and Open-Source

3 points by baal80spam 6y ago

latexr 6y ago
If someone from the Vivaldi teams reaches this comment section, I have a few questions. As I understand it, the major reason you don’t publish everything as open-source is to protect the Vivaldi brand, which you feel would be difficult because Vivaldi is not yet a household name: > When it comes to large projects that have been around for long enough or are household names, people won’t take notice of the fork. > However, as Vivaldi is still small and could be easily overshadowed, this makes our brand more vulnerable and not just in terms of revenue. Does that mean that if Vivaldi became as well-known as Firefox or Safari, you’d be open to open-sourcing everything? > only 5% is our UI closed-source code. > (…) > If a new project based on our code implements features that are fundamentally against our ethics (damaging to human rights or to the environment in some way, for instance) Can you provide a concrete example on how a malicious actor could damage human rights or the environment from browser UI code (HTML+CSS+JS on the Desktop, Chromium’s Java UI on Android)? > there is some security-relevant code in the UI as well. If you think that specific security-relevant parts of the UI should be open-sourced to make Vivaldi more trustworthy, let us know and we’ll consider putting it out as part of our code bundles, so you can check it for yourselves. Even though I’d be unlikely to personally review it, yes, I do think that’s important. I will note that I’m not a Vivaldi user partly because I don’t feels its open-source components are shared adequately. Browsing the code is an inconvenient task: it has to be downloaded as a single 1.5GB tarball from a webpage (https://vivaldi.com/source/ https://vivaldi.com/source/), which means code changes aren’t simple to track when compared to getting a GitHub/GitLab notification of changes and analysing the latest commits. In other words, it’s impractical for someone to investigate your code out of curiosity. It becomes a chore, something you have to decide to consciously carve a piece of time for, meaning less people will do it.

3 points by baal80spam 6y ago

If someone from the Vivaldi teams reaches this comment section, I have a few questions. As I understand it, the major reason you don’t publish everything as open-source is to protect the Vivaldi brand, which you feel would be difficult because Vivaldi is not yet a household name: > When it comes to large projects that have been around for long enough or are household names, people won’t take notice of the fork. > However, as Vivaldi is still small and could be easily overshadowed, this makes our brand more vulnerable and not just in terms of revenue. Does that mean that if Vivaldi became as well-known as Firefox or Safari, you’d be open to open-sourcing everything? > only 5% is our UI closed-source code. > (…) > If a new project based on our code implements features that are fundamentally against our ethics (damaging to human rights or to the environment in some way, for instance) Can you provide a concrete example on how a malicious actor could damage human rights or the environment from browser UI code (HTML+CSS+JS on the Desktop, Chromium’s Java UI on Android)? > there is some security-relevant code in the UI as well. If you think that specific security-relevant parts of the UI should be open-sourced to make Vivaldi more trustworthy, let us know and we’ll consider putting it out as part of our code bundles, so you can check it for yourselves. Even though I’d be unlikely to personally review it, yes, I do think that’s important. I will note that I’m not a Vivaldi user partly because I don’t feels its open-source components are shared adequately. Browsing the code is an inconvenient task: it has to be downloaded as a single 1.5GB tarball from a webpage (https://vivaldi.com/source/ https://vivaldi.com/source/), which means code changes aren’t simple to track when compared to getting a GitHub/GitLab notification of changes and analysing the latest commits. In other words, it’s impractical for someone to investigate your code out of curiosity. It becomes a chore, something you have to decide to consciously carve a piece of time for, meaning less people will do it.