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this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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To be fair it is just a Chromium backend with their custom frontend. And the value Vivaldi brings is in that frontend hence it's being proprietary.
Jón von Tetzchner mentioned they been talking internally about making it open source, but it's very unlikely.
It would be interesting if they made it fully open source. I hope they do, but fully understand if they don't.
Well, part of the script of the UI is proprietary, but it's 100% auditable and modificable by the user. The only point is that you can't use the script for other projects or browsers. It's not the same as in Chrome, Edge, Opera, there is nothing auditable in the script, apart from the Chromium script itself. Making the UI script in Vivaldi OpenSource, the first thing ocurres is that Chrome and Edge use it, killing all the other Chromiums, Vivaldi first. That isn't the same in the Gecko engine, there isn't any Big Brother using this engine. The engine isn't the real problem, most use Blink, because it's the best for several reasons, the problem is that the worst companies use it too and uniques developements and features which other company made, if it is released as OpenSource is a suicid for a small company, in a oversaturated and harsh Browser market (~100 browsers and forks), where the reason and sense of OpenSource is debatable. It is better to focus on other factors that are more important, business ethics with respect to the user, excellent support and a good community, the secondary services it offers, that it does not depend on external investors who can dictate the rules and that it does not create income from profiling the user to sell the data to others. Vivaldi complies with all this even in a political way, not being a company with a boss and his employees, but a cooperative, owned by its employees.
Please read the open source definition. Vivaldi doesn't meet it. You can't be kind of open source or partially open source. You either are or you are not.
That's pure bullshit. Neither Google not Microsoft give a shit about what others are doing. They don't onboard features from other open source Chromium browsers because they have their own vision.
And even if they wanted to implement similar feature they will have reinvent the wheel themselves instead of using code from open source, because under most open source licences you have to share the source code back and they are like exactly like Vivaldi. Using open source Chromium backend, with proprietary frontend.
You have fundamental lack of understanding how licensing works. And as you mentioned there are plenty of open source browsers that not only survive being open source, but thrive in their own niches.
There are a lot of good things about Vivaldi, but that doesn't make them bulletproof from valid critisim.
None of the browsers that exist are free of critical aspects and Vivaldi is no exception. That Google and EDGE are not interested in the Vivaldi UI is not true at all, it shows the attempt to imitate different functions introduced by Vivaldi with mediocre results. Although Vivaldi is still a minority browser, it is gaining a lot of acceptance in large companies and even in the automotive world with the inclusion of series in Renault, Polestar, Mercedes and even VAG, which not even Google has achieved, which can mean more than 40 million users in the near future. In other words, it can become a competitor to be taken seriously, as a European response to Google. From this point of view, this discrepancy of a script that differentiates Vivaldi from the others makes sense, although it does not conform to the traditional definition of OpenSource, since it is "Open" at the user level, but not to the competition for being owned by Vivaldi . Making it OpenSource, with restrictive licenses in the background, wouldn't change anything.