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this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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I donate to Ladybird and Servo, and I hope they succeed. We need serious competition and a check on Mozilla (not to mention Chrome and Safari).
That said, I'm sad that neither Ladybird or Servo are licensed under strong copyleft licenses. We need user-oriented browsers now more than ever, and strong copyleft enables that. I worry that, even if these engines are successful, they will be co-opted by proprietary browsers and eventually superseded by them.
This happened before - both Chrome and Safari ultimately derive from KHTML, Konqueror's browser engine. If KHTML had been licnesed under the GPL instead of the LGPL, Chrome and Safari (and not just their engines) may have been free software today. Or, at the very least, it would have been much more difficult for Apple and Google to get started.
That said, I wish Ladybird the best. There donation = no influence policy is excellent, and I really, really hope they can stick to it in the long term.
How does one have a donation = no influence policy?
Huge companies donate to make open apps like this reliant on them. Then they threaten to pull the donation if that doesn't happen...
Strong Copyleft licenses protect from this by allowing others to fork and keep an app going without being taken advantage of.
If Google donates 1 billion dollars tomorrow, and over several months, Ladybird will expand to use that money. Then Google can threaten to stop the donations unless LB does something like "make ad blockers worse"
It's a web browser. The only money they will make is from donations. Unless they do something wonky with their business model, like charge. Then no one will use it anyway.
Frankly at this point I'd be willing to contribute to a strongly copyleft, privacy focused browser even if it meant yet another fucking 'subscription'
That would not have changed much, since browser engines are million-manhours projects and a small group of devs doing that voluntary, just isn't enough.
Isn't servo mostly a Mozilla-led project? I thought servo would probably just replace gecko as the engine firefox used if it ends up succeeding
Iirc it started its life that way but Mozilla abandoned it and the community picked it up
Servo is developed by Igalia at this point. Mozilla is not involved.