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this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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Privacy
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As per the license, such products can be forked and inspected regardless - adoption by such corporations is helpful if not necessary to both snowball the initial stages of development into a product palatable to the mass market, alongside bringing as many eyes as possible to fulfill Linus' Law.
The FOSS licensing system, at it's core, allows you to pick ANY fork, and the root source cannot be contaminated, only upstream forks can be with corporate enshittification. All the user needs to do is hear word of mouth about a fork that takes away the problems that you mentioned - Ungoogled Chromium, GrapheneOS, Librewolf, etc... are examples of software one can use without "checking the source three times over", even if they are partially built with labor contributed by proprietary means.
Yes, but Chromium is a good example, it's 100% FOSS, but not recommend to use it before "checking three times" to strip out all the Google tracking APIs and other profiling crap (ungoogling it), but this need a big effort by the browser companies, which have to do it on every new release, so their versions are always behind the one from Chrome or others which use Chromium as is. I don't see an advantage that big corporations develope OpenSource incorporating their crap, when later devs have more work with forking it than with independent releases.
If that were true, then how do Brave and Librewolf even exist? Clearly it was less work to strip the garbage than to start from scratch.
Librewolf is Gecko and Brave has a big team and a lot of money, sponsored by Facebook and some crypto companies., even so the Brave chromium version is behind of the current from Chrome. There is an blogpost from one of the Vivaldi devs, explaining the work to make and maintain a Chromium fork
https://yngve.vivaldi.net/sooo-you-say-you-want-to-maintain-a-chromium-fork/