As the top comment on the Hacker News thread notes,

Cloudflare clearly wants to move us to a future where only approved browsers are allowed to access the web... an independent open source web browser is obviously against that ethos.

I'm suspicious on that basis alone.

Intellectual property is made up bullshit. You can't "steal" a jpeg by making a copy of it, and the idea that creating something based on or inspired by something else is somehow "stealing" it is quite frankly preposterous.

The sooner we as a society disabuse ourselves of this brainworm the better.

Edit: I have very mixed feelings about so-called generative AI, so please do not take this as a blanket endorsement of the technology - but rather a challenge on the concept of "stealing intellectual property," which I unequivocally do not believe in.

smart tab groups, a new AI-powered feature that suggests names and groups based on the tabs you have open.

Yeah sure ok. Did the community ask for this too?

Notice they avoid using the exact term "open source" in this press release. I'm ~90% sure it'll turn out to be under some proprietary source-available license.

I don't think the ffmpeg maintainer is complaining that Microsoft is using ffmpeg, rather that they are opening "high priority" bug reports based on customer complaints. This might be a high priority problem for Microsoft but that does not make it so for ffmpeg.

The license allows Microsoft to use ffmpeg but they aren't entitled to demand free labor from the project. Really, no one is entitled to do so, but Microsoft being a large company who can definitely afford to put money or talent on the problem makes it only that much more egregious.

edit: I would note that asking for help or reporting a bug is usually welcome, the problematic part is demanding help because it's a high priority issue for YOUR customers.

Discord is a proprietary centralized service that is hostile to privacy and third-party clients.

Google is also one of the most prolific contributors to Linux, and was the #3 corporate contributor in 2022. If you're avoiding everything Google had a hand in you literally can't use any GNU/Linux.

ChromeOS is Linux with Google’s desktop environment

Always has been. One does not "use Linux" they use an operating system built on top of Linux.

Chrome is not Linux, but Xfce also is not Linux. Gnome is not Linux. KDE is not Linux. Linux is Linux.

Software freedom applies only to hardware you personally own. It wouldn't even apply to machines you interact with but do not own (such as ATMs or kiosks) since you aren't the one who agrees to the proprietary software license.

Stallman himself explains it in his computing FAQ.

We live in a timeline where desktop apps all run in a browser, whereas mobile websites are all their own apps.

I say this as someone who is probably one of the biggest supporters of software-freedom around here, but bullying or shaming people for preferring non-free apps does nothing but incite resentment towards the movement. I value the four freedoms because I think I deserve control of my computing, not because I think it's my place to dictate what others should value.

Reddit karma is a self-perpetuating problem. Karma being used as an indicator of an account's quality and trustworthiness incentivizes karma farming, effectively turning fake internet points into real money. This spurs the development of bots whose sole purpose is to farm karma by reposting old content from humans (and more recently using ChatGPT to generate comments) which then spurs the rise of human "bot hunter" accounts whose sole purpose is to detect and report bots "stealing" content. At some point reddit turns into bots acting like humans vs humans acting like bots.