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Floorp, a Firefox Fork with an awful name, has moved some components inside a private submodule. (github.com)

submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Edit: They claim they will make that part open source too, eventually, and it is due to behavior of another browser: https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp-core/issues/62

Edit 2: They just open sourced the private repository 7 minutes ago, 2024-03-24T12:39Z

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (3 children)

eli5?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (2 children)

It’s an open source browser based on Firefox with additional features and configuration tweaks.

Except they recently made part of it proprietary and hid the source code for that, so most other people cannot actually build the same one.

They claim they will make that part open source too, eventually, and it is due to behavior of another browser: https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp-core/issues/62

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (3 children)

They do say that

They will be using a different repository with a different license for some of its new features

"different license" suggests to me it might be a proprietary/fauxpen source licene, since this is explicitly being done to punish a fork.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

It may be. The person saying that has contributed artwork but is not the maintainer. It is a bad look though. It sounds like they want to build the next release in secret so the fork can’t release features first.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

I wonder if it's Midori

[–] flumph 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Yeah. The maintainer said in their blog post they're looking for a license that lets people read the code but not fork it. Isn't that just standard American copyright?

Edit: Looks like they went with CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Deed (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International). So not an open source license and one that CC themselves recommends not using for software.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Huh, that's very valuable context.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Some time ago, a bunch of really smart people wanted to be able to modify software, so it can never be broken since they can fix it. Thus began open source, which is having a piece of software tell everybody exactly how to make it. Meanwhile, many companies don't want people to modify their software, usually because they don't want people easily competing with them and bankrupting them due to creating a better modification. Such software that isn't open source is termed "proprietary".

Floorp was one of these open source softwares. Some ambitious Japanese people modified Firefox, added some features and customizations, and named it "Floorp".

Recently, these people decided, for whatever reason, to stop the public from being able to access some of the materials and configurations for making Floorp. They did this by creating a new "warehouse" to store these materials, sealing off the access to it, and replacing the original location of the now proprietary materials with a note that tells you the location of the warehouse you can't get in.

(Hopefully that wasn't confusing...)