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[OUTDATED POST] Floorp, a Firefox Fork with an awful name, has moved some components inside a private submodule.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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Update: They just open-sourced it https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp-private-components

cross-posted from: https://kbin.melroy.org/m/[email protected]/t/170330

See also https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/floorp-going-closed-source/52783

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

The creator of Floorp posted a reponse to this: https://blog.ablaze.one/4125/2024-03-11/

TLDR posted by the creator: creator:

To put it simply, the current Floorp, including forks, will end the moment I stop maintaining it, so to prevent that from happening, I have prohibited forks. The idea is to solve the user's concern about code transparency by tightening the license when returning to open source, and to create a sustainable Floorp by giving them the choice of paying money or helping with the coding.

Unfortunately a lot of this seems in reponse to Midori, a seemingly hostile fork with a pretty suspcious website.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Unfortunately a lot of this seems in reponse to Midori, a seemingly hostile fork with a pretty suspcious website.

To some people all forks are hostile. This appears to be such a case. He just seems to be sour over people exercising the same freedoms he got from Mozilla upstream. Rules for thee but not for me. The free software community doesn't need his obscure fork.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I disagree in this case. The majority of Firefox forks make it clear they're a fork, giving credit to Mozilla. Midori seems to hide that they're a fork while adding very little to the browser. Their website also takes donations while having a fake phone number and broken contact button. Hard not to see that as suspicious.

Edit: the dev was also completely ok with Firedragon switching to their codebase because they did so resepectfully.

I still disagree with what the dev did, but I get the struggle.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

I agree that the Midori website is suspicious however their repo properly credits Firefox and Floorp in the very first sentence of the readme (however they don't actually link to this repo for some reason). In any case, my intent isn't to defend Midori (which I don't use or have any interest in) but rather to defend the four freedoms none of which are conditional on how much a fork adds or contributes back. In other words, it's perfectly ok to just fork something and change the name.

I still maintain it's ironic that a fork developer is complaining about forks of his fork. This statement is baffling but I suppose it comes from a proprietary mindset where copying is theft:

If these are forked, my hundreds of hours will have been wasted.

By this logic the decades of development time on Firefox is wasted because of this guy's fork.