>On the other hand it just leads to Chrome monopoly.
If a browser engine continues to exist not on its merits but because its users are locked in, there is zero value in it. If 100% of people switch to chromium based browsers (an open source project) while they have free choice that's how it is. There's nothing inherently wrong with this.
We don't need browser engine DEI. Even the term monopoly is spurious in the world of open source software. Say if in 30 years we have 100% linux market share because open source won, do we need to protect Microsoft so they can lock people into Windows, like some sort of endangered animal program for proprietary software?
There's an inherent contradiction to apply the competitive logic of proprietary platforms to fundamental OSS infrastructure. They'll tend to be natural "monopolies" just by virtue of how resource intensive they are and the desire to standardize.
They can do nothing to Android because as the article points out Samsung or the entirety of China and the billions of other people in the world will just work on a fork and that will become consensus. If you have one company acting as the dominant player in an open source project, the fact that everyone else can walk away puts an implicit limit on what they can do.
To literally take Chromium as an example. Look at Google's manifest v3 changes. Brave and all the other chromium based browsers just put their own ad blocking shim on top and they're fine.
> billions of other people in the world will just work on a fork and that will become consensus.
Yes, yes, billions of people will work on the fork.
> To literally take Chromium as an example. Look at Google's manifest v3 changes.
That literally changed nothing in Chrome dominance.
> Brave and all the other chromium based browsers just put their own ad blocking shim on top and they're fine.
You mean: they literally just slap a skin on top of a Google-developed project, do no actual browser development of their own (do they even participate in web standards?), have vanishingly few users and are likely hemorrhaging money?
If a browser engine continues to exist not on its merits but because its users are locked in, there is zero value in it. If 100% of people switch to chromium based browsers (an open source project) while they have free choice that's how it is. There's nothing inherently wrong with this.
We don't need browser engine DEI. Even the term monopoly is spurious in the world of open source software. Say if in 30 years we have 100% linux market share because open source won, do we need to protect Microsoft so they can lock people into Windows, like some sort of endangered animal program for proprietary software?
There's an inherent contradiction to apply the competitive logic of proprietary platforms to fundamental OSS infrastructure. They'll tend to be natural "monopolies" just by virtue of how resource intensive they are and the desire to standardize.