> The culture of the web was "the owners are those who run the web sites, the servants are the software that provides an entry point to the web (read or publish or both)".

This is an attempt to rewrite history.

Early browser like NCSA Mosaic were never even released as Open Source Software.

Netscape Navigator made headlines by offering a free version for academic or non-profit use, but they wanted to charge as much as $99 (in 1995 dollars!) for the browser.

Microsoft got in trouble for bundling a web browser with their operating system.

The current world where we have true open source browser options like Chromium is probably closer to a true open web than what some people have retconned the early days of the web as being.

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glenstein 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Chromium commits are controlled by a pool of Google developers, so it's not open in the sense that anyone can contribute or steer the direction of the project.

It's also 32 million lines of code which is borderline prohibitive to maintain if you're planning any importantly different browser architecture, without a business plan or significant funding.

There's lots of things perfectly forkable and maintainable in the world is better for them (shoutout Nextcloud and the various Syncthing forks). But Chromium, insofar as it's a test of the health and openness of the software ecosystem, I think is not much of a positive signal on account of what it would realistically require to fork and maintain for any non-trivial repurposing.

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dpark 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> Chromium commits are controlled by a pool of Google developers, so it's not open in the sense that anyone can contribute or steer the direction of the project.

By these criteria no software is open source.

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glenstein 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I would disagree, corporate open source involves corporate dominance over governance that fits internal priorities. It meets the legal definition rather than the cultural model which is community driven and often multi-stakeholder. I would put Debian, VLC, LibreOffice in the latter camp.

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akerl_ 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Is it often multi-stakeholder? Debian has bureaucracy and a set group of people with commit permissions. VLC likewise has the VideoLAN organization. LibreOffice has The Document Foundation.

It seems like most open source projects either have:

1. A singular developer, who controls what contributions are accepted and sets the direction of the project 2. An in-group / foundation / organization / etc that does the same.

Do you have an example of an open source project whose roadmap is community-driven, any more than Google or Mozilla accepts bug reports and feature reports and patches and then decides if they want to merge them?

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glenstein 2 hours ago | parent [-]

A lot of the governance structures with "foundation" in their name, e.g. Apache Foundation, Linux Foundation, Rust Foundation, involve some combination of corporate parties, maintainers, independent contributors without any singularly corporate heavy hand responsible for their momentum.

I don't know that road maps are any more or less "community driven" than anything else given the nature of their structures, but one can draw a distinction between them and the degree of corporate alignment like React (Facebook), Swift (Apple).

I'm agreeable enough to your characterization of open source projects. It's broad but, I think, charitably interpreted, true enough. But I think you can look at the range of projects and see ones that are multi stakeholder vs those with consolidated control and their degree of alignment with specific corporate missions.

When Google tries to, or is able to, muscle through Manifest v3, or FLoC or AMP, it's not trying to model benevolent actor standing on open source principles.

	▲	akerl_ 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		My argument is that "open source principles" do not suggest anything about how the maintainers have to handle input from users. Open source principles have to do with the source being available and users being able to access/use/modify the source. Chrome is an open source project. To try to expand "open source principles" to suggest that if the guiding entity is a corporation and they have a heavy hand in how they steer their own project, they're not meeting those principles, is just incorrect. The average open source project is run by a person or group with a set of goals/intentions for the project, and they make decisions about the project based on those goals. That includes sometimes taking input from users and sometimes ignoring it.
	▲	pas 40 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Chromium can be forked (probably there are already a bunch of degoogled ones) to keep Manifest v2 what's missing is social infrastructure to direct attention to this (and maybe it's missing because people are too dumb when it comes to adblockers, or they are not bothered that much, or ...) and of course, also maintaining a fork that does the usual convenience features/services that Google couples to Chrome is hard and obviously this has antitrust implications, but nowadays not enough people care about this either

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croes 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The web wasn’t the browser it was the protocols.

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dpark 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That’s not an accurate statement. The web was not just the protocols. It was the protocols and the servers that served them and the browsers that supported them and the web sites that were built with them. There is no web without browsers just like there is no web without websites.

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hluska 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I can’t understand why you’re splitting hairs to this extent. The web is protocols; some are implemented at server side whereas others are implemented at browser side. They’re all still protocols with a big dollop of marketing.

That statement was accurate enough if you’re willing to read actively and provide people with the most minimal benefit of the doubt.

	▲	dpark 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My response is in a chain discussing browsers in response to someone who literally said “The web wasn’t the browser it was the protocols.” I responded essentially “it was indeed also the browser”, which it seems you agree with so I don’t know what you’re even trying to argue about. > willing to read actively and provide people with the most minimal benefit of the doubt. Indeed

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akerl_ 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Most of the protocol specs were written retroactively to match functionality that browsers were already using in the wild.