Post by RubenI will not be open sourcing all my patches right now
So you actually made closed source fork of Chromium.
And you put your binary build as a commercial to the list.
I doubt you have rights to call it Chromium then,
since it is clear that Chromium brand name is not at your possession
and second, Chromium by default is open source project
and base for Google Chrome and Chromium browser in all those Linux
distributions they have it ported in their repositories right now.
So you actually want to make money out of distributing binary port.
That is quite fine.
Just release source and I think people will be more then happy to
contribute to your porting project. And you can continue to sell it if
no one have objections over Chromium brand name.
You do not need to make binary available for free, sell it freely
(IF it is allowed to you by license)
Just put your source changes there somewhere with build instructions, so
OI folks and anyone else can build it fully in open. (share knowledge)
If otherwise, your porting effort goes against free and open source
software implemented in Illumos and OpenIndiana.
Your Chromium with closed parts is a threat to rights of free
distribution of OI and at the end, it is unlikely that closed source
product like that might end up in OI repositories/publishers unless full
open sourced.
Illumos project is changing and replacing closed parts in OS/net and
adding closed things on top of other distributions is like shooting
yourself in a foot, actually.
It is not only open vs closed, it also the case of security - Not having
your arbitrary closed parts in binary releases.
And making it under closed and usage restricted Oracle Solaris Express
primary,
but collaborating to the open source OpenSolaris based
Illumos/OpenIndiana folks also does not help advocating your effort. But
may be helping your selling, sure.
Maybe then you could ask Oracle for porting sponsorship and solve your
financial support problems, right now. I guess they might be willing to
help you advocating their platforms together.
For the lack of Chromium brand name usage rights, you can contact Google
directly.
Post by Rubenbut I do periodically spin off portions of my patches and submit them
upstream.
I suppose that might be from 1-5 years time, and in between, no one can
actually make Chromium to compile it and use it. And there are no
insurances you will ever distribute your source changes to the public in
full, beside this e-mail/message.
I only guess, you maybe do not even have rights to distribute changes in
the first place?
Maybe even you do not have rights to those binary parts added to your build?
I'll be happy to support OPEN SOURCE porting project with donations,
fund raising or something, (or Google and Oracle with selling those fine
shiny servers to the enterprises might do that) just I do not like
anyone to force me to support closed source things I am forced to support.
I wonder, how would anyone react if one would make fork of X server ,
GNOME, Libre/OpenOffice, Firefox, Pidgin, Thunderbird, adding to it
closed and binary parts and try to sell it with the _same name_ like
original free software and open source products?
I guess reaction would be not quite positive and legal.
We had such attempt locally, someone tried to sell OpenOffice via SMS to
windows users without releasing same-licensed source changes. That is
,like a NO-NO thing.
I guess someone might say that you are basically doing what Google is doing.
Well, Google is not selling Chrome. And Google have rights to core Chromium.
And even selling is not the point it might be OK under license,
but problem are binary additions to the open source product, who's
sources are unavailable to the public inspection, expansion,
contribution and future development.
Therefore, anyone thinking that your Chromium port is a solution might
be stuck with your code, depending on closed parts you might never
release. (That is OpenCore on top of Open..) And being insecure by
default is Microsoft's job, not Solaris folks.