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Open Source Alternative To

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Re: Open Source Alternative To

#11

Post by judge2020 »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #6

I honestly had no idea Brave was an open source. Why is it being so heavily criticized on HN ( from what I saw whenever it comes up )?

People on HN can both like that some piece of software is OSS and dislike it for other reasons. For example, Chromium is also open source, and most criticisms of "Chrome" aren't exactly limited to the closed-source additions (like Widevine and enhanced grammar fixing) Google puts in after the fact, eg. Manifest v3 which will touch both Chromium and Chrome.

Re: Open Source Alternative To

#15

Post by BaronVonSteuben »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #6

I honestly had no idea Brave was an open source. Why is it being so heavily criticized on HN ( from what I saw whenever it comes up )?

Interesting, I don't think I've noticed the same criticism for Brave. But many times when it has come up in discussions at work, people will say they don't want to use it and don't trust it because Brendan Eich is behind it. He donated money to Prop 8 in California many years ago (which at the time, was very popular. More than half the people in California supported it), and he was fired/cancelled for it (long before the term "cancel culture" was a thing). Unfortunately for Eich, the culture shifted radically during that time, and he became a target (see OkCupid[1]). IIRC it was like 7 or 8 or so years after Prop 8 that the news leaked, and like most Americans Eich had changed his mind on it. But it didn't/doesn't matter, he has been branded and is forever tainted.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26868536

Re: Open Source Alternative To

#17

Post by judge2020 »

yata69420 wrote: post #8
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #6

I honestly had no idea Brave was an open source. Why is it being so heavily criticized on HN ( from what I saw whenever it comes up )?

Probably because of https://basicattentiontoken.org/ For a group that's largely bet their fortunes on internet companies, it's kind of funny that anything crypto is so toxic here, but that's probably the reason. The actual browser is under good technical stewardship from what I know. It's essentially not-evil Chrome with an optional crypto-for-ads monetization model, a crypto wallet, and some primitive default privac…

My particular gripe with BAT is noted here[0] and AFAIK nothing has changed; you still have to use their KYC-compliant platform to ever exchange BAT for real-world money, as they'd much rather you re-donate the BAT to websites via brave's reward system instead of ever exchanging for USD.

Other problems that they'd had:

- were inserting referral tokens into the URL when visiting popular websites, so presumably brave was getting a lot of referral credit[1]. In particular it seems to be bad-faith to inject referral codes since Brave really isn't driving traffic to these sites, unless when you type "crypto" it autocompletes "binance.us".

- They've since stopped doing this, but previously tipping BAT to a website or creator meant users would lose that BAT with it basically being held in escrow until the website/creator did their own KYC and redeemed the tokens.[2]

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27549826

1: https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/07/brave-browser-caugh...

2: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-br...

Re: Open Source Alternative To

#18

Post by Nursie »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #6

I honestly had no idea Brave was an open source. Why is it being so heavily criticized on HN ( from what I saw whenever it comes up )?

There have been ... incidents in their development.

At one point they misrepresented themselves as collecting donations for bloggers who a) had no relation with Brave and b) didn't want donations or monetisation of their content.

At another point it seemed like they were intercepting ads on pages and replacing them with their own ads. Not sure exactly what the truth of that situation is.

Yeah, tokenisation, BAT etc. HN is extremely sceptical about cryptocurrency, IMHO with very good reason.

As mentioned by another user - under the covers they inserted their own referral codes into links to online vendors.

All in all it's a sequence of dodgy decisions that tell me they put money above honesty.

Re: Open Source Alternative To

#19

Post by pretext-1 »

josephcsible wrote: post #7
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitLab Community Edition is MIT licensed. I don't know that it gets much more open source than that. I've survived at very very large companies on CE, never needing any of the paid features.

The existence of paid features at all is exactly what makes it open core.

Open core is a business model not a license. You can download GitLab CE and use it under MIT license. You can use all the features it contains and do whatever you want with the code. Yes, GitLab Inc. has other products and some of them are paid, but that doesn't change the fact that GitLab CE is open source.
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