Open Source
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@DonnyTinyHands We are all entitled to our own ideological positions, just as we are all entitled to our own business models.
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Sometimes fewer users is better than more users.
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@barbudo2005 Well, the Vivaldi business model does require more users to be more successful.
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@barbudo2005 That said, not everyone has to be a Vivaldi user.
My wife and I rescue Airedale Terriers. One of our saying is, every Airedale should have a home; not every home should have an Airedale.
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while valvdi is not fully open source, the team behind it continuously evaluting the community feedback.
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@Ayespy Never said you weren't. Literally the only reason I bothered to make the post is the Vivaldi blog post I'd read explicitly asked for this feedback.
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@DonnyTinyHands Very well, then.
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@DonnyTinyHands said in Open Source:
the Vivaldi blog post I'd read explicitly asked for this feedback.
Fair enough. Why does it need to be open source for you to use Vivaldi? What specific benefit are you looking for? Do you trust the Vivaldi team less than, say, some other Chromium browser team (Chromium to stay on the same playing field) that is open source, or do you want to submit bug fixes,...?
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@DonnyTinyHands
Hello,
welcome to the 'Vivaldiverse'.
And hopefully you'll have a lot of fun here soon.I'm a great friend of 'FOSS', Open Source, use it almost exclusively wherever possible.
And it works almost everywhere.With a clear conscience, I can make the word for Vivaldi.
Vivaldi is 95% open source, and the remaining 5% is used to earn money for around 50 employees.
Vivaldi is still not really profitable.
"What we believe in"
https://vivaldi.com/company/Vivaldi should be able to think about this from 3,000,000 users.
This statement has appeared here over the years.Vivaldi is based on 'Chromium', 100% open source and is heavily sponsored by Google.
Google is by far the largest open source sponsor.Of course, this is not altruistic, and Google can celebrated it.
Google is quite skilful in this respect, so they sit directly at the source of innovations that they incorporate directly into their products and try to give themselves a good image.
Google earns many more from open source than it invests in it.Vivaldi can be completely ungoogled in the settings, which also means no extensions from the Chrome Store and, if so, only truly open source.
The CEO of Vivaldi previously developed the 'Opera' browser in Iceland.
It was then decided to sell Opera to a Chinese company.He was paid off and founded Vivaldi.
Vivaldi history is really interesting.
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OpenSource is important, it allows collaboration in the development of new products and their improvement, but in a product in a market already more than saturated with this product, as in the case of a browser, with already around 100(!) different ones available and another 70 that have already been discontinued along the way, the meaning of OpenSource has become quite debatable.
Adding that, since large corporations like Google, Microsoft and others have appropriated OpenSource even in its distribution (GitHub is from Microsoft, Google code....), and many products that contain their tracking APIs (which are also OpenSource), the original value of OpenSource has been quite distorted. The only advantage that remains is that everyone is free to modify these products to their needs, deleting these APIs that track the user, as is the case with Chromium, which is 100% OpenSource, but it is certainly not recommended to use it as is. without gutting all Google's anti-privacy APIs first, which Vivaldi already does.
The only part of Vivaldi that is proprietary is 5% of the script corresponding to its only UI, which is also fully auditable and even modifiable by the user (here in the forum it is taught how to do it). Even Firefox isn't fully OpenSource, same as any other advanced browsers with extra features, eg the translator, Lingvanex used by FF and Vivaldi, Lingvanex is proprietary soft, same as some other extra functions they hmay have. Also Brave, supposed OpenSource, in it's TOS make clear that it refers to the executable part, with different licenses that are not so free in its extra features.
In the case of browsers, being OpenSource or not, at this point has become quite irrelevant, ethics regarding the user and the transparency of the company matter much more, which in the case of Vivaldi is more than guaranteed.
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@DonnyTinyHands
You've already made it this far.
You already seem to be interested in Vivaldi.Take a closer look at him.
Nobody sees it here.
And maybe read up a bit on the background.
Why Vivaldi is not 100% Open Source will be a recurring topic here.So, now have pleasure while trying something out.
I think you'll be impressed.
Maybe we'll hear from you again.
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@ingolftopf You have just a little bit of that out of order. Jon (and a friend who passed from cancer 'way too early) founded Opera and built it into a browser (user-centric and feature-rich), advertising and embedded software company with over 57 million users and a very healthy income. Along the way he brought in some investors to help with the company's expansion. He developed Presto, a unique, fast and flexible browser engine.
Eventually, patching and refactoring Presto to keep Opera compatible with websites built only for MS, Mozilla and Google browser engines became a Herculean task and Jon wanted to hire more developers to work on the browser core to keep Presto competitive. The investors disagreed and wanted to drop Presto for a pre-baked browser engine and downsize to be "more profitable" and make Opera more attractive to sell. They were investors after all, and wanted only to make money off the company.The differences became irreconcilable and Jon left Opera on June 30 2011, selling his ownership share to the other owners of the company. In May 2013, Webkit Opera came out. The first "stable" Webkit Opera was released Jul 2 2013. Jon had been gone from Opera for over two years. It was not until 2016 that the investors realized their dream of cashing out from Opera by selling to a Chinese conglomerate. By then, Jon was gone for five years.
Jon and Tatsuki Tomita had formed Vivaldi technologies in 2013, and they put up the Vivaldi Forums to replace the MyOpera community that Opera had abandoned. Many community members migrated to Vivaldi Forums. By 2014, it became obvious to Jon that Opera had abandoned the user-centric feature-rich model of browser and he and Tatsuki decided to build a browser to honor the user-centric feature-rich ideal, and they pulled together a team and started that work. January 27 2015, the first technical preview was released. On that day I installed Vivaldi and joined the community. Soon, I quit using Opera and switched to Vivaldi as my default.
So the order of things was, Jon attracted investors, he and the investors diverged over their visions for the company, Jon left Opera with some money for his ownership share, Opera adopted the Webkit engine and abandoned Presto, Jon and Tatsuki put together Vivaldi Technologies, eventually they started building their own browser, then Opera sold out to the Chinese. Jon did not sell out to the Chinese. It's the last thing he would have wanted to do. And Vivaldi was already a viable publicly-used browser before that sale ever occurred.
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@DonnyTinyHands
A good recommendation are also the open source messengers [Matrix], 'SimpleX', 'Jabber/XMPP', 'Briar', 'Jitsi Meet', for Android from 'F-Droid'.
There are also genuine 100% open source browsers.Maybe you're already using one of them.
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@Ayespy
I only gave him the short version.
It's great that you felt called upon to report on the more detailed version.I wasn't so familiar with some things either.
There were also some new things for me.Thank you
Once again for your great, tireless commitment to Vivaldi. -
@johnny004
Hello,
Welcome to the 'Vivaldiverse'.Have fun and maybe also on 'Mastodon' social.vivaldi.net.
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@DonnyTinyHands
Google has a very difficult relationship with Vivaldi.
They harass Vivaldi and my impression after years here and on Mastodon social.vivaldi.net is that they want to flatten little Vivaldi, he's probably a thorn in their side.Vivaldi earns money through clicks on the pages of contractual partners.
Google pays large sums of money to its contractual partners, such as Microsoft, Apple, Firefox, Brave etc. for the use of its search engine.
Vivaldi does not receive a cent from Google.
But it still offers the Google search engine because users expect it.
My recommendation to users is to replace the Google search engine and 'Bing' with another search engine, which Vivaldi also offers.
Vivaldi is a real underdog on the browser market.
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The million dollar question:
Will Vivaldi become the default browser for him?
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@DonnyTinyHands What are your reasons for requiring it to be 100% open source? I'm just curious.
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@barbudo2005 said in Open Source:
The million dollar question:
Will Vivaldi become the default browser for him?
I don't think I'll be able to sleep tonight xD
Aside from that, I wanted to say that I don't care at all that Vivaldi isn't 100% open source, even though I'm a big supporter of FOSS. I believe what matters much more is the spirit of the team behind it, certainly much more attentive to users compared to a multinational corporation.
Furthermore, I don't think I'm in any way favoring Google by using Vivaldi since they release the software open-source for purely commercial reasons, and I don't think they want people to be so attracted to other browsers based on their engine, unless they use Google services.