Why isn’t Vivaldi browser open-source?
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People involved in the open-source community often ask us why Vivaldi browser isn’t fully open-source. In this post, we’ll explore and explain our position.
Click here to see the full blog post
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being Open Source gives project some advantages, one, the most important imo, being: ability to save it if something goes wrong
some projects are "open-sourcable" as in nothing legally stops them from being open source but the sole author is afraid of abuse so keeps it closed, some of these projects though are available for few other people with will stating something in lines of "if anything happens to me so I'll be unable to do it myself the code should be released" and that's great
for bigger team like Vivaldi the bus factor isn't that low so this issue isn't present, but there's another: the head changing mind enough to disappoint the community, with project being open source there's a chance of fork emerging that will preserve the old goal and purpose, and Vivaldi seems to be much better separated than Firefox was so it seems to be possible for a small-ish team to continue providing backend updates as needed, unlike Firefoxof course I'm not saying you're going to do so, but as time flies by the people in charge may change and then everything is possible, would be best to take law-backed precautions before that happens
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Vivaldi, rocks, still would love to have non obfuscated code to made modding easier and even let us help vivaldi by proposing code directly instead of just asking for something to be improved/implemented, yet if being fully open source puts vivaldi at risk i'd rather stay like this.
As a somewhat unrelated question, feel free to move, edit or remove this post if is not the place to ask:
Someone brought this to my attention recently:
Here we can read:When you install Vivaldi browser (“Vivaldi”), each installation profile is assigned a unique user ID that is stored on your computer. Vivaldi will send a message using HTTPS directly to our servers located in Iceland every 24 hours containing this ID, version...
Yet i remember reading that the unique id was not used anymore, so what is it? it's still being sent? it's local only? it's not there anymore and the privacy policy needs an update? the new system is still not in place?
Don't get me wrong, i used vivaldi when the ID was there and will keep using it, the collected information is close to nothing and not a problem for me, but when asked recently about this it surprised me that the ID is still mentioned when iirc it was supposedly removed on ~2.7?
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With Brave, you'd think there would be a competing fork without ads, autoupdates and new random crypto tickers showing up every week, but no. Is it just Chromium compile time scaring people away?
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@sdar They said they are testing solutions to get by without unique ID, not that it’s implemented.
@julien_picalausa I think that’s the second article about why Vivaldi isn’t open source. Personally I don’t mind either way, I have no problems with closed software, since I very rarely take a look at the source code of open source software anyway. It’s for certain that 99.999% of users neither have the expertise nor the drive to find out whether a program is secure in the first place. They ironically rely on other users to do it for them (figures…). People who think this matters are interested in tech and consider themselves power users and build up a blind paranoia, even towards companies they could/should trust, like Vivaldi.
But this is exactly the issue Vivaldi as a company faces. It is the customizable browser for power users and it’s exactly this target crowd that has developed a hate towards proprietary software and Google. Vivaldi is a Chromium browser and not open source, so this is an issue, no matter how you look at it. Linux in particular might be a small market overall, but for growing Vivaldi’s userbase it could be a big deal. This will only happen, if Vivaldi goes open source, even if it makes no sense from a logical standpoint. People/users don’t follow this logic, they follow pre‐chewed opinions and gut feeling.
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@sdar: It has been a long road since we announced that we were working on this new method of counting installations that offers improved privacy. Right now we have a new system in place that's using the new way of counting, and we hope that we will be able to put it through final testing soon. If it proves itself to work well enough, we can then move over to using that instead of the old system.
Software developer at Vivaldi since January 2017.
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This seems like an easy fix. Just add a clause in the company policy, if it fills a certain amount of pre-requisites (that foreshadow the project is about to go under), the remaining code is automatically open-sourced. That way, you can close it, and if someone wants to fork it, they can. But only after you're done with it.
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@guigirl It’s cold out there.
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@julien_picalausa Thank you for the quick reply, it's been so long since the announcement that i really thought the new system was already in place, well doesn't really matter, the collected info is minimal and non an issue for me, most browsers collect more, but some people lose their minds when they hear "unique id" even if it can't be used to track them.
I hope vivaldi grow big enough at some point as to be able to go open source without any risk, yet there's some licenses that are "open" yet forbid derivatives, maybe that could work?
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@luetage: Yes, it is true that many Linux users won't consider using software that's not fully open source, but I don't think they deserve so much criticism for that choice. The world is hard enough to navigate as it is, and having clear ethical guidelines can make it easier for some people to go around. The hope with this article is remind people that the issue isn't all that easy to deal with, and that even if we don't agree with them, we aren't there to cause them trouble either.
Software developer at Vivaldi since January 2017.
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@sdar: Indeed, licensing is also one of the hard to solve questions, which I didn't mention in the article. The "simplest" way to prevent derivatives would be to release the source without any explicit open source license, which prevents all derivatives by default.
Unfortunately, while forbidding derivatives its a nice solution in theory, in practice we'd also have to enforce it, which comes with its own set of problems. -
@guigirl: The awareness of Vivaldi has been growing lately, so it's good to make sure new people know about this.
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@vollinger: Chromium compilation time is definitely a barrier to entry when it comes to forking chromium. But that barrier doesn't exist for desktop UI code, as it takes only about a minute to build it.
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@julien_picalausa
At least I'm glad to see this is being evaluated from time to time.Yet if forks are the major risk i suppose having a license that doesn't allow derivatives and enforcing it with DMCA requests should be the way to go and forks don't usually go unnoticed for long.
Pros: There's not a lot of people out there wanting to fork a browser and even less competent enough to get enough traction as to be a risk to vivaldi.
Cons: Enforcing licenses is not always straight forward and while it's usually resolved in a few days in some cases it can take several months and be very frustrating.
Ok, I may not be selling this too well, but i was just evaluating the risks to have to enforce the license not the additional benefits of making vivaldi open source, of course it's hard to tell beforehand if the benefits will outweigh the risks, I just hope at some point the conditions will permit the UI code to not being obfuscated so it's easier to mod.
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@julien_picalausa Well, I might be too harsh. But then again read this: https://www.reddit.com/r/ManjaroLinux/comments/pl0jmb/vivaldi_replaces_firefox_as_the_default_browser/
Vivaldi is immediately accused of paying for the default spot, a Chinese connection is brought up and the proprietary nature of Vivaldi is heavily criticised. That Vivaldi is just another Chromium browser and therefore sucks is obviously in there too. And a lot more. Am I being too harsh? I don’t know.
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@luetage Of course the open-source nutjobs throw out accusations.
To be clear: I'm not describing everyone in that thread! I'm not even describing everyone who would like Linux distributions to use open-source software by default. What I am saying is: There are, unfortunately, some rabid unreasonable folks in the open-source movement.
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FOSS is certainly a good format that allows sharing and developing all kinds of software, although I do wonder what the meaning is in a market saturated with around 100 browsers, forks and re-forks, with another 70 listed as discontinued.
That is, in the case of browsers it is currently rather irrelevant, if it is FOSS or not, other needs reward, for example, what happens with a small company like Vivaldi, if it releases the script that makes it so different from the others ? Or what if the great Chrome and Edge take advantage of it to use these scripts, entering direct competition with Vivaldi with a similar product?
I think it is not difficult that then they will finish dominating the market and of Vivaldi there will be a nice memory, as in his Opera 12 day, which was not OpenSource either, even less so than Vivaldi.
All developers have the same scripts at their disposal in the Chromium Browsers and therefore have the same possibilities to add their solutions to create their own browser. If they just use Chromium and just stick their logo on it and voila, like so many that appear and disappear, it is their problem, not Vivaldi's.
For something they are developers, who should know how to do more than just make a copy paste of a script, only to enter a market more than saturated. -
Open-source is nice to have, but for most users it's of limited direct benefit.
When Opera dumped a fully functional browser and left me with an pre-alpha release to try and work with, there were no open-source forks out there that I could even look at. I eventually moved to Firefox and slowly made myself at home there.
Some years pass and then Firefox dumped the description/notes field in the bookmarks - they didn't even sound apologetic about it. (There were other things, but this was the change that got me looking for alternatives.) In this case there were forks out here, but none of them left me confident that they would not simply take-up the Firefox changes I objected to (or confident the project would still be going in 6 months time).
At no time was I even tempted to try and fork my own. I simply don't have the time for such an endeavour, even before we question my skill levels across all the necessary facets.
So ultimately, for me, Firefox being open-source made little practical difference. I was screwed either way and left with nothing much I could do but move on. (Sure it probably made lots of difference to the project and product, but for me as a user, not so much.)
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@vollinger said in Why isn’t Vivaldi browser open-source?:
With Brave, you'd think there would be a competing fork without ads, autoupdates and new random crypto tickers showing up every week, but no.
There is the Dissenter browser, that's a fork of Brave. But I don't know if it has (or rather, doesn't have) all that.
Edit: Don't use Dissenter, turns out it's way behind on security updates!
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@gworboys , Open Source is an interesting format for developers, but for the normal user, without programming knowledge beyond 'Hello World', it is certainly irrelevant if the code is open or not, they have no possibility to check if it contains code that they do not know they might like it and they can't use it for other projects.
Personally, for me it is more interesting on the one hand that the product meets my expectations and that it has a TOS and PP that does not compromise my privacy and security. If it also has a support community at the height, the better.
In many debates on other sites with different users I have come across a very widespread opinion 'What is not FOSS, is garbage', or 'I only use FOSS because it is more private and secure', both opinions naturally completely false, which also discredit to the developers of many excellent software that are not OSS, but who often respect privacy and security much more than some FOSS
They argue 'But in FOSS we can read and check the Source code', of course, they will surely read and check the millions of lines of a program, if they do not even read the TOS and PP of the product and without having a programming idea.
If they did, they would find that Mozilla's TOS and PP is far worse and more restrictive than Vivaldi's.>Laptop Lenovo V145 15AST, AMD A9- 9425 Radeon R5 - 5 cores 3,1 GHz RAM 8GB, GPU 2+1 GB SSD 256GB -Win10 64 v22H2| Vivaldi last stable|
