Oof. I want to cheer this project on as much as anybody, but there’s no two ways around it, those terms have every appearance of being extreme and expansive. Just to copy it here for others to see:

When you post Contributions, you grant us a license (including use of your name, trademarks, and logos): By posting any Contributions, you grant us an unrestricted, unlimited, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, fully-paid, worldwide right, and license to: use, copy, reproduce, distribute, sell, resell, publish, broadcast, retitle, store, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part), and exploit your Contributions (including, without limitation, your image, name, and voice) for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, your Contributions, and to sublicense the licenses granted in this section. Our use and distribution may occur in any media formats and through any media channels.

This license includes our use of your name, company name, and franchise name, as applicable, and any of the trademarks, service marks, trade names, logos, and personal and commercial images you provide.

https://loops.video/legal/terms-of-service

Not when they use the conjunction “so”. If they’d used “and”, then sure - there could be any number of reasons. Using “so” as a conjunction like that in the sentence gives it an equivalent definition of “therefore"

You’re technically correct in your narrow focus on the conjunction “so,” but you are missing the bigger picture. Yes, “so” generally functions as a logical connector like “therefore,” meaning that the first statement is directly causing the second. Their sentence could be read as “Vivaldi is closed source, therefore it’s harder for users to investigate,” which isn’t a comprehensive or precise statement on its own.

But that’s a pretty pedantic take. The point that they were making doesn’t rely on an exacting technical breakdown of the closed-source nature of Vivaldi. Rather, they’re making a general observation that closed-source projects tend to be harder to investigate. With that in mind, the use of “so” is informal and reflects a broad conclusion that aligns with general knowledge about open vs. closed-source software. Closed source inherently implies limitations on access, which, while not exhaustive in this single sentence, still holds weight in the general sense.

Why are you making it about that question in particular? There’s a lot of topics that have been raised here, notably Google’s Chromium project, the way it’s killing ad blockers, the way that other browsers also use chromium, people associated with those browsers.

In this range of subjects I’m not sure what the significance is of elevating this libre software question above everything else.

I don’t love Peter Theil by any means, and his association with any project is, to my mind, enough to completely discredit it.

But I get a little worried when it starts turning into references to the bilderberg group, and whatever that link is to NCIO.ca is just completely nuts, low evidence jumping to conclusions.

He certainly has crazy ideas that I want no part of, but I think it crosses the line into conspiratorial to suggest he was instructed by Germany to act as a foreign agent to sabotage the global economy.

Please show me where you explained that Vivaldi’s source code is harder to investigate because “users need to download a 2 GB repo” or a “tarball dump”.

I can see why you think this is not entirely implied. But I also don’t think that it’s incumbent on them to have laid it out with such specificity. You can read this reference to closed source in the most charitable way as alluding to the whole motley of things that render closed source projects less accessible.

It takes a little squinting, sure, but the internet is a better place when we read things charitably, and I don’t think such fine grain differences rise to the level of straight up misinformation.

I mean, there are some real whoppers around here on Lemmy. There’s no shortage of crazy people saying crazy things, I just don’t think this rises to that level.

Brave also uses chromium.

nothing is free

Plenty of things can be and are free at the point of service/point of consumption/utilization.

That’s all they need to be. And they’re just has to be enough willpower to do that from enough people.

Ok So who is going to give you something for free and why?

People who value the ability to do publish information, or engage in personal expression, for starters.

I think the only real path forward is for a developer to figure out a way to decentralize video hosting

That’s what Peertube is all about. It’s like the Lemmy version of Youtube. And it seems to have real funding and development mojo.

I was using them interchangeably. I guess one is understood to be kind of a general foundation or overall company, whereas Firefox is just the browser itself

I don’t think throwing a fit and it being a hissy fit are the same thing.

the things people will debate online

It’s probably a coincidence that shortly after Mozilla acquires an ad company, they “accidentally” remove an ad blocker.

I mean I’m of two minds here. One, there’s an epidemic of intellectually lazy, kneejerk Mozilla hate and it’s time to turn the tide on that.

But on the other hand, even as a Mozilla fanboy I can see how this is a really bad look, and really indefensible. I think it’s more of a huge error of judgment, and if there are other huge errors, I can begin to see a problem, but I think they have too much of a positive track record in their history to just go reaching for the tinfoil hats so quickly.

Firefox will be adopting Manifest V3, but a modded version that enables ad blocking.

The best I can think of is that the explainer language used to justify the extension’s removal was just boilerplate language that got copy+pasted here because someone clicked the wrong button. But even that makes a mockery of the review process.

I think “oops clicked wrong button” would be slightly more defensible, but not by much. If they truly rejected the extension for content in it that it does not have, it’s hard to see how a human could make that mistake even accidentally. But maybe there’s something I’m missing.

Being open minded in response to new information is an automatic upvote from me

I had an alienware Steam Machine and it was perfectly fine.

I think the criticisms of the Steam Machine suffered from what I would call the Verge Syndrome, which is only being able to comprehend things in a binary of instant success or failure, with no in between and no comprehension of other definitions of success.

Steam Machines were a low risk initiative that were fine for what the were. They did not have a ring of death, they didn’t have a blue screen, the OS itself was not glitchy, they didn’t lose money, and they didn’t fail any stated goals. They got the Proton ecosystem up and running, and got the ball rolling on hardware partnerships, which led to the smash success of the Steam Deck which would not have been otherwise possible.

If you absolutely have to use a Chromium project, then Vivaldi is the one, but at the end of the day it is still unfortunately Chromium.

They got sold to a Chinese firm and it appears that much of the core development team abandoned the project and restarted under the name Vivaldi.