this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2024
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[โ€“] priapus@sh.itjust.works 9 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I disagree in this case. The majority of Firefox forks make it clear they're a fork, giving credit to Mozilla. Midori seems to hide that they're a fork while adding very little to the browser. Their website also takes donations while having a fake phone number and broken contact button. Hard not to see that as suspicious.

Edit: the dev was also completely ok with Firedragon switching to their codebase because they did so resepectfully.

I still disagree with what the dev did, but I get the struggle.

[โ€“] beyond@linkage.ds8.zone 4 points 7 months ago

I agree that the Midori website is suspicious however their repo properly credits Firefox and Floorp in the very first sentence of the readme (however they don't actually link to this repo for some reason). In any case, my intent isn't to defend Midori (which I don't use or have any interest in) but rather to defend the four freedoms none of which are conditional on how much a fork adds or contributes back. In other words, it's perfectly ok to just fork something and change the name.

I still maintain it's ironic that a fork developer is complaining about forks of his fork. This statement is baffling but I suppose it comes from a proprietary mindset where copying is theft:

If these are forked, my hundreds of hours will have been wasted.

By this logic the decades of development time on Firefox is wasted because of this guy's fork.