In the last years, I have seen plenty of users telling or promoting certain ultra-permissive rules as part of Open Source but which are not even in the definition like the use of read-only licenses, being a good example the MEGA software.
However, I didn’t find exact source of these ideas and only believed in the misinformation of certain videos in *tube or similar.
Today, I was looking for a FLOSS VPN client to use at home as I use MATE DE and found Printunl Client promoted as Open Source. Or that was everything until I read the license.
Yeah, Vivaldi is another one where I’ve been misled to think that it’s open-source.
I don’t believe it was ever officially communicated as such, but people have been claiming that it was open-source, presumably because open-source==good and they were fanboying for it.
I’ve made it a habit when I find a new open-source project to check whether it even links a code repo and what license it has.
Vivaldi is propietary with the exception of old released whose source code is released as a permissive FLOSS license, but only old versions.
Bit of a sidenote, but Vivaldi is just another Chromium browser. If I had to use Chromium, I’d rather use the Ungoogled fork, even if it’s not perfect at removing everything Google because they’ve made themselves so damn pervasive in the codebase.
Ah ok, I think back then it was something weird, like most of the code being open-source (the Chromium portion), then the Vivaldi-specific code was source-available, except for the assets, but you could get a hold of those assets by extracting them from the official build.
Thinking about it, I guess some may have actually thought that open-source == source-available, but I also distinctly remember someone delivering the explanation above to argue that it’s technically open-source, because you could compile it yourself, if you really wanted to.
…which is not at all the definition of open-source, but yeah, you linked it above, I don’t need to go into that.
I have to fix something in which I was wrong, even older releases, they only free the changes made to the Chromium codebase but maintaining a part of their own code, for the interface, as review-only license. Source: https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/privacy/is-vivaldi-open-source/
The concept of review-only is something I have seen mostly promoted as open source when it is not.
Ah, thanks for posting that. I guess that horrible bullshit it’s-still-practically-open-source excuse actually came from their own website.
Yes, what they wrote there is technically correct and technically they did not claim that they were open-source. But they also wrote it in the most confusing, most misleading way possible. That whole response should’ve began with “No, it’s not open-source”.
Yes I was really into Vivaldi for the vertical tabs and ditched them after I heard their pathetic reason for not being open source, yet building on top of open source.
You are aware that you can get vertical tabs in Firefox, too, right?
Tree-Style Tabs is the most popular extension for that: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/
Tab Center Reborn is also neat (no tree-structure, but thumbnails): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tabcenter-reborn/
I had to abandoned Firefox due to a really horrific response issue (despite clearing caches etc) - I have about 20 tabs open per browser and it was slowing really badly obviously due to one or two of those tabs chewing up resources. But yes I certainly used its vertical tabs along with Vivaldi (until I discovered Vivaldi’s abuse of open source).