Interesting. It looks like floorp moved their modules into a private repo and it looks like if you build floorp from source you get less functionality than in their binaries. If you look through the commit history, you will see that many of the commits have code you can no longer see.
I guess now floorp has a partially closed source model similar to Vivaldi.
I didn’t see anything discussing this or the reasoning for it. Although, most of the details for floorp are in Japanese so maybe there is something somewhere.
Very sad if this does happen as I really like Floorp (despite the horrible name).
Just curious, where did you see this? Did you try building and comparing against pre-built? I looked at about a dozen (granted, I appreciate that’s not a lot) random commits from the past two weeks and was able to view the diffs for all of them.
It appears they (as required) pass on the MPL and MIT licenses from various things they use. Within the browser itself, they list all licenses (a LOT) and I’ve never seen a vast majority of them. It seems in addition to the above two, the other primary ones are variations on the GPL. Due to the huge number of licenses, I don’t know which ones allow or restrict proprietary licensing. I know MPL and MIT allow proprietary on top of them, as long as the original code licensed under either remains under those licenses and is available. From what I’ve been able to glean in a short time of searching, I find it a little confusing as to how Floorp licenses the modules and other QOL changes they’ve made. On the one hand it looks like possibly MPL 2.0, but it’s not exactly clear. I’m sure someone who has a better understanding of licensing can figure it out.
I’ll give it a little time to see what comes of it, but likely on to regular FF or another derivative…
the “legend” of floorp is/was/who knows that a bunch of Japanese college kids made Floorp years ago in aqn attempt to put lipstick on a pig (Firefox my DD of course).
But I was only able to source that from one or two places.
they put lipstick on it and made it real attractive. I thought it was bright, shiny, nifty, with way too much cute crap.
–but that someone noticed this, moved to a private repo, and if they monetize it any way that will be your answer.
Doesn’t surprise me at all. I remember commenting when someone first mentioned this browser that the sponsorship part on the github site was worded in a weird way
The source code for Floorp is mostly public, allowing anyone to view it and contribute to Floorp.
Usually I would put this under not accurately translated text from Japanese. But with your findings you might be on to something. Or they hide that part of the code because it was malicious or embarrassing and won’t be part of the program in the future? If this turns partial closed source, man, that would suck. What is it that so many closed source browsers exist?
I don’t really get this. If Floorp dies, why are other forks of it also dead? Wouldn’t a fork of Floorp have different contributors and maintainers, thus continuing Floorp under a different name? Also, it isn’t this guy’s problem that someone forked the project and he stopped maintaining his own. It’s the problem of the guy who decided to fork it. This is pretty dumb, as I understand it.
What the dev means it that, certain forks are basically rebranded Floorps that do not make much modifications by themselves.So right now, he’s preparing to make it so that, either the fork’s developers should make contributions to Floorp or pay to use the code.
Disclaimer: I’m just a contributor to Floorp, and so what I say may not always be the case.
This whole thing was a translation misunderstanding, from what I’m gathering. I can believe it because I have spoken to the developers before and there is very clearly a language barrier.
