Not sure how moving stuff under a private submodule and making a blog post about why can be a translation misunderstanding .
Did you read the Reddit thread link I provided?
This is pretty well explains part of my feelings. If @TheChilledBuffalo is correct, I can understand the lead maintainer not liking when some do nothing to add to his work and just rebrand it and sell it as their own. I think that’s inherently scummy, but at the same time, it sort of comes with the territory of going open source. There will be people who don’t care about this, but fighting these people often times doesn’t lead to anything productive.
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The fact that I use Vivaldi and have accepted their model of mostly “open source” makes me not too bothered by the current situation with Floorp. It’s more or less the same.
Isn’t this how most distro’s become about? I mean they start out as a rebrand of the Distro they based off of with maybe the addition of a few tools? The idea being as the user base grow’s development will grow and all of us can prosper.
I get his point however at the same time as you stated its the nature of the beast. Seems like to me the authors want to enjoy the benifits of OpenSource while at the same time wanting the protection of proprietary so they are going to deny anyone else from doing exactly what they did? I’m sorry I see this as just a redhat move and being just as scummy.
But I guess the dev can do what they want its their project. Which is why I say yeah just seems like to much drama to have to deal with just to have a web browser.
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Yes, in fact I’ve read the blog post from federated social media. What exactly do you mean by error in translation? The repository linked in that blog post has been open source since the timestamp I’ve provided.
The linked blog post says this:
The solution has already been found and I am working on getting some of the Floorp code ready to be released as Open-source LICENSE.
“Some of the Floorp code” will be open source is not the same as the “closed sourcing is temporary”. Maybe there are details missing or something has been lost in translation.
Hmm, this is a curious turn of events. So they closed off a git submodule, made some back-end changes while no one could see it, and now they have lifted the curtain pretty much immediately after releasing the blog post confirming they are changing code to kill off forks.
I understand licensing is complicated and there is more to this story than the public can see, but it seems kind of suspicious for some reason.
If their method for “prohibiting forks” is to close off the code unless people pay money to access it, how is that not “going closed source”? Isn’t that exactly what it is?
I agree with this. For many years, Vivaldi has maintained the stance of “Maybe we will open the code someday but it’s too good to let anyone just use it for free.” This seems like pretty much the same move, perhaps finally confirming that Floorp is the “Vivaldi of Firefox.” 
It looks like the maintainer of the NixOS package is dropping it now that there are proprietary bits:
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Im as big an open source advocate as anyone else here but really this doesn’t bother me. Open sourcing your code is going to be subject to abuse and disrespect by forkers which I can understand why that would sometimes be unsettling for project developers.
Not saying this is a good move but I do understand it.
I like Floorp a lot, adopted since early inception, but would prefer for it to be fully open source. Will keep an eye on this.
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Floorp is fully open-source again. The “private-components” repository has been reopened to the public under the Creative Commons license which should provide better precautions against forks.
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Hmm, this is a curious turn of events. So they closed off a git submodule, made some back-end changes while no one could see it, and now they have lifted the curtain pretty much immediately after releasing the blog post confirming they are changing code to kill off forks.
The developer’s initial plan was not to open the repository to the public today. It should have been a gradual process. But due to heavy community pushback, he has pre-poned it. But we gotta give him credit, as a main developer, for being active in the community and listening to user’s concerns.
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The license he applied is CC BY-NC-SA.
That basically gives people the ability to fork and modify the code so long as those forks are non-commercial, proper attribution is provided and those forks apply the same license.
That seems reasonable and gives us insight into what he was trying to accomplish. He wanted to stop people from making money off floorp without a specific agreement in place.
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Floorp.
While re-opening the repository to the public… DEAR GOD, CHANGE THAT NAME. 
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Why tho. I kinda like the name lol
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FLOORP
You love it, you hate it, good for publicity either way 
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I can’t disagree with that.
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FWIW, I have been using pulse browser. No idea if it is a fork of a fork or whatever (probably), but it seems a little better organized and comes with the additional benefit of not being named floorp.
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