Free and Open Source Software

17960 readers

4 users here now

If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Gaywallet

alyaza

Florp, the Firefox fork with an awful name, is fully source-available again (github.com)

submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by Aatube@kbin.melroy.org to c/foss

52 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The repository for the previously private submodule is still called Floorp-private-components, though it's public.

https://blog.ablaze.one/4125/2024-03-11/ is a maintainer's official response to... Reddit, which crossposted me apparently. Hooray!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] thesmokingman@programming.dev 2 points 8 months ago

If a repo is very popular, it should have a lot of forks. The higher the upstream popularity, the higher the downstream popularity. When a dev makes a claim that there are a ton of malicious forks stealing IP, we can vet that claim by looking at the forks that respect the upstream. Big projects have a big community with big forks with many stars. The popular downstreams drive traffic to the upstream.

In this case, we have a couple hundred direct forks. That’s not a ton. Out of those, only three have stars. All of them only have one star. At face value, that could imply a few things: the repo is not very popular, the community is centralized around the upstream, or something else along those lines. Comparing this to other open source projects, our initial conclusion is that this is not a hugely popular repo and does not get a lot of development outside of its incredibly niche community.

Occam’s razor is a tool, not objective truth. Based on the facts as we can see them, this focus on forking from the dev is much more indicative of a burnout spiral, incredibly common in the FOSS community, than nefarious actors. If we see receipts, eg a collection of takedown requests on malicious forks attempting to claim ownership of the code, our analysis falls apart. That’s still a possibility, however remote.