Liwott

they only have around 150 employees

So, they would need to build up a lot of expertise.

So, yeah, you kind of need to continue innovating, which requires manpower.

You would pretty much need to poach these employees, or build up a huge team of your own, to be able to move the project in a different direction.

Now, this seems to be more about the manpower needed to mantain a browser that about the open-source or free (or in fact even community-driven) natures of Chromium. Is there anything that makes Firefox more opensource than Chromium?

And even if that is not the case, a handful of frustrated community members can probably outperform the current maintainers.

LibreOffice

Again, even departing from the strict opensource definition, I think that how much a project is free come from the possibility to have a fork that works, not necessarily one that can compete with the original project. Is it necessarily a good thing if the development team of a projects can be outperformed by "a handful of frustrated community members"?

In fact, is your point that it would be better if there were no professional developers and only projects run by communities of hobbyists?

I do like Atom, although there's no other editor that I've used as much to compare (except maybe saying that I find it as good as a tex editor as TeXStudio, TeXMaker and TeXShop). It does allow to collapse/expand

Isn't scale effect playing at least as much as engagement? In the sense that the message gets more easily drawn in a Twitter feed than in a Mastodon one.

So, I don’t see Brave as a hard fork. They are very much dependent on Google continuing to open-source the Chromium code. And they don’t really have the capacity to make larger changes to the code base, or even just maintain the status quo, if Google decides to make changes that go against Brave’s interests.

Ok, thanks for clarifying, I definitely don't know enough about Brave's developement to comment on that. Do you mean that Brave's team wouldn't even have the manpower to mantain security updates if they want to harder-fork? I still don't really understand what is the difference between Chromium and say KDE about the possibility to hard-fork.

they may be shit in one way or another, but they would never make a change with which the majority of the user base disagrees.

I see, thanks again. Indeed "community-driven" is a better fit label for that state of affair !

I use Atom, because I like the "everything is a package" philosophy. I'm also starting to try out emacs.

This means that these projects practically cannot be hard-forked (taking them into a different direction)

I don't understand the implication, what is it that makes a hard-fork impossible? In fact, isn't Brave a hard fork of Chromium?

such a fork would likely not gather many users either

With actual Chromium, though, not a chance of that happening.

In my understanding, while the freedom of forking the project is certainly determinant in the question of whether it is open source, I don't see any relevance in the one of creating a fork that can get popular enough to strip the original project of its users.

it’s only technically open-source and you’re still eating whatever changes Microsoft/Google decide to include

Not sure I get the nuance, isn't one always eating whatever changes the main developers decide to include?

Nice, thanks ! Are there any similar trends outside cities?

Is there any sign that people cycle more because of the infrastructure rather than the other way around?

Alternatively, I wish more programs would offer editable keybindings

I'm talking about free software, as defined by the fsf. A software is free if it comes with its source code and a license that gives some rights about this source code. Doesn't matter what horrible features your software has, it is free as long as one can edit them out and distribute their edited version. I am not aware of a definition of free software that includes requirements on the software's features (like collecting email addresses), maybe you can link to one?

Note that this community's description is about free culture in general, which is broader than free software. You probably meant that rather than FOSS. Sorry if it seems like I am playing with word, it's just that I first commented as a response to your question without paying attention to the community.

Now I am not sure about how much it changes my previous answer. If you run an online service, it is probably legitimate to ask for a way to contact your users, as long as you only use it for what they gave you their consent for. If the underlying software is free, people who don't want to give you that information can still run their own instance of your service. Creating a free software doesn't come with the duty of maintaining servers that run it, so you are free to impose whatever condition on the ones you run.

What is the FOSS philosophy? Whether something is FOSS is a statement only about its source code, the data it collects is a separate issue.