alt Hacker NewsBeen a Kagi subscriber for a while, and am supportive of a more diverse browser ecosystem. However, I won't be using this browser as long as it is closed source. Honestly, the arguments made by the founder (I believe he's the founder anyway. I may be wrong) in the related feedback thread kind of soured me a little bit on Kagi. The arguments were essentially:
1. It's a lot of work to maintain an open source project accepting community contributions. Absolutely true, but that's not what's being asked for. Providing a tarball under an open source license doesn't add any significant work. 2. No one has asked for the Kagi backends to be open sourced, so why is the browser different? Obviously because I run the browser on my machine. Your backend runs on your machine. 3. We need to protect our IP. Then release it under a copyleft license. Or if you absolutely must, release your proprietary bit under a non-open source license. 4. You don't need the source because we send 0 telemetry, which you can verify using a network proxy. That's hardly the only thing to be worried about with a binary blob. Even if you kept the code completely closed source, by just releasing a tarball with the source under a proprietary license, I can build my own binary from source and eliminate this threat.
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> 3. We need to protect our IP. Then release it under a copyleft license.
No affiliation with Kagi, but I think you're dreaming if this actually would make a difference.
How many times has GPL'd software successfully been argued in court? Maybe four or five? Considering how many millions of software packages exist and how hard it would be to prove enough to bring a lawsuit/discovery request, I would be extremely surprised if there aren't thousands of GPL violations out in the wild that never go to court. I remember the source code to Spongebob Squarepants Supersponge violated the GPL [1], and that wasn't discovered for decades.
I am mostly ok with FOSS, and I don't love the idea of using a fully proprietary browser either, and I am probably not going to use Orion on Linux, but I don't think it's inherently wrong for them to want to keep any secret sauce close to their chest.
As a Kagi long time user, and a Linux die-hard, I don't get the obsession with having everything being open source.
This will sound overly critic (sorry before hand), but what do you want the source code for?
Do you read the source code of every open source applications you use? Do you compile all of them to make sure there are no shenanigans? If you do, congratulations, you are a member of a very niche group of people, that I'm not sure companies will be targeting.
I pay Kagi because I don't want to be the product (via no-privacy ad businesses). Not because I hate ads per-se (although I really dislike them), but because ads-funding incentives are contrary to make their products better. I like to know that Kagi's only incentive is to make their products better, so that I will keep paying for them.
I more than welcome that now expanding to browsers. I would get absolutely 0 value from it being open source, and so would most users I would guess, including probably you, even if you are fundamentally against closed source software, which you have the right to be of course.
> Then release it under a copyleft license. Or if you absolutely must, release your proprietary bit under a non-open source license
An old mentor once said to me that a contract is just the start of a conversation. If you sign a contract, the other party violates it, and your business goes under... you may be able to get some compensation through courts, but also your business is gone. And getting that compensation and proving that the contract was violated and how much you are entitled to costs time and money.
Releasing something at all, even under a restrictive license, means nothing if you have no intention (or capability) of enforcing that license. Look at how often companies take GPL code, modify it, and then never publish their modifications... and then people have to sue to get things resolved.
So "We aren't ready to commit the legal resources to fighting and defending the licenses" makes a LOT of sense. IP protection is not just a matter of signing a piece of paper saying people can't do a thing, you have to actually prevent them from doing the thing.